It was apparent by the beginning of 2007 that the Xbox 360, with its premium online gaming, its HD graphics and its early run clear of competition, was succeeding well beyond what its predecessor had managed. That would have an effect on the type of games at the top of the charts, and it was good news for some who had thrown their lot in with the original Xbox. This also came alongside the broader US and UK political context of the “war on terror” and the accompanying increase in belligerent jingoism. All of which meant that the Ubisoft (the same one more recently sued for institutional sexual harassment) and their all-purpose Tom Clancy franchise were in the right place at the right time on multiple levels.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW 2) steps up to bigger spaces than the more personal and small-scale missions of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. It has you waging war across urban and rural spaces, with lots of open ground and conveniently placed cover between you and your enemies. It still shares with both of those games not just a mentality but a focus on technology. The idea is that you are a special soldier kitted out with all kinds of augmented reality devices alongside your fancy weapons, turning the game’s ‘Heads Up Device’ — HUD — into a diegetic feature.
So when it gives you a yellow square on the screen and tells you to head there, that’s happening inside its fictional reality. When it gives you a red diamond outlining an enemy and displaying their health as a percentage, which turns to unthreatening white upon their death at your hands, that’s happening inside its fictional reality too. If Rainbow Six: Lockdown worked as a game “with a layer of complication that mostly serves to make you feel clever, while rarely requiring you to be clever”, GRAW 2 takes out even the pretence of cleverness required, as you follow instructions and complete simple tasks, between watching news broadcasts beamed directly to your eyes. The flood of information produces much the same vision of war as a video game which Metal Gear Solid 2 interrogated. Interrogating its basis is not something which GRAW 2 ever intends on doing, of course.
All of its fictional technology is a lot more advanced than the monochrome PDA of Splinter Cell just four years earlier, and yet it feels closer to reality. This is both due to aesthetic differences in design that cast GRAW 2 more seriously, and because of the real world moving fast too. By 2007, the US army was using Xbox 360 controllers for its drones, alongside its investments in collaborating with games companies pushing its propaganda. The same things that could turn killing fictional people into the stuff of games were out there being used to add a similar distance to killing real people.
That’s part of why, while Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six were already insidious propaganda, GRAW 2 comes off as significantly worse. The other part is the nature of the story that it tells. Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher is a Jack Bauer action hero operating on his own genre narrative logic. Rainbow Six’s terrorist incursions exist clearly in the realm of fevered fantasy. GRAW 2 has closer links to a twisted version of reality. It puts you in a yellow-filtered Mexico to take down rebels whose goal is to “remove all American presence from Latin America”. It spends inordinate amounts of time amidst jocular briefings ramming home the message that you are a “ghost” who is not there in any official capacity. Rebels are “right on the border of the US” – “that’s just too damn close”. Throughout all of that it never allows any possibility that the player might have anything other than an instant assumption that secret war crimes are a justified and good thing in a world of dangerous threats to how the US would like other countries to be run.
GRAW 2 ends up escalating to threats of nuclear attacks using missiles and warheads sourced from Ukraine and Pakistan, just to make sure that it’s not just casting one other part of the world as inherently threatening. The basics of the story, though, are very much parallel to the CIA’s real life actions and aims in Latin America. Parallel enough to make sure that its more fantastical elements read as justification of its more realistic ones and their counterparts. It’s perverse and horrific even by war video game standards.
Top of the charts for week ending 10 March 2007:
