Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019)
“Remember. No Russian.”
This line from Modern Warfare 2 is one of the most indelible video game memories that I have, standing next to moments such as entering L-A-R-A to save Lucca’s mother in Chrono Trigger, waiting until the final minute for Shadow to appear before abandoning the airship in Final Fantasy VI, or watching the baby Metroid sacrifice itself to save Samus from Mother Brain in Super Metroid. This line is the video game equivalent of “Rosebud” or “To be, or not to be” and is an example of the powerful and unique storytelling potential of video games.
So despite the fact that what I know about ludology and Game Studies may be considered anachronistic and outdated today, I still feel a compulsion to write about the new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (MW19) because of the impact that the franchise and Modern Warfare sub-brand in particular had on me and both as an academic and as a fan of the medium. Even if I know that it’s highly unlikely that MW19 will be as interesting as the games Activision and Infinity Ward are invoking, I just had to experience the campaign and see it for myself.
I previously revisited the original Modern Warfare through the remastered version that was released in 2016 and was pleased to see that the campaign stood the test of time long after the novelty of some of its then revolutionary mechanics had worn off. I recently replayed the Modern Warfare 2 when Microsoft added the game to the Xbox One backwards compatibility list in 2018 and my thoughts on the second game are captured in the dusty tome that I submitted to my thesis committee nearly four years ago, but I’ll quickly note that my thoughts on the game haven’t changed in that time. “No Russian” is one of the most important canonical moments in ludological storytelling and the campaign, despite its ridiculous bombast, is still one of the better paced and well designed first person shooter campaigns that I’ve played.
MW19 is an attempt to capitalize on all of the good will generated by the “original” Infinity Ward in those first two Modern Warfare games, returning to its roots after its Battle Royale multiplayer-only experiment with Black Ops 4 last year. We’re back to the contemporary weapons everyone is familiar with, the contemporary enemies and geopolitical context that is makes war easier for the average American player to consume, and most importantly, we see the return of Captain Price and the birth of Task Force 141, wrapping the game in the comfortable nostalgia of a familiar cast of characters.
I don’t really feel like there’s a need for me to go into the actual narrative of the campaign too much. The many problematic aspects of the game have already been covered, including GameSpot’s interview with Taylor Kurosaki over what I see are the campaign’s politically motivated narrative failings — the absurdity over recontextualizing the “Highway of Death” as a Russian-led disaster for one. And not to dwell too long on an actual human tragedy, but there’s something karmically serendipitous about the fact that the Americans pulled out of Syria and abandoned the Kurds shortly before a game valorizing American efforts to support rebel fighters in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Urzikstan was released. Needless to say, in 2019 the narrative license and shortcuts that the Kurosaki and the other writers at Infinity Ward took are almost insulting given the nature of the story that they are trying to tell.
There have been other interesting reactions to the game. Russian YouTube essayist NFKRZ posted a video describing how the game has been received in the Russian media and the fact that the game was banned from store shelves (at least for a short while) due to its extreme flanderization of the Russian antagonist’s lack of humanity and single-minded devotion to being evil. Similarly, CNET’s Daniel Van Bloom wrote an article decrying the toothless nature of the game’s storytelling and I’m sure there have been many others.
For my part, I believe that if you don’t have the courage to tell a story set in Syria about a CIA agent supporting Kuridsh fighters against a threat driven by the Russians and also by ISIS, then you don’t get to use the imagery of the White Helmets or of people dying from a chemical attack. Otherwise you’re simply trivializing real world events for the purposes of making a palatable story that manages to offend both the players of the game by underestimating their intellectual capacity to understand geopolitical events and the actual victims of the Syrian war by appropriating their lived experiences and exploiting their tragedy for the purposes of convenient storytelling.
Rather than dwell on the problematic elements of the narrative, I wanted to focus on the noteworthy ludic moments of the campaign because that’s where I feel that I can make a contribution to the conversation. My enjoyment of the original Modern Warfare games is in large part predicated on how the developers use interactivity and the conventions of video games to subvert player expectations and create the conditions that allow the player to potentially embody the actual experience of a soldier fighting in a war and taking someone’s life. MW19 tries to do the same throughout its campaign, but its moments simply don’t live up to the ones found in the original games.
