Call of Duty: Black Ops is Americanism With Its Sleeves Rolled
Posted by Martin on 21st July, 2011
We broke out of the mines of the Vorkuta Gulag in a violent dream and a flurry of bullets. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of men died in the attempt, both prisoners and guards. Grabbing the chain gun was a particularly bold move on our part, as was spearing the helicopter, but fortunately I was up to the task. Reznov, my crafty Russian accomplice, vouched for me when the other prisoners questioned putting an American at the heart of the plan, and while he was perfectly happy for them to be gunned down, he carried me through tear gas and fire to victory. Finally, we came across two motorbikes, positioned by providence to face towards two ramps which led to our exit. Reznov compelled me to jump aboard the second bike and secure my freedom; two rugged individualists, risen from hell, escaping through a plate glass window to . . . I don’t know, apple pie and handjobs, presumably.
Fuck you, Call of Duty. I’m so sick of this shit.
My country – and here I’m referring to the real world as you and I experience it, not the twisted version of it found in Black Ops – is currently at war on multiple fronts, for inarguably muddy reasons. Regardless of your ideology, the motivation for our war on Iraq alone is an impossible to break down in simple terms. Between the oil crisis, the ‘war on terror’, the military-industrial complex and the political egos involved, our actual purpose for invasion – and then occupation – cannot possibly be reduced to black and white, good vs evil, from any perspective. To claim otherwise would be just dishonest; I’m a hardline anti-war activist, and even I concede that removing Saddam from power was probably for the best. Nothing is ever simple.
The last thing we need in a world this complex is media – of any kind – telling us that there are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and that the way to tell them apart is to look at how chiselled their jawline is. Call of Duty: Black Ops is the guilty of the worst kind of propaganda; the kind that masquerades as realism. The ‘heroes’ of the piece – all of whom are square-jawed white males who quip their way past even the most grievous injury – are so joyfully violent that it is hard to believe that there is no level of self-awareness to the game.
Even the Vietnam section finds ways to cast the Americans as heroes by showing the NVA shooting medics and executing civilians, whilst you fight for freedom against the filthy communists. You’re expected to be outraged by the Vietnamese atrocities, despite the fact that you get patted on the back by the game for shooting fleeing scientists and torturing an unarmed man.
It’s impossible to justify, and that’s often due to the tone rather than the content itself. Team Fortress 2 employs violent, hyper-masculine archetypes, but with a sense of tongue-in-cheek silliness which transforms it into ridiculous, campy parody. Grand Theft Auto 4 was all sex and death, but it was uncompromising in its refusal to glamorise; Niko Bellic was ugly as hell, inside and out. Even a game as thematically serious as Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood doesn’t try to cast its heroes as entirely positive. The ethical dilemma of keeping Desmond in virtual reality against his will is central to the storyline.
Black Ops, by contrast, uses action movie tropes alongside references to serious real-world events, and there is nothing in the main campaign which implies that they take this anything less than completely seriously. This is a game which features graphic dismemberment, strangulation, torture and execution, all by the lead character, and all condoned by the characters around him. I really, really tried to read a critical stance into the presentation, but it simply isn’t there; it can only be concluded, therefore, that the game itself condones these acts. Other games have gone that far, but few have been so positive about it. Hell, the game even suggests that torture is a fun, effective way to get information. Your victim gives you the details you need, and then gets up and walks off his grievous injuries as though they were nothing at all. It’s ridiculous, offensive propaganda.
A few missions later I found myself in Vietnam, as Khe Sanh got attacked from all sides. After dragging one of my injured friends to safety – only to have him promptly stand up and shake it off once we hit the checkpoint, as all good heroes should – I was ordered to run through a bunker to help with the defence effort. On the way through, I noticed one marine clutching his gun and rocking back and forth on the floor, clearly suffering from a very Hollywood version of shell-shock. His name tag read ‘Private Baker’. I crouched down next to him and stayed there for a good ten minutes, watching the animation loop, whilst my compatriots up ahead waited for me to activate the next action trigger. I knew I was supposed to run straight past him and shoot more bad guys, but I think that’s what compelled me to stay.
