Children Playing War - Marc Awoday

I finally got around to play Modern Warfare 2 last week, about an eternity later than everyone else on the planet, and I can now make an informed critique about it. Keep in mind that this is a critic of the single player campaign and not a review of the product as an whole. I had quite some fun with it but here are the points that stuck out.

I didn’t touch the multiplayer for two reasons; the first is that I rarely play online games on Xbox or any other consoles for that matter (blame the kids) and the second is my fear of catching on of those crazy bug/glitch/hack that are spreading around like a bad flu.

The single player campaign took me a few hours to complete, one or two of those hours due to my bad habit of dying, and I can resume the plot with one word: ridiculous. Of course, was I to expect some Shakespearian storytelling and deep meaningful talk about the nature of war and humankind? No. But I wasn’t expecting snowmobiles and boat chases either.

Right now I must be beating a record by spending two paragraphs not talking about the now infamous “No Russians” mission. I will fulfil my duty as a blogger and give my opinion about it. Actually, let me resume my opinion first with one more single word: Bullshit.

Apart from the ridiculous setting-up to the mission where you go from being a soldier shooting rebels in Afghanistan to an undercover agent who is strangely the new best friend of a Russian terrorist (and you go from A to B in a day, can you smell the trap), what really kills me about that mission is the amazingly awkward tonal shift between it and the previous and following missions.

Seriously, five minutes before that mission you are jumping ravines on a snowmobile, something straight out of a James Bond movie, and five minutes after said mission you are gunning your way through small Brazilian streets and rooftops. And stuck in the middle of those two scenes that could come from a Michael Bay movie you are asked to “sacrifice a part of your soul” to arrest a crazy Russian (news flash, the cold war’s long over) terrorist.

The scene by itself, and with a good story around it, could have been a very poignant moment of interactivity where you are tasked to do something you would normally never do. Something that goes directly against the notion of the war-game FPS where you most avoid civilian casualties at all cost, something that goes against your very cognitive response. You could have dropped the controller afterward and ask yourself “What can bring human beings to do such a thing in the real life?” But no, it didn’t happen.

Badly handled, it became a shock tactic. Sure, it sets up the remaining of the story but at what cost? You just spent five minutes slowly walking through hell only to get killed at the end in a mildly ironic way. Great, IW took a page from Bioshock and made you feel like a puppet. What now? I’m supposed to go back into the game like nothing happened, back to some kind of high adrenaline military shooter where I shoot evil Russian soldiers and mercenaries. Oh and some Americans at the end for good measure.

This is one of the worst tonal shifts I’ve seen in a long time in any kind of medium.

That being said, if you listen to the word around the blogs and some less than scientific surveys, two out of three MW2 players will never touch the single player campaign, preferring the competitive side of the multiplayer. Fine by me. Not everyone’s into games for the same reasons.

I’ll make a quick mention of the defencive arguments some fans of the game gave to some criticisms like mine. The goldmine probably is the comments section on Tom Chick’s brilliant take on the issue at Fidgit.

I can detect three kinds of defense, the first being the now infamous “it’s just a game” defense and any of its multiple variation. I won’t go back on why this argument is completely bogus; a bunch of more intelligent people than me already did it a bunch of times already. The second is “It’s rated M so stop whining”. Being rated M is not a license to be dumb and shocking for shock’s sake. If anything, it undermines the idea of M for “Mature”.

At the last one is the beautiful “If you don’t like it don’t play it and stop talking about it”. A whole three pages post could be dedicated just to that single argument but I’ll cut it short. People can have opinion and express them. I don’t know why some gamers have that insane fear of talking about games in a mature and critical way. Maybe they are just afraid that they couldn’t keep up.