The first moment that stands out to me, particularly in relation to Modern Warfare 2, is “Piccadilly”. This is the second mission in MW19 and takes place in Piccadilly Circus where you are forced to deal with the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack in London:
It’s actually a set piece that is fairly reminiscent of Infinite Warfare’s opening, where the player walks through a “peaceful” civilian location that is as divorced from a war zone as possible, only to helplessly watch as an enemy perpetrates an act of terror and begins to tear the city apart around them. But given the Modern Warfare context, it’s hard not to draw parallels to both Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian” and to Modern Warfare 3’s London chemical attack scene.
The biggest difference in is that you are cast as the protector or savior in this level. While you can’t stop the terrorist plot from happening and are forced to watch helplessly as an entire cell of “Al-Qatala” terrorists set off bombs throughout Piccadilly Circus and indiscriminately kill civilians, you are given full control when tasked with the job of killing the terrorists to try to bring order back to the city. Unlike “No Russian”, where you play as an undercover American operative forced to conduct an act of terrorism at a Russian airport (and at the very least, you will have to shoot Russian police officers in order to proceed through the level) in order to try to infiltrate a terrorist cell, there is no ambiguity about the nature of this scene.
As you navigate through the recreation of Piccadilly Circus, you’ll encounter a sea of civilians trying to escape from the terror and protect themselves. Except where “No Russian” allowed you to shoot civilians if you were so inclined, perhaps to support your character’s undercover story as a terrorist, in MW19 it’s very clear that Kyle Garrick, the SAS solder you inhabit, has specific rules of engagement and needs to exhibit trigger discipline while engaging the enemy. It’s interesting in that in a genre where you are trained to essentially shoot at everything that moves, you are forced to think about what you are aiming at before you pull the trigger.
Admittedly it’s not a novel idea and certainly doesn’t have the same impact as the truly impossible position you are forced into in “No Russian”, but it is a moment that balances the demands of the game’s narrative with the emergent opportunities that are afforded to you as the game doesn’t give you any specific direction on how you should deal with the terror plot unfolding in front of you. Do you rush over to the next mission objective as you are ordered to by the game? Or do you fight through the pseudo open world recreation of Piccadilly Circus to try to engage as many Al-Qatala terrorists as possible? It doesn’t really matter once you become aware of the mechanics of the game, in the same way that most interactions with video game NPCs eventually become empty experiences, but in the moment you are at least presented with a set of options for how you want to approach this harrowing situation and act accordingly.
What’s unfortunate then is that the one first opportunity of a moral choice in the game is taken away when the game designers wrest control of the game from the player and imposes a cutscene on them. “Piccadilly” culminates with a sequence where the player finds an innocent man who is forced into wearing a suicide vest. As you approach the man, you see that he is padlocked into the vest and that the bomb is set to detonate within seconds. What could have been an interesting moral choice where the player is forced to choose between pushing the victim away or dying in an explosion, creating a ludic moment reminiscent of “No Russian” or the final moment with The Boss moment in Metal Gear Solid 3, is instead replaced with a cutscene of Captain Price pushing the innocent man away from you seconds before the vest explodes.
The fact that the game developers chose to take control away from you at such an important moment is the ludic manifestation of the aforementioned narrative problems previously discussed. The developers want to convey a “war is hell” message, but also want to present it in a manner that doesn’t offend anyone or forces them to think about what the consequences of war might actually be. It’s a decision similar to the one in The Last of Us, where Naughty Dog cheapened the ending of the game by removing the player from the final moments of the game and forces them to watch Joel act on his own. Yes, you get to see the consequences of a choice being made for you, but you are relieved of any of the guilt of having to make the decision yourself.
What makes this decision somewhat baffling is that there are some other moments where the game tries to force you into making a choice or dying through inaction — two times in the game in “Clean House” and “The Wolf’s Den”, you are tasked with storming a residence and clearing a series of rooms with your team. The designers rely on the player’s (presumably socially constructed) expectations that women can’t be enemy combatants and presents a few situations between these levels where a female NPC begs the player not to shoot them before pulling out a weapon (or in the case of the ending of “Clean House”, reach for a detonator).
