So, back to Modern Warfare 2 and that level where you gun down an entire airport terminal’s worth of innocents.
A question arises:
Where, after an airport massacre of innocents do you go next in a game?
What atrocity could you ‘top’ that with?
Well, you start taking real-world historical events and making them the subject of or a level within the next game. But, how far back do you go? How recent would something have to be before it’s considered distasteful?
Most wars have already been covered by one game or another. You can’t move in video game shops for titles set in various bits of the second world war, vietnam, the middle east, medieval and napoleonic times. No games about the Falklands though. Guess that one wasn’t big or bloody enough for the developers.
As I write this in 2010 would 2001 be far enough back in history yet to be the possible subject of Modern Warfare 3?
If so maybe it’ll be part of the game to have you and 3 others sneak weapons onto a commercial airliner, hijack & fly it into a building called something like ‘The World Finance Centre’.
The game could then switch to the point of view of someone caught in the building and you have to guide them out before it collapses (there’s a countdown clock in the top right of the screen). Then, after making your way past dead and dying colleagues and tourists you find the staircase.
Down you go, jumping over rubble, dropping down through gaps in floors helping people as you go. Eventually you near the bottom of the (seemingly neverending) stairs with the people you’ve found on the way you get to a dead end. A sign on the wall says ‘Floor 10′ .
What do you do, where do you go? There’s got to be a way out, right?
Wrong.
You backtrack a few floors up but you’re blocked in as the building is crumbling and becoming engulfed in fire all around you. You desperately run around, coughing and sweating from the dust, acrid fumes & flames. There must be way out.
There’s always a way out in the movies, and in the videogames.
Only then do you realise there is no way out. You’re trapped in a burning building, surrounded by the bodies of a variety of people you’ve said “hello” to on the way into & out of work. The clock in the top right corner reaches the last ten seconds of it’s countdown. You look at the blocked stairs, you look at the window. Stairs, window, window, stairs.
3 seconds left.
You see the main support beams going up through the floor start to violently bend and eventually give way.
The building starts to disintegrate.You realise you have only two options;
1, Stay where you.
2, Jump out of the window.
It doesn’t matter which you choose. You and thousands of others inside and in the surrounding area of the building are dead mere seconds later. You were never getting out alive.
The next level loads.
How long before the September 11th (US) and July 7th (UK) attacks translate into game missions? Ten years? Five? Next year?
I predict that a game will contain something similar in the next ten years, maximum.
It will probably have people and politicians recoiling in disgust at the bad taste of it all (and rightly so), but it’s just the modern equivalent of games that recreate past war scenarios or acts of terrorism.
The 2nd World War was horrific for all involved, yet now we think nothing (or very little) of recreating that nightmare to entertain us because it’s distanced from us by time.
Can you imagine showing the D-Day beach landing scene from Call Of Duty to a veteran who was actually there in on the 6th of June 1944?
Not only would it probably disgust them that this is now considered a game and entertainment but how would you feel if they had flashbacks of their friends and comrades being killed all around them and broke down crying? Same goes for the similar scene in Saving Private Ryan.
Maybe that’s the perspective we need to remind ourselves of, although I do think there’s more artistic merit by recreating it in a movie to show the brutality and realism than a video game.
In the movie the soldiers don’t die then click ‘try again’ and are reset back to the save point to try again yet, in Modern Warfare 2, when your character dies the screen blurs heavily and a quote about the futility, violence, loss or (surprisingly) the benefit of war appears;
“Only the dead have seen the end of war” - Plato
“If our country is worth dying for in time of war let us resolve that it is truly worth living for in time of peace.” - Hamilton Fish
“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” – Ghandi
“A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote.” – Bill Vaughan
“If you are ashamed to stand by your colours, you had better seek another flag.” – Anonymous
A game that, on the one hand, gives you permission to massacre innocents and puts you square in the situations where, as a highly trained special forces operative, you’re encouraged to kill non-stop will then stop to remind you how awful war is when you happen to die in-game?
It’s like the game is saying to you:
“Yeah, go on kill those motherfuckers, stab them, shoot them, blow them up. Isn’t this brilliant?! Look at all these big shiny weapons you can use to kill all these evil-doers. These people must be killed and you’re the guy who gets to do it. Quick, kill that guy over there, stab his face in, quick!!
Oh, you’re dead.
Of course if you enjoy this game then just think for a minute about how horrific war is and how many people have suffered and died. If only we as a race could learn that war isn’t the answer to anything and we should leanr to wage peace on other nations instead of war.
Still… would you like to have another go though?
Coz war is LOADS of fun and like really exciting and you get kill loads of people with guns… Go on, have another go.
Perhaps a bit of a mixed message there?
Games and movies are all about perspective though. It’s all about your point of view. We assume ourselves to be the ‘good’ guys. But do the guys we assume to be the ‘bad’ guys also thinkl of themselves as the ‘good’d guys, or at the very least the righteous or justified guys?
Part 5 of this ridiculously long and rambling thing will attempt to address this. It may be coming soon, it may not. Who knows. It’s taken me about 5 months to get 4 parts written. So tired.