The Call of Duty franchise relies on recreating the horrors of war for you to run past and glance at. It’s a tour bus travelling through a war zone, where you aren’t even encouraged to take pictures as you pass. Even Private Baker’s incessant rocking is just another meaningless sideshow to be gawped at; PTSD is placed alongside exploding barrels and motorbike jumps as light entertainment, to glance at before moving on. And, as the box proudly proclaims, it’s “The Best Selling Xbox 360 Franchise of All Time”. More living Americans bought Black Ops (13.7 million units sold) than actually fought in Vietnam (7.6 million veterans left at last count), so representing the conflict – and conflict in general – in such a binary, jingoistic fashion is irresponsible and disgusting. The message of this game is clear: Good guys are good. Bad guys are bad. And there’s nothing in between.
I’m simply not prepared to write these things off as just entertainment any more.
Facebook
Twitter
Reddit
There’s plenty to criticise about war games’ depictions of morality, but I feel Black Ops is an undeserving choice of game to start with.
I’d argue that BLOPS and the two Modern Warfare games do a better job than most military games of highlighting grey areas and presenting flawed heroes. There was certainly content in BLOPS that made me feel uncomfortable, and frankly embarrassed to be playing it in front of my flatmate, but on the whole I didn’t see it as flag-waving or jingoistic. There’s something that the protagonist is strongly hinted at having done at the end of BLOPS (which I wouldn’t want to spoil) that make it very hard to see him as a black-and-white hero.
I felt COD4 did a relatively (whenc ompared to the average war game, or film for that matter) good job of making war seem grim as hell, and that was carried over into the next two games. They fetishise the technology of war and glamorise moment-to-moment violence, but as far as the big picture goes I felt they portrayed wars as horrific moral quagmires. Not realistic depictions of geopolitics by any means (not that they claimed to be) but certainly not clean cut.
Having said that, an amoral, apolitical glamorisation of the mechanics of war is perhaps a more dangerous thing than a naive morality tale could ever be. I’ve known people eager to join the military because of the aesthetics of it, the technology, the camaraderie and the sensations that come with that kind of life, rather than any desire to fight for what is good. So I might have misgivings about how these games aesthetically present a certain range of professions to people, but not in how they present good and evil. There are countless other military games that present a far more binary view of the morality of warfare.
The COD games often do nasty, tasteless things but I don’t think presenting a whitewashed view of combat and a clean-cut view of good and evil are accusations they particularly deserve. The greatest criticisms they deserve to have levelled at them relate to the game mechanics, not the world they depict.
The trouble is that I really don’t feel that they are trying to explore the gritty moral ground which war really is. Instead, they’re trying to tap into a specific, desensitised demographic – young men, primarily – who just want to see stuff blow up and people get sliced on in graphic and ‘awesome’ ways. The ‘flawed heros’ are always ultimately designed to be badass action hero anti-heroes, along the lines of John McClane, which means their flaws are ultimately only designed to add to our sympathy for them; they’re just doing what they have to do to complete the mission. You’re never asked to actually criticise the actions of the characters, which is an important line, in my mind.
To me, it’s the difference between Full Metal Jacket and Saw 3. The former is gruesome and dark and graphic because that is the story it’s trying to tell, whilst the latter is gruesome and dark and graphic because it thinks that’s what the kids want to see. I don’t necessarily have a problem with gratuitous violence (I love me some Mortal Kombat, and that goes *way* further in sheer dismemberment terms) but the Call Of Duty games dwell on the violence in a way which is less about trying to convey ‘war is hell’ than ‘war is awesome hell’. Most importantly, though, blops is a military sim aimed at this demographic, which I’ve no doubt gets a lot of young men into the whole ‘army’ thing.
Also, I’ve played to the ending, and I see your point, but if he did do *that thing* then it’s still ultimately because the Nasty Sneaky Evil Russians messed with the Good American’s mind. And again, I think it’s less about trying to convey that he is flawed and morally grey than sticking a twist ending on there to get the players talking, like the airport level in MW2. All the brutality is just for show, at the end of the day, rather than in service of any actually nuanced exploration of the reality of war, and that bothers me a lot. There’s no space for introspection in a game that fast paced, and I honestly think there should be!
As an aside, I’m never gonna stop finding blops / codblops a funny word. Thanks for the feedback.
