Let’s start with where I ended on the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, two years and two massive-selling Call of Duty games ago. “Modern Warfare treats spectacle as its number one priority but casts a very wide net for what that spectacle might consist of. If making the player creep through the undergrowth while tanks and soldiers walk past unknowingly, or simulating their slow death in the wake of a nuclear blast will give them a moment of heightened emotion, great. If turning them into the sharp end of the faceless machinery of death will do the same, that can go in too.”
Having established that modus operandi of hardcore emotional manipulation, the inevitable question comes: what exactly do you do for an encore? Modern Warfare 2 answers that by continuing to invent new twists on the basics of the first person shooter, giving you levels where the challenge is not to shoot someone being captured; nuclear submarines; James Bond snowmobile chases; sheer ice cliffs to be climbed with alternating RT and LT strikes of an ice axe in each hand. It also seeks to escalate the emotional stakes along the way, with a full-on invasion of suburban America, craters and armoured vehicles next to houses flying the stars and stripes. And then, of course, there’s its most famous contribution to the genre: the mission known as “No Russian”.
In that mission you play an American agent who has infiltrated a Russian extremist cell, and the game tells you to follow them as they carry out a massacre at a Russian airport. You can give in to the obvious pressure to join in, or not, and at the end it is revealed that they already knew of the player character’s real background and planned to frame him all along. It takes the eerie sense of your pointlessness that can sometimes creep into Call of Duty’s over-engineered squad pieces, and turns it into the point.
Even before the questions of your own actions, just watching from close quarters is already extremely uncomfortable, with the horror emphasised as people panic and run, or crawl through the carnage and discarded suitcases in a futile attempt to escape. The way that it turns real life events into entertainment is also tough to miss, with the game coming less than a year after a similar scale of terrorist massacre in a transport hub in Mumbai.
Once again, Infinity Ward were seeking a way of heightening emotions and succeeded on those terms. There is little other justification for the mission to be there unless you’re deep into the territory of only using in-game logic to explain narrative decisions taken by creators. The inevitable advanced controversy did no harm in helping to sell the game. The fig leaf concession of providing options to skip the mission without losing achievements ends up feeling like a way to make playing it even more of a badge of honour, an equivalent to whacking a Parental Advisory sticker on a sweary CD.
The even bigger problem than any resultant distaste is the lingering effect that No Russian has on the rest of the game. Once you’ve seen people crawling through pools of blood, it’s not an easy image to forget. Each time I shot someone afterwards, I thought about the fact that there was not an equivalent dark red puddle. When tasked with finding a target in a favela and being warned of the civilians there, it became all the more noticeable how few civilians were ever actually present, even when taking shelter in people’s homes. One moment of transgression acts to draw attention to how carefully and unrealistically it is avoided elsewhere.
There is a message in the contrast. Innocent people being killed by terrorists have blood. You have blood, spattered across your vision in blurry, aesthetically pleasing drops and trails as a fancier health meter. Enemy combatants barely have blood, the better to dehumanise them. Logically the depersonalisation has always been there, but by nature it works to obscure itself. This particular disruption just proves too large for it.
There are further threads to follow from that issue. Amid its prioritisation of spectacle and its occasional acknowledgement of the horrors of war, the first Modern Warfare certainly acted as US military propaganda. It has nothing, though, on Modern Warfare 2. Before long this time it tells you that the US military is “the most powerful military force in the history of man”, and you are part of “the best hand-picked group of warriors on the planet”. After hyping them up, it’s at least as keen to emphasise that they should be making righteous interventions at all opportunities. “We don’t get to sit one out”, as it puts it. Because you, as part of the military, could be the difference in allowing for “the prospering of your people”, American exceptionalism shading into full-on supremacist language.
This glorification is matched to a spectacularly paranoid sensibility which No Russian and the invasion of the US give full force to. “Front lines are history, uniforms are relics”, you are briefed before the former. “The war wages everywhere”. The rhetoric is concentrated War on Terror justification, everything an act of embattled self-defence, all actions a justifiable response. It’s an idea that shares a lot in common with your average action video game, but it’s rare that those shine quite such a light on how far they are willing to take it.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 spent a total of 9 weeks as UK #1. Details of what else was at the top of the charts after the page break.