As with Rainbow Six, the important choice that you must make as a soldier is to move into the room quickly and decide fast who to save or who to shoot. I did not play this mission; the Infinity Ward staff played it for us in a dark theater.
But the game differs from other gritty combat games based on who is in each room. The characters appear to be Muslim terrorist fighters in mostly civilian garb. But those characters include both men and women.
One of the women runs for a baby. Fortunately, the developers told me later, you cannot shoot that woman or that baby. She surrenders.
But in another room, a woman runs for a gun. She prepares to shoot. You have to kill her. Your silenced weapon makes muffled noises, and bodies hit the floor. Up close and personal. The same goes for other armed men in the place. In another room, shots are fired through the door before you can respond. One enemy is wounded and gurgles his last breaths. A woman cries in the background. One of your soldiers goes down. You fire into the door or fire into the wall, and the enemy goes down.
And in the final room, you confront an unarmed woman. She tries to divert you. She moves despite your warnings to stop. She then grabs a bomb detonator. You have to shoot her.
This is the nature of modern combat, the developers say. But this should not be a part of a modern video game, in my opinion, given the thin line between civilians and warriors and given the impression it creates in our world, which is driven by social media sound and video bites. It looks so much like you are killing innocent civilians. And if you make a mistake, you are.
I am told that the narrative of the story, which is generally secret, will explain the context for this scene. But as it is, as I’ve seen it, I found it profoundly disturbing and unjustifiable. After showing us this scene, the developers at Infinity Ward went right into a presentation where they said, “We’d like to talk to you about the star of the game, which is the weapons.” Sadly, I do not have pictures of this scene to show you.
The demo then shifted to a Middle Eastern country. My guess was that it was Syria, but the game doesn’t tell you where it is.
It is a chaotic environment. You’re buried under rubble. Your voice is a child, and you soon see that you are a young girl. You are trapped in a building that has been blown up. You make noises, and people outside with muffled voices can hear you.
Slowly, they dig their way to you. They lift concrete blocks and you emerge, unhurt. But a woman who appears to be your mother lies dead beside you. You are unscathed and begin running home. You find your father there.
But Russian soldiers arrive, and they start launching canisters that emit a green gas. It’s poison gas, and other civilians in the village start choking and dying. You run inside the home, where your brother has closed the windows.
Your father prepares an escape, but a Russian soldier comes in the house. Your father tries to reason with him, but the soldier guns him down. Then he hunts the children. You are still playing as the young girl, and you hide. You can crawl through a hole in a wall and sneak up on the soldier. You grab a knife and stab him in the leg. He shakes you off and you run away, escaping through the hole again.
You do that repeatedly, and eventually both you and your brother kill the soldier. One of you grabs his gas mask and you escape. You hold your breath and then run off, picking up a second gas mask. You pass by Russian soldiers who are executing civilians. And eventually, you get away.
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This game will give fuel to those who hate. On the one hand, some groups will be outraged that their people are branded as terrorists and enemies. They will share snippets of this game on social media that will take the violence out of context. Groups of outraged lawmakers, parents, and nongamers will turn their ire toward all of gaming. If you’re a game developer at the peak of your talents, why would you step into this lion’s den? You would have to have a very good reason, and so far, I do not see it.
Modern Warfare is bloody, but it’s not a sea of blood spraying everywhere. But sometimes the medium is the message. Sometimes the horror of a particular scene outweighs the point that you’re trying to make. There may be a message in what the developers intend, but it might be overshadowed.
I think of the anti-war movie Apocalypse Now, which had the memorable Ride of the Valkyries scene, where a mad colonel orders an attack on a Vietnamese village so that his guys can surf. It was an excellent commentary on the insanity of war. But it was executed so well as a combat scene that, in my opinion, it probably inspired a lot of young people to enlist in the military. Art can often have unintentional effects. And that is why my favorite quote is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, where an American spy does his cover job of being a Nazi propagandist too well. The line is, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
This is supposed to be a video game. It will undoubtedly have a multiplayer element, where players shoot each other for fun and have a hell of a time doing it. That’s when we’ll see that “guns are the star of the show.” And the incongruity of it all will be clear.
The overall dramatic effect of the intense scenes should be memorable and artistic. Not gratuitous or base. The developers can fall back on the argument that this is our world. Their game is “ripped from the headlines.” But this puts us on a slippery slope toward a lot of things. What about school shootings? What about Christchurch? Do we want to put those in video games because they exist in the real world?