I really think it’s unreasonable to say that the game doesn’t invite you to question the morality of what’s going on, especially given the constraints and standards of the medium. Of course you can choose to interpret it however you want, and enjoy it (or not) at whatever level you see fit, but to me there’s plenty of material in those games that makes the “war is hell” point fairly unambiguously. I don’t think they were just giving the punters what they wanted when they made the player character stagger and crawl around before inevitably dieing in the aftermath of a nuclear detonation. Ggiving the player agency in a futile situation was a great, innovative piece of design that served only to highlight the consequences of a nuclear detonation, with no glamorisation at all. Similarly, BLOPS’ treatment of chemical weapons came over to me as appropriately grim and completely non-glamorised, and I don’t think the ongoing torture scene between missions did anything to make torture appear sanitised or even particularly effective. After a long, frustrating interrogation that largely involves Mason saying he doesn’t know anything and the interrogator having to fill him in, the interrogator releases Mason. Mason only finally gives up the source of the broadcasts once he’s free from the interrogation room. Far from an advocacy of interrogation as a quick, effective means justified by noble ends, you could argue it depicts interrogation as frustrating and ineffective, not to mention really grim to go through. The trauma is enough to make an Alaskan talk in an Australian accent.
As for the characters being lovable rogues, I think Captain Price is a pretty good counterexample; that guy is a maniac who gets results in a sense, but not always the results that even his buddies seem to be on board with. I’d need to play the field torture sequence in COD4 again to see how the other character reacts, but I think they do voice concerns about it. They definitely voice concerns over what he does at the nuclear sub in MW2, and it’s not necessarily presented as being the correct decision. You can choose to feel sympathy for the series’ main characters if you want, but I don’t feel the game particularly compels you to, or expects you do. Conversely, there’s a running theme of people on both sides making poor decisions and people in positions of authority being untrustworthy.
There are missteps, no question. The run of gratuitous close-up throat-slitting in BLOPS made me feel awkward as hell, and the chugging guitars in the background didn’t make it feel like a cautionary tale. No Russian was completely tasteless, albeit with a clever twist and set-up for a utterly dastardly, if rather ludicrous, terrorist caper. And a daft caper it is, because the recent COD games are B-movie genre pieces all the way. So in that sense your film analogy is correct, but rather than Saw, maybe you should compare it with something like Delta Force. But that comparison probably wouldn’t be fair on COD, because by the standards of B-movie depictions of war the COD series is a remarkably balanced depiction of the grim murkiness of contemporary (and cold) war.
Full Metal Jacket it is not, but relative to its contemporaries in its medium I think it’s pretty respectable. It’s a mass-market product through and through so the war:hell ratio might be a little off, but for a bombastic, mass-market depiction of war I think they cram in a laudable amount of subversive material.. As one of the biggest, most overblown game series’ in the world it’s a big target, and as what must be one of the most-viewed depictions of war in popular culture today it’s worth discussing, but I don’t think you’re being fair to it.
In response to the image you have used, I remember seeing that film on TV a while ago and being astonished at the amount of bullpoopie propaganda in it.
I can’t really comment on BLOPs because I haven’t played it (apart from a brief bit of multiplayer), but reading your article reminds me of that game America’s Army. I remember being pretty annoyed at the US army using a video game to encourage people to join, but are games like BLOPs worse because they trivialise and/or glamorise it? When asked in an interview the people who were associated with America’s Army were very honest saying that is was indeed to encourage people to join.
The part where the soldier is rocking back and forth does sound like the issue of PTSD or shellshock being trampled on. Maybe in the next Call of Duty there should be a “level” where you are a patient in a military hospital recovering from a life changing injury, or a part where you have to travel to the houses of dead soldiers families and inform them that their son/daughter has been killed.
Maybe that’s a bit extreme but I think showing the consequences of conflict would make games like this far more respectable, I wonder how many of those 13.7 million people would actually want to play it though.
I think you’re right to some extent; one of the things which would make me enjoy and respect CoD a lot more is if the games took just a second to slow down for some real introspection. I’m not saying that an ‘inform the grieving relatives’ mission is necessarily the way to do it, but some kind of indication that the people you are murdering are, y’know, actual people, rather than just faceless drones, would be really nice.
Even the nuke section in CoD:MW, which was lauded by a lot of people as a great anti-war moment, didn’t strike me as at all powerful, because the main characters – and the supporting cast – were all so cartoonishly unsympathetic, and because it was over so damn quickly. It just felt like another big awesome explosion in an ongoing series of big awesome explosions.
Bleh. I don’t like Call of Duty games. Maybe you can tell, heh.