Notes on Call of Duty: Ghosts

(With thanks to my girlfriend Helen Berents, who is all over South American politics and conflicts, for helping me think through some of these ideas, and giving me the words for them.)

(I don't play Call of Duty multiplayer and am only discussion the campaign here.)

1. People remain perplexed whenever I mention my interest in Call of Duty games. They don't understand what of value one could possibly get out of a franchise that pumps out a nearly identical game every year or so. To be sure, there are all kinds of valid reasons to dismiss the Call of Duty series out of hand: the hypermasculinity, the military-entertainment complex (as the credits rolled on Ghosts, Remington Arms Company Inc. were on the list of people Activision "would like to thank"), the fact that the only way to engage with the world and others in it is by shooting them. These are all, without a doubt, valid reasons to never touch a Call of Duty game.

But there are a whole lot of other reasons often cited that, to me, highlight these uncritically accepted values at the core of games culture: the idea that Call of Duty is bad because the player has no freedom and can only do what they're told (as though the only games that are valuable are those that offer unparalleled freedom), the idea that Call of Duty is not 'innovative' enough (as though games always have to do 'something new' to be worthy). This is going to sound super weird and I fully acknowledge the irony of this statement, but I feel the measuring stick people use to dismiss Call of Duty out of hand is the same measuring stick they regularly use to sideline games by marginalised creators as 'non-games' or some kind of 'low culture'. This is not to say that Call of Duty requires the game critic's energy to defend it as much as Dys4ia, but simply that there is totally some kind of high/low culture divide being implemented by those critics who turn their noses at such a popular franchise.

Even if I didn't enjoy the core feedback loop of Call of Duty (and I would be lying to myself and to you if I tried to pretend I didn't enjoy it), as a critic I don't want to ignore those games that a huge proportion of our culture engages with. I want to understand them. I want to understand how they work. I want to understand the cultural values that emerge from them. I want to understand what is happening here and why it is happening. Dismissing a game out of hand makes it much harder to be meaningfully critical of that game.

And, yeah, I enjoy the core feedback loop.

Anyway. That is why I played Call of Duty: Ghosts.

2. Ghosts narrative is fascinatingly nonsensical. It is nothing but the condensation of North American paranoia of South Americans crossing the border. 'The Federation' (which is just all of South America as one, homogenised nation) hates America and wants to destroy it. One of the first levels, you are literally patrolling a 10-story wall to make sure no South Americans have made it into the country. Of course, the most popular media of a culture is going to highlight just who the imagined, antagonist Other is in the contemporary cultural imagining. It was Russians and then Middle Easterns as America's power spread across the word. Now, as it recedes on itself, the most terrifying enemy is the one at the front door, sneaking in to take our jobs and destroy our way of life. That is Ghosts entire story: the South Americans want to destroy us.

3. Okay, that's not the entire story. There is also one American who wants to destroy us. One American who had his own Kurtz experience in "the heart of the Amazon" where "natives" have mastered the art of torture to break a man. The South Americans have the magic voodoo power to turn Us into Them. South America is the new Africa, where its own history of colonialisation is demolished as all South Americans are branded as 'natives'. These are the two narratives of Ghosts: South Americans want to destroy us, and this American dude with Marcus Fenix's manrag wants to destroy us so we should probably kill both of them.

4. Ghosts is the first Call of Duty I've played not contextualised in a fictional version of a real-world conflict (I never played Black Ops 2). the Modern Warfare games and Black Ops didn't need a whole heap of time spent contextualising the world or politics because you already knew them. In Ghosts, nothing makes sense. America is simultaneously a post-apocalyptic ruin and a burgeoning army. One mission simultaneously deploys "our last remaining carrier" and a space shuttle launch. 'The Federation' is a homogenous evil blob with no clear commander or dictator (the Evil American's connection to this army is never fleshed out). There is no discussion of life beyond either army. No one ever mentions what the rest of the world is doing while these two continents battle it out. This is a world reduced to a battlefield between two purified armies detached from any socio-political body or nation. There is only war. The world makes no sense, and you are never given a reason to care about it or its characters.

