How Including a Prison Level Makes Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (Just a Tad) More Progressive
SPOILERS FOR WOLFENSTEIN: THE NEW ORDER AND CALL OF DUTY: ADVANCED WARFARE AHEAD. NOT MAJOR BUT THE STUFF INVOLVED TOUCHES ON SOME KINDA BIG PLOT DETAILS FOR EACH GAME SO IF YOU’RE NOT SURE GO PLAY THE GAMES I GUESS. ESPECIALLY WOLFENSTEIN, THAT ONE WAS REALLY GOOD.
One of the weirdest things you can say about games in 2014 is that they gave us a template for how to handle a level that takes place in a prison camp. Over the past few months I found myself being shepherded through two completely separate concrete hellholes. They’re the video game equivalent of a haunted house painted with an industrial palette, but the resemblances go beyond just aesthetics. Mechanically and structurally, the two levels share far more than just belonging to the same genre.
The hellholes in question are Camp Belica from Wolfenstein: The New Order and the facility in the level “Captured” from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Despite being separated by one hundred years and an alternate timeline, the two levels are strikingly similar. And yet something really odd happened. Call of Duty’s virtual mill of human suffering affected me much more viscerally in the moment than did Camp Belica from The New Order. Wolfenstein’s level wasn’t bad by any means, and the game’s story is probably better in many respects than Call of Duty’s more popcorn flavored take on gunplay and politics. So why did Call of Duty’s level make me feel genuinely horrified while The New Order’s simply made me think differently about how best to kill this particular set of Nazis?
Breaking Them Down
Just so we’re on the same page, I’m going to give a quick run through of the commonalities each level shares with its cousin, because there are enough for it to be genuinely weird. They are:
Being Brought to the Camp as Just One of a Faceless Horde of Jumpsuit Wearing Prisoners
By truck or by train, same difference.
Grand Tour of the Terrible Stuff That Goes On In The Camp
This is far more pronounced in COD, but The New Order has it’s own fair sprinkling of abuses and horrors on display throughout the level, from the squalid prisoner barracks to the merciless beating of a prisoner near the beginning of the level.
Mustache Twirling Villain Threatens Your Restrained Player Character
Getting up close and personal with Kevin Spacey is a lot more bearable than doing the same with a freshly disfigured Nazi commandant, I’ll tell you that much.
Heavily Altered Gameplay For Most of the Level That Emphasizes a More Restrained Approach to Combat
In The New Order you were stuck with a knife, which meant either stealthing your way through the camp offices or getting into a bunch of grueling melees with the guards. In Advanced Warfare your left hand is totally unusable, which means no reloading. Instead of spraying and praying as you could with every other level in the game, precision suddenly became key. In either case, the implication is clear: for this section of the game you are very vulnerable and must be careful about managing your resources and keeping your head down.
Proceed Through a Gruesome Morgue and Fight Your Way Out of an Incinerator
See, this is exactly the sort of weirdly specific thing I’m talking about.
And Finally, Hop Into a Giant Robot Suit To Blow Up Everything and Smash Your Way Out of the Base
Laugh with glee as the sadistic guards flee from your mighty chainguns and missiles! Serves them right for being Nazis/Private Military Contractors who Hate America!
See what I mean? The two levels line up almost perfectly when it comes to structure and gameplay, and given their long development cycles and the fact they were released just a few months apart it wouldn’t make any sense to claim that one is “ripping off” the other. So we’re back at the start. Why did “Captured” shake me up so much more than Camp Belica?
Shock and Awe
A lot of it comes down to the element of surprise. Perverse as it may sound, when the idea of infiltrating a Nazi labor camp comes up in The New Order, it was something I was sort of expecting. Yes the trailers spoiled the reveal, but it’s also not sold in-game as a huge surprise. Wolfenstein is very concerned with world-building and does so behind the curtains of a 1960 world ruled by the Nazis. We spend practically no time in the homes of Berlin civilians, shuttled instead between military checkpoints, secret research facilities, and yes, prison camps. While there might be more human suffering on display in Camp Belica than in other areas in the game, the materials it’s built from and the overall tenor of the facility is one we’ve already grown accustomed to at this point just over halfway through the game. In a broader sense, pop culture has made evil Nazis a very familiar concept to us, and the idea of them running a stark prison camp is something we don’t need a lot of insight into because there’s already a wealth of resources documenting the horrors that went on in real life at such facilities.
The prison camp featured in Call of Duty on the other hand catches the player off guard. It’s visited as the second to last level, and comes on the tail end of fighting through a series of recognizable locales. Despite its futuristic setting the game, like so many of its franchise brethren, derives much of its vaunted “authenticity” from locating itself in places we’ve seen or been to many times before and then deploying highly detailed weaponry in them. The gadgets might be flashier and the surfaces shinier, but Seoul still looks reasonably enough like the popular imagination’s idea of Seoul, as does Lagos and Santorini. Even New Baghdad, Atlas’s capital built out of the ashes of the Iraqi capital, is basically just Dubai.
And while this prison camp might not be as familiar to as many people, it’s still intensely recognizable. It runs deeper than just the horrors glimpsed by the public at Guantanamo Bay or hinted at by the existence of CIA run black sites around the world. This game’s core audience lives in a country with the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. A not insignificant number of these prisons are also privatized in whole or in part, a fact that kept running through my head as I was coerced along by barking contractors. How many similar looking facilities are built and run in this country in the name of “order” and “security”, words the villain Jonathan Irons keeps using in his rhetoric throughout the game? The juxtaposition of this stark shift in tone and setting with the rest of the shiny and familiar locales in the game makes it that much more effective in shaking up the player.
That’s one way of saying you could view this level as just the next in a proud tradition of “shocking moments” delivered by the Call of Duty series, moments which have only gotten more ridiculous and obvious in their attempts to garner press attention as the series has progressed. But the shock here isn’t entirely the point, as it was with the airport massacre or the tourist family’s death by chemical attack that were both featured in previous installments. This level ups the stakes of the narrative, and it lasts for more than just a moment. A rogue supervillain with a catastrophic weapon of mass destruction is this franchise’s bread and butter. At first the only thing separating Jonathan Irons from his predecessors is his American accent. We didn’t really need any further establishment of how evil he is. What this level does instead is give us a glimpse into what the world might look like if you lose, and it’s a repulsive vision indeed.
Ultimately what’s really shocking about the level is that something like it exists in a Call of Duty game at all. Many people view these games as little more than propaganda for the American military industrial complex, and they aren’t exactly wrong. But the villain this time is not an amorphous blob of implausibly overpowered foreigners. It’s an American at the helm of a multinational corporation, a demographic that in real life really does exercise a huge amount of power.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that while it might not be totally progressive per se, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is by far the most progressive entry in the series so far, a title that’s widely acknowledged albeit with no small number of reservations. It manages this transition in tone thanks to a simultaneous transition in narrative. Advanced Warfare isn’t content to lounge in the realm of Tom Clancy style military fiction with its immediate predecessors. Instead it inhabits the much more flexible genre of military science-fiction. By stepping away from a more modern setting and focusing on one that’s more removed, this lets it try to do what a lot of good science fiction does: use fantastical scenarios to draw attention to how our society looks now and where that might be taking us.
