Having finally got around to purchasing and playing through the controversial terrorism level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, it seemed worthwhile following up on my previous posts on videogaming. I warn you – it’s a bit lengthy, and I’ll be leaning on the fact I spent a long time studying Vietnam, and it’s depiction in films as a student…

There are two questions worth asking about Call of Duty:

1. Should videogames include content which raises moral and ethical questions?

2. Does Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 do a good job of it?

If you’ve got a short attention span, the answers are:

1. Yes.

2. Nope.

More?

Should videogames include content which raises moral and ethical questions?

Videogames are as much a part of mainstream entertainment as literature, film, TV, music and art, and in fact have a greater impact in pure terms of revenue, attention and impact in some cases – including Call of Duty.

As such they should, in theory, span the same ranges of artistic and intellectual merit that appears in other entertainment, and the same ranges of moral, ethical and intellectual challenges. In the past, they’ve generally not achieved this for various reasons. The valid perception has been that videogames were childish entertainment with a focus on pushing technology rather than emotion.

But this shouldn’t remain the case. The same concerns have been levelled at every other form of entertainment since the printing press popularised literature. And every form of entertainment has filled the gaps from low-brow ‘high concept’ films to mature, intelligent and searching television. Comics have gone through a similar path from child’s indulgence to adult entertainment, but haven’t had the same acceptance and success across the genre (Batman is a stand-out in terms of commercial success, and awareness of comics beyond Watchmen, Persepolis, Akira etc is still pretty limited.)

When you’re dealing with an entertainment medium which engages someone for 30 hours+ in many cases, there needs to be a more considered approach to balancing the commercial push for big selling action-based entertainment. At the moment we’ve got plenty of video-gaming Simpson and Bruckenheimers (Responsible for producing Flashdance, Top Gun, Days of Thunder, The Rock etc), but there’s a lot less sustainable appreciation for the videogame equivalent of Stanley Kubrick or Ingmar Bergman as it’s rare for those types of games to achieve commercial success, and the kudos of producing that type of content is of less value to the videogame industry as a whole. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t exist within games.

As for the potential for inciting violence or terrorism – the simplest answer is to ask which came first? Incidents such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam (which is echoed in the film Platoon), were happening long before videogames became adopted.

Does Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 do a good job of it?

Sadly Call of Duty isn’t a great game to be at the centre of such a debate. As a moral and ethical prompt it sits somewhere between Top Gun and the Teletubbies, which is not to say it shouldn’t exist (Not all entertainment needs to aspire to great things), but that’s it not great for those mounting a defence of the entertainment medium.

The last two Call of Duty games have jumped between different characters (mainly to sell to U.S and UK audiences – and the terrorist mission occurs very early on in the game, meaning that you have little identity with the character, little empathy with the story, and little motivation to balance the need to do something immoral.

[Spoilers from this point onwards]

As the level opens, the carnage provides a bit of a shock, but because all the victims, and indeed participants, are without any character, it’s less connecting and involving than the average episode of Spooks. You can wander through the level choosing to shoot or not in a disembodied state – and I ended up checking out the airport shops a lot of the time.

There’s only really one further moment where anything connects and that’s moving through a pile of civilian casualties as you leave the airport building – the scale of the carnage evokes some emotion – but that’s about your lot.

And then the level fails further by removing any choice about participation as you face wave after wave of Russian police, and any moral ambiguity goes out of the window unless you want to get repeatedly shot (Definitely if you’re playing on the hardest Veteran setting).

The final insult is being shot as the bad guys make their escape. Probably because, in the manner of Hollywood focus groups, the fact you’ve been bad means you have to unambiguously be punished. As a result, the last level is entirely meaningless because you don’t live with your actions, see the implications, or have the deal with the aftermath. Instead you’re magically transported into the body of an entirely different soldier, essentially wiping the slate completely clean, and allowing you to get back to slaughtering bad guys without a second thought.

This isn’t Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket or even Platoon. The first Rambo film gives you more to empathise and sympathise with.

So how do we frame discussion of morals in videogames?

There needs to be a debate about how videogames develop critical awareness on behalf of those creating, writing about, and playing games for the future to allow better handling of important issues in the context of games like Call of Duty – which besides the badly-handled controversy level are brilliant first person shooters and multi-player games. There’s a whole other argument about how such games can build teamwork, problem solving, co-ordination etc, and provide value as much as they can take attention away from now-respectable pastimes such as reading.

The traditional videogame review of the 80’s, 90’s and most of the 00’s has been about the technical achievements, the graphics, sound, and control mechanisms. These were often individual scores which were aggregated for an overall rating.

In order to move discussions and reviews onwards, game developers and publishers need to challenge the current attitudes and provoke interest – and to that end moral and ethical challenges, even badly done, are valuable in some way. We’ll know when things have changed when gaming discussions don’t carry any perceived stigma, and we’re no longer doing a straight comparison with either PacMan or Shakespeare.