5. "It's Call of Duty, did you really expect a good story?" Yes, actually. The Modern Warfare trilogy and Black Ops did not tell good stories per se but they told stories well. For a series derided for churning out the same thing over and over, it experiments with storytelling in a whole heap of fascinating ways. Most significantly, through the constant swapping of perspective. Loading screens aside, you are never looking at the world of a Call of Duty game from a disembodied nowhere; you are always embodied in a particular subject's point of view. Call of Duty doesn't have cut scenes; it has a small level from another character's point of view. I think this is fascinating, the confidence to just take the player out of one character and insert them into another. You can trace this historically to the early games desire to show that World War II was won by "countless men, not a few heroes" I think it was the box said. The multiple POVs are meant to give the player a sense of this networked, intersubjective military. That is gross for a whole heap of reasons, but the purely formal mechanic of only using bodies to let the player see the world is a fascinating one I would like to see more of.

Tellingly, Ghosts rarely swaps your point of view (with the exception of the end of the game). For the vast majority of the game, you are one blank slate character following his brother (his literal bro) around the battle field. Where the Modern Warfares could show a large, complex, (absurd) network of war spreading across the world, Ghosts is restrained to a boring, head-to-head conflict of the Americas and is forced to ignore the rest of the world.

Also, for all that military shooters embody this jingoistic love of American militarism, it was always refreshing to spend so much of the Modern Warfares not as an American.

So, yes, I do expect to enjoy the story of a Call of Duty, but I didn't this time.

6. The story was claustrophobic. I felt restricted being trapped inside Logan's boring body for so much of the game, on the same goddamn continent the entire time. But even interpersonally, you spend the entire game alongside your brother and your father. The army-as-family is literalised. One mission gives you the objective "Get to dad". It's weird. It's really, really weird. I don't care about this blank slate white bro family. What the hell even is this?

7. The dog. The dog is the most boring, embarrassingly forced story component ever. Special effects always have a dual spectacle, as much in games as in film: there is the spectacle of the cool thing happening in the fictional world, and the spectacle of the technology that allows that cool thing to be produced as a real thing. Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix was cool because he was following bullets, and it was cool because a camera spun in a circle. Infinity Ward are so excited about this damn dog they spent a whole lot of money on. You spend the first few levels forced to look at this dog do its dog things. You are riding a tank and its head is popped out of the manhole in front of you to force you to pay attention to its 3D many-polygon model. If someone from Infinity Ward had telephoned me once per level to remind me how they animated this dog to put in this game, it couldn't have been much more pathetic.

8. There are a few levels in the middle of the game that stand out, that made me think, okay, this is why I bother playing Call of Duty games. These are the levels that aren't just this one, constant, boring gunfight, but a well and deliberately paced script of down-time followed by up-time followed by down-time. The levels that don't feel like filler.

The first one is in Caracas (of course the capital of Evil South America is the capital of Venezuela). The level progresses from abseiling down skyscrapers to parachuting while that skyscraper is falling on you. Every moment of the level feels considered and there for a reason, like Infinity Ward actually, deliberately built this level with a certain goal in mind—like they did with most of the Modern Warfare levels.

Another one is when you are attacking... I don't know... some lab in the snow. You steal uniforms and sneak into the lab quietly. You have a massive stand-your-ground gun fight. You escape on a lift and head out the same way you came in: blending in. You are forced to walk slow through the wreckage you caused as the injured you left behind are helped. It's this seamless escalation from just walking down corridors to explosive action and back to just walking down corridors and then, to end it, you drive a jeap across a frozen ocean, sinking other jeeps with a grenade launcher, and drive your jeep onto a submarine. It's a wonderfully paced stage that hits a high level that the game never again achieves.

9. You've probably seen the video of how the intro of Ghosts uses an identical animation sequence to the end of Modern Warfare 2. It's the most explicit example of it, but the same animations and moments are used throughout Ghosts. It's either intended as laziness, apathy, or deliberate intertextuality—it functions as all three. The entire game feels like a collage of moments from the previous games. Not just the same mechanics or the same features but literally the same moments. The moment your bro looked into the distance then helped you up. The moment your bro was fighting the bad dude while you were crawling towards a gun. The moment an explosion knocked you off your feet in slow motion.

Where these because interesting is where Ghosts is clearly, deliberately using these to subvert expectations. At one point, a tank bursts out of a carpark wall to save you, exactly as it does in Modern Warfare 3. Except, instead of saving you, it gets blown up as well and you have to run for your life. At another moment you are about to breach a door like you have done a million times when your bro tackles you to the ground a moment before a hail of bullets splinters the door. There are these little snippets where the copy-pasted moments feel cleverly used.

But even if it is just laziness, I still find that fascinating. Like peeling back layers of wallpaper from an old house. I kind of like that you can see the history of this series and these studios in the game.

