Watching Modern Warfare
Brendan Keogh’s Critical Let’s Play series on the Modern Warfare trilogy has just wrapped up and I watched the last video over the weekend. I like watching Let’s Plays but usually only for games I have no intention of playing myself, and Modern Warfare fits the bill brilliantly; I very rarely play FPS games and I have next to no interest in military shooters. Yet, the FPS is certainly a dominant form in gaming as-it-is today and not wanting to play it doesn't mean I don’t want to understand how it works. And, as Keogh suggests in his reasoning for starting the series, MW utilises the narrative possibilities of the form to a particular and efficient effect.
Keogh’s series is excellent and comes highly recommended. He is eloquent even while playing and knows the games inside out, stopping when needed to point out the ways that the embodied, first-person perspective and the linearity of the ‘corridor shooter’ are used to keep the plot beats coming on time and on-pace. But watching a game is not the same as playing it, and I was interested, as the series looked at the two sequels, how my experience and enjoyment diverged from Keogh’s. Very briefly, Keogh is clear that he finds Modern Warfare 2 to be the worst of the trilogy, and at points states that he is mainly playing through it in order to be able to play and talk about Modern Warfare 3. As a viewer however, I found MW2 considerably more interesting while I found MW3 to be frequently boring enough that I would leave the audio running in the background and do something else, tabbing back to the screen only if something interesting was pointed out.
Parsing out why this is so has taken me a few days and although I think some of it is just down to taste — I was to a certain extent just more interested in the type of story being told in MW2 — I don’t think that that accounts for the whole of it. There are two main strands of thought that I've had about this which I will expand upon below: the first is that there is a fundamental difference between watching and playing a game. This is obvious of course, but I think it sometimes gets lost a little when we talk about games as cinematic experiences and as games aim to incorporate cinematic techniques. Keogh talks a lot about MW as a very scripted game in which the perfect playthrough will match very closely to the director’s vision, and even deaths only punctuate rather than destroy the pacing. Nonetheless, the game still requires the player to play it, to trigger each scripted event and to provide the action at the procedural heart of the plot, which leads into my second strand of thought. Games are, always, co-authored works of art; players are complicit in their activity. This complicity in authorship is similar to that between playwright and actor and a game is an instanced piece of theatre in much the same way, acted and authored by the player playing through and interpreting the lines that they are given.
For me, this concept of co-authoring goes some way towards explaining why I enjoyed watching MW2 far more than Keogh enjoyed playing it, and vice versa with MW3. MW2 is, I think, more difficult in terms of the themes it is interested in and the way it presents them. This difficulty isn't expressed through procedural difficulty as such, except for the odd frustratingly designed level it seems that all three games are much the same challenge for the player and, conversely, MW3 eschews any kind of tutorial level. MW2 expresses it’s thematic difficulty via a contempt for the player and a cynicism about both the player-as-consumer-of-war and the role of the obligatory single-player mission in a multi-player focused title. The game dislikes and continually challenges its co-author to produce meaning, to produce a piece of theatre which is, ultimately, far more interesting to the spectator. MW3 is more conciliatory however. It is happier with it’s role as a thing to be played and more engaged with its co-author, making it more rewarding to play but less rewarding to watch, if that makes sense.
This difference in approach can best be seen in, or as a function of, the elements of the first game the the later two find most interesting and make the most attempt to emulate. MW3 is, as Keogh points out, a series of variations and refinements on All Ghillied Up, one of the most popular missions in MW. It’s message is that if you follow the script, obey your superior officers and do your duty as a soldier then no matter how hairy things get justice will be, brutally, served at the end. MW3 is a game that fundamentally doesn't question, and doesn't want the player to question, what it is to be a soldier and it rewards this with a mixture of pathos leavened by loaned power; by allowing oneself to be an instrument of the state, or in this case the game-as-state, a player is rewarded with the power of the state flowing through them. The perfect pacing, sense of flow and the tightening of the co-author bond between the player and the game, the confluence of the two-entities goals, make for a greater game but a lesser spectacle; a more self-involved theatrical offering.
MW2 on the other hand is clearly much more heavily influenced by the MW mission Shock and Awe. It repeatedly kills the player as they are playing, asks them to engage on meaningless and futile actions and, often when they finally succeed, punishes them by revealing the actions they have taken to be either meaningless or actively harmful to the implied goals and beliefs of the player-character. It is a game that is in constant conflict with its co-author which maybe makes it less fun to play, but a lot more satisfying to watch. This is, with a grim finality, emphasised in the end credits, which reject the player completely and stand disgusted at the game’s willing participation with them in this destructive symbiotic relationship. The player is divorced from their control and ownership of the characters and relegated to their implied-true status as a voyeur hungry for images of suffering safely contained and displayed. The player’s part in the authorship of the events is denied except as the destructive force that pushed these people through a cycle of destruction to their deaths.