I don’t find these moments as interesting because there’s very little thought to the choice being forced onto the player. Unless the game is actually making a commentary on the implicit sexism that its players may exhibit if they hesitate when confronted with a female NPC (much like the “female surgeon” riddle that I seem to be unable to avoid lately), there really is nothing interesting going on here. Say you are killed by the female terrorist the first time around… You’ll just reload the checkpoint and know to shoot them first. It’s not as if you are given the option to try to de-radicalize or otherwise perform a non-lethal take-down of any of the NPCs you face in these missions. Knowing that these characters are literally programmed to try to trick you into hesitating before trying to kill you means that there is really only one solution after an initial failure.
The other big moment in the game that showcases a major ludic storytelling moment is from the mission “Old Comrades”, where the player tracks down the mastermind behind the Piccadilly attack and is given the opportunity to interrogate him.
What should be an opportunity for the designers to explore the ambiguous nature of war in an interactive manner falls fairly flat because the choices given to the player direct them to the exact same narrative outcome. This scene is emblematic of how game designers present the fiction of choice while sparing the players from the consequences of their decisions.
As the video illustrates, there are really only two choices given to the player — you either shoot the Butcher or you spare him. The comments in the video speculate that it’s possible other options were originally available in the game, and the one that seems obvious is actually using the Butcher’s family against him. But as the uploader of the video points out, shooting either the Butcher’s wife or son results in an immediate fail state.
It’s a bit incredulous because at this point, the character you inhabit has expressed his frustration at the limited Rules of Engagement he is forced to abide by — leading to the deaths of countless civilians in “Piccadilly” — and was also forced to stand by and watch as the Butcher executes a father and son in “The Embassy” (in another automatic fail state, if you try to stop the execution the Butcher kills you and you have to reload the checkpoint). In narrative terms, the story builds up to this confrontation where you are given the opportunity to not only exact revenge, but to do so in the “noble” cause of stopping a terrorist attack.
It’s the most cliche of Hollywood plots that’s been repeated countless times through the lens of the fallen hero who uses the tactics of the villain in order to accomplish their goal. The Punisher and Jack Bauer are the pop-culture ur-examples of this trope, but it’s been used countless times in movies as trite as Taken. So when MW19 builds to this scene and there is no payoff or climax, in either narrative or ludic terms, I can’t help but be disappointed.
I can’t help but think about Grand Theft Auto V and its torture scene. As much as I despised Trevor and the fact that the developers tried to make him a likable protagonist, at the very least they stood by their depiction of the character and were happy to allow the player to live in the mind of a man with no morality. Rockstar stood by the story that they were trying to tell and gave us a story featuring a despicable human being because they knew that’s exactly what many of their players wanted. If nothing else, I can applaud Rockstar for not pulling any punches and trying to make Trevor into something he isn’t.
So when Infinity Ward promises a game that is meant to shed light onto the darker sides of war and isn’t even able to meet the expectations of Hollywood pablum? It just adds to the feeling that the developers are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want people to believe that this is a serious war game that illuminates some part of the human condition that creates the endless cycle of violence plaguing humanity since the first ape picked up a rock and used it to fight another ape. But they also go out of their way to present a clean narrative where the Western powers are all saints and only resort to violence when absolutely necessary.
That’s not to say that I would have personally picked the option to use the Butcher’s family against him, but the fact that the developers give the illusion of choice to the player only to tell them that they’re playing the game wrong if they wanted to shoot the Butcher’s family? The two choices you are given are meaningless because they’re not really choices at all and have no bearing on you as a player or in the story of the game — the fact that the game continues exactly the same way in the following cutscene confirms as much. If they weren’t going to allow the player to make a real choice, the whole sequence might as well have been a cutscene instead.
In fact, the only interesting choice in that whole sequence is the option to opt out of it completely. Players familiar with the Call of Duty franchise will know that in many of the previous games, a pop up will appear before the game starts to ask the player if they want to censor certain parts of the game because of graphic content. In Modern Warfare 2 for example, toggling this option on allows the player to skip “No Russian” entirely. Rather than make that choice an out-of-game menu option, the MW19 developers diegetically inserted that option into the game by asking the player if they wanted to take part in the interrogation before it begins. It’s probably the most interesting design choice of the game, even if it’s simply taking a page out of Halo’s in-game inverted controls check that takes place at the start of each game.
There are some other sequences that I would probably be remiss if I didn’t at least address them. The two levels where you play as Farah, leader of the Urzikstan resistance fighters, “Hometown” and “Captive” present interesting scenarios to the player in the controlled and linear manner that Call of Duty is best known for. “Hometown”, the level that features the White Helmets mentioned earlier, takes place when Farah is a child and witnesses the cruelty of the Russian occupiers firsthand. The level begins with you trapped under a building that has collapsed, watching your mother die in front of you. Then the Russians drop chemical weapons into the city and you watch as civilians fall victim to the gas and slowly choke to death. Finally, you watch as a Russian soldier barges into your home and kills your father in front of you, before he tries to kill you as well.
Content aside — as mentioned previously, the game is hilariously one-sided — this level presents what is now called the “Walking Simulator” experience quite effectively. And seeing it through the eyes of a child makes the experience all the more harrowing. I’d almost forgive them for taking “inspiration” from The Last of Us and its opening scene if they didn’t also wholesale lift the entire sequence where Ellie fights David in the diner as well. It’s not as ridiculously dramatic as sequence the from The Last of Us at least: here, as Farah, you have to hide from the Russian soldier who kills your father and stab him with a screw driver when he doesn’t see you. But it is fairly unoriginal and also commits the sin of being transparently “videogamey” by making you attack the soldier three times before you can kill him. It’s really an odd place to insert the Rule of Threes.
“Captive” jumps forward in time to when Farah is being held in a prison camp by Barkov, the evil Russian General who has no qualms about using chemical weapons, murdering your friends, or torturing you in order to get what he wants. And torture you he does, as the opening of the level forces you to endure a waterboarding sequence in first person. There’s nothing really special about this sequence mechanically— as Farah, you move your head around with your controller and control your breathing with the trigger button in order to avoid being drowned by the solder pouring water onto your face — and there is no true failure condition either, other than Barkov threatening to kill one of your friends if you pass out. But as a means of conveying the experience of being waterboarded, it is also surprisingly effective.
Both of these levels use the ludic grammatical device of limited control to convey meaning to the player, affording them the opportunity to embody Farah’s emotional and physical state by carefully controlling what the player can do and see. These sequences don’t feel as perfunctory as similar sequences found in Call of Duty: WWII which I had previously reviewed and I’ll give credit where credit is due and applaud Infinity Ward for making these sequences compelling.
There’s a lot more I could say about the game and some of the choices Infinity Ward made throughout the campaign, but it feels like beating a dead horse at that point. I’m fairly ambivalent about the game, which is perhaps not a great sign when the major reason MW19 exists is to try to remind players why they Call of Duty is so beloved in the first place. Perhaps I am in the minority, particularly when I’ve read reviews, watched videos, and listened to podcasts calling the campaign from this year’s game the best in years. But as a video game, I genuinely feel that Infinity Ward left a lot of good opportunities to tell an interactive story on the table and that the game is a poorer experience as a result. It’s not even that it’s a “bad” game, just one that could have been a great game.
I’m also not willing to take “it’s just a Call of Duty game, what do you expect?” as an excuse either, particularly given that the original two Modern Warfare games serve as shining examples of why ludic storytelling is different from cinematic storytelling. For the time being anyway, Call of Duty is still one of the biggest franchises in the industry and it would be a shame if someone didn’t capitalize on the opportunity to develop a fully resourced game with a built-in audience to try to tell a war story as influential as the previous games in the franchise. Heck, I still think that someone will top Spec Ops: The Line and there is no reason why it couldn’t be the next Call of Duty game.
Perhaps I’m just trying to convince myself that there’s a reason to look forward to the inevitable sequel in a couple of years, but there is still a special place in my heart for the franchise and I remain hopeful that one of these games will make as big an impact as Modern Warfare 2.