10. Towards the end of the game is this absurd tank level. You are driving a tank at super high speed in a battalion of tanks in a bizarre sandbox-y level. It felt like I was playing Tokyo Wars. It was weird.

11. A reason most people can't tolerate Call of Duty is a reason I can't tolerate most AAA games: because it takes itself too seriously. When you spend millions of dollars on a game and you need to make millions in return, you have to be bombastic and absurd and ridiculous. When that bombastic, absurd ridiculousness gets painted up as GRIM and SERIOUS, there is this weird jarring that doesn't always work. I am increasingly convinced that AAA games can not, and perhaps even should not, be 'serious'. At least, they can't be serious for as long as their primary goal is to just be 'fun', and they're primary goal isn't going to stop being 'fun' for as long as they need to make millions of dollars.

But I think this is exactly the reason I am able to enjoy a Call of Duty, despite everything: because they are so absurd that I don't think anyone, not even Activision, really takes them serious. Medal of Honor takes itself serious, with all its bullshit 'Lest we forget' quotes around its 'real' battles told by 'real' soldiers in a self-gratifying fellatio. Call of Duty, though, with its commercials that quite explicitly note that it only sees itself as a 'fun game', and its partnership with Eminem has me convinced that it doesn't take itself seriously. Or, perhaps more justifiably, makes it impossible for me to take serious. I don't take Call of Duty serious. I take it as I would take a Michael Bay film. I think that is how I can tolerate all the shit of each Call of Duty to explore the things I find fascinating: by only ever taking it at face value, as nothing more than a ridiculous, military-themed story for a little while.

Of course, that is not a reason to excuse or justify the many issues I've stated with the game.

12. The loading screen animations are really great.

13. Although the world has finally reached a level of technological advancement that Infinity Ward is able to animate a 3D model of a woman, there are still next to no women in the campaign, with the exception of one significant companion for a single mission towards the start of the game. Unsurprising, but still disappointing. Notably, the game's marketing was no better.

14. People like to say that Call of Duty studios just tack on the campaign as an afterthought to the multiplayer that is their main consideration. Ghosts is the first time that I am anywhere near convinced of that argument. Infinity Ward doesn't care about this story or these characters.

Wargames

While I don't think it aired here in Australia, I came across the following commercial for Call of Duty: Black Ops via several discussions of it online this week.



Over at Border House, they applaud the commercial for the diversity of the people portrayed: 

The commercial portrays a war in which a variety of people are the soldiers. The commercial includes people of color, men, women, people of various body types, and even a number of professions. All of these people are portrayed as equal soldiers in this war. This commercial implies that this first person shooter game welcomes adult players from a variety of backgrounds and is not simply a toy for men aged 18-25.

Meanwhile, writing over at The Atlantic, Sam Machkovech has a different take on the commercial:

I couldn't have asked for a more disappointing game-related ad. These aren't the video games I play. Even at their highest levels of action and violence, video games play like sophisticated games of Cops & Robbers. They're silly; they require colorful, funny-shaped controllers; they stay decidedly in the domain of detached fiction.

This ad equips people with real guns and simulates real-life, no-CGI combat. The thud of recoil, the screams of rockets, the dust of explosions... and the look of exasperation on that little, shotgun-wielding girl. The only things missing are the dead bodies on the receiving ends of each bullet and blast.

It really is a slick commercial, there is no arguing that, and I certainly agree with Border House that the diversity of the the people portrayed in the commercial is (probably) a good thing. However, I also can't help but agree with Machkovech that the commercial is ultimately problematic. To try to express why I feel it is problematic, i am going to compare it to an Xbox commercial that Microsoft opted not to air. Machkovech noted the same commercial in his article and my conclusions will be similar to his, but not identical.

 


Personally, I think this second commercial is absolutely fabulous. It shows the true beauty of games: playfulness and imagination. Violence is not something kids learn just from videogames; many games (videogames, boardgames, schoolyard games nursery games) are situated in re-enactments of violence, either real or pretend. This Xbox commercial simply shows a large group of strangers playing together. It is cute. It makes me smile. I would love this to happen in reality.

The Black Ops commercial is trying to tap into a similar theme, I feel. However, while the Xbox commercial brings war into the context of games, play, and fun, the Black Ops commercial takes games and players and fun and puts them into the context of war. The difference is nuanced, but it makes a huge difference.

Using war as the basis for entertainment is already a gray area ethically. It risks belittling real acts of violence, real lives, and real sacrifices (to use a potentially loaded word) into fictional, consumable action plots. Generally, though, if the line between the two is kept clear, then there is no problem. You can have a game, movie, or book based on war that is entertaining that also acknowledges that the real war was not entertaining at all. It is a thin line, but it is one that various media have managed to more-or-less maintain through the decades.

And that is where the Black Ops commercial falls down. By placing the game players not in a virtual game but in a real war, the distinction between the entertainment product and the real war is blurred--potentially to the benefit of the former, but certainly to the disrespect of the latter. When I play I war game, I  want to have fun, and I want to feel the gravitas of war. I do not want to feel that the two are the same thing, that real war is fun. That is when it stops being a game and starts being propaganda.

This line blurring is disconcerting from another aspect, also. I have written before (as have many others better than me, I don't doubt) about the blurring between 'real' war and 'virtual' war, as each looks more and more like the other. War videogames are becoming increasingly realistic while real wars are looking more like videogames with each leaked video appearing on YouTube. 

As Machkovech points out, the tag line of the commercial is "There's a soldier in all of us". Not a hero, a soldier. Not "everyone is capable of great sacrifice and fighting for a noble cause", but "everyone is capable of being conditioned to follow orders and to kill without question". These commercial puts these two ideas together (war is becoming more like a videogame; anyone can be conditioned to be a soldier) alongside a young girl (or boy) clearing a real room with a real shotgun in a commercial for a virtual videogame. When I watched that girl clear the room, I was not sure if I should be happy to see someone other than an '18-25-year-old male' enjoying videogames' or concerned that I was seeing a child be conditioned into a soldier. 

Which, as something of a side note, makes me skeptical of the true nature of the commercial's diversity. "There's a soldier in all of us". With the right technology and the right content, anyone can be conditioned to fight in a war, and not just any war, but a war as morally hazardous as Vietnam. Okay, perhaps that is a bit fatalistic, and I should just accept the one time the broader gaming industry does diversity right. But considering Activision's track record, I can't help but be skeptical.

So what are your opinions on the commercial? Are Machkovech and I the only people who have a problem with it?


Full disclosure: 1) I have been listening to The Rolling Stones all day thanks to the excellent use of music in the Black Ops commercial. 2) I have not yet played Black Ops and do not mean to comment on the game's content itself but rather the themes of the commercial and the content of war games generally.

Death From Above: Playing War Like a Videogame

Earlier this year, I watched the video released by Wikileaks that showed a US Apache helicopter gunning down civilians and Reuters’ journalists in Baghdad. Like a lot of people, I found the footage deeply disturbing. I have seen photos of battlefields before; I have seen the videos of 9-11 from a hundred different angles; but I had never before watched someone line up an individual in a cross hair and open fire. Part of me wants to hate the troops involved—the way they hope the wounded man picks up a weapon so they can finish him off; the way they chuckle when the tank runs over a body—but I know that this is unfair. Though I have never experienced a conflict situation personally, I imagine that constructing a barrier between “Us” and “Them” is the only way one could handle having to kill fellow humans on a regular basis. At least, I like to think so. The most gut-wrenching aspect of this video, then, is not the behaviour of these individual troops, but an environment that fosters such an irreverent, detached othering of enemy combatants.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said, when releasing the video, that “the behaviour of the pilots is like they’re playing a video game. It’s like they want high scores in that computer game.”

This caused a minor buzz in comment threads on various gaming sites complaining that people were yet again blaming videogames for all the world’s woes. For the most part, though, people conceded that this is exactly how videogames (and videogame players) tend to treat violence: disassociated, irreverent, and acted out on some not-quite-human other. Assange’s comments were not an attack on videogames, but rather a simple simile that points out that the same detached treatment of violence in videogames is applied in modern warfare to the same result—the doer’s increased distance from the violent act lessens the consequences and makes the actions easier to perform. While videogames are depicting increasingly realistic battlefields, real battlefields are becoming increasingly like videogames.

Less than a week after watching the leaked video, I picked up a copy of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I have already written briefly about how I think Call of Duty 4 works as a linear, story-driven game (even if the story it tells is not particularly fascinating), but I have not spent much time discussing its themes. The Call of Duty series has always tried to stress that wars are not won by any one individual hero, but by thousands of individual men and women (okay, it’s not so good at showing the women) who do not fight for “good” or “evil” but merely different sides (that said, the player is always limited to fighting for whatever side the Americans and British are on). The games do this by constantly changing your point-of-view to a variety of characters fighting from different perspectives and contributing to a collaborative result. As an extension of this, the series tries to depict war as the true horror that it is, by stressing that the people dying around you are people and the people that you are killing are people.

Here, the Call of Duty games (and, by extension, all war-based videogames and movies) has two major challenges. One is that they are also a form of entertainment and must, paradoxically, entertain the audience while simultaneously attempting to show them how horrible war can be. The greater challenge, though, is the fourth wall. The player will always be beyond the borders of the game-world and will always be fundamentally detached from the conflict. Call of Duty 4  constantly struggles against the fourth wall to pull the player as deeply and intimately into the conflict as possible: first-person perspective, explosions all around, roaring sounds and shaky screens all exist to immerse the play as deeply as possible in the virtual war, to render the fourth wall invisible among the nightmarish chaos of the battlefield.

But it never really works as, inevitably, the player behaves like they are playing a videogame. The horror of war is that you are killing people; however, just as the US troops on the Apache seem detached from the men they gun down—rendered as identical, grey silhouettes on the other side of a computer monitor—the enemies running at the player in Call of Duty 4 are not individual men with their own histories and stories but cloned NPCs spawning just off-screen indefinitely until the player passes a certain point. While Call of Duty 4 did a decent job of immersing me in the stories of its characters, it failed to immerse me in their war.

That was, until, the “Death From Above” mission.

“Death From Above” places the player as a gunner of an AC-130U gunship. As the level begins and I look through the black and white monitor at the ground below, as the gunship’s crew chat about who and what to shoot with about as much gravitas as one would recite a grocery list, I can’t help but remember the Wikileaks video. I begin to feel sick in the stomach before I even fire the first shell.

“Death From Above” is the most detached of Call of Duty 4’s missions, by which I mean it is the level that positions the player the furthest from the violence they inflict. The mission does this in three key ways: Firstly, the player’s character is invincible and never in danger for the duration of the mission. Secondly, while in no other mission do your squad mates boast about their actions or mock their enemies, in the gunship they keep a running commentary on their kills as though racking up points, as though reassuring the player's character that the enemies are nothing more than identical targets on a screen. “Smoke ‘em!”; “Niiiiice!”; “Good kill, good kill.”; “Yeah! Direct hit right there!”. Thirdly, the utter destruction the gunship is capable of (witnessed by Soap at the end of the previous level) is diluted on the gunner’s monitor to a dull, monochrome thud. In other words, "Death From Above" plays like a videogame. The troops in the Wikileaks video unconsciously treat war like a videogame, as does the player of every mission of Call of Duty 4. “Death From Above”, however, does not unconsciously treat war like a videogame but rather demonstrates explicitly and intentionally how war has become a videogame.

Videogames can be incredibly immersive; it is one of their greatest features. While many games are nonchalant about the violence they ask of the player, some try to harness this immersive potential alongside acts of violence to challenge the player’s tolerance of such acts. Manhunt, for instance, challenges the player to be implicit in endorsing the character’s crimes, forcing the player to admit just how repulsive the violence they enjoy in other games truly is. However, the player will always be (to some arbitrary extent) detached from the game-world and disassociated from its characters. They have to be—it’s a game.

“Death From Above” has the same thematic goals of depicting war as the rest of Call of Duty 4, but uses entirely different means. Instead of hiding them, “Death From Above” makes explicit the filters of representation that inevitably dilute the impact of the player’s violent acts. It says, “This is not one hundred per cent accurate. You are in no danger here, but you are doing horrible, horrible things.”

In this mission, my imagination cannot help but to fill in the blanks. The enemies are no longer identical because the game only has a set number of enemy models, but because of my infra-red monitor. 

“We’ve got a runner!” shouts my spotter, and I quickly lock onto the man, running for his life, and gun him down. “Yeah, good kill!” my spotter commends. 

All I can think of is the Wikileaks video—the troops chuckling as the tank runs over a body. For the first and last time in this game, I feel like I am killing people and that is not okay. I am distressed at how much this is like ‘real’ warfare, and disturbed at how much ‘real’ warfare is like this videogame.

Disempowered Play

I imagine that a soldier under fire doesn’t have the liberty of either agreeing or disagreeing with the reasons the war is being fought. Whether they are invading or defending would cease to matter beyond tactical importance. Who the enemy is, what they stand for, would cease to matter beyond the fact they want the soldier dead. The soldier joined the army/navy/air-force, and now they are here—killing in order to not die.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s story is nothing special, but once I started, I found myself committing to it as enthusiastically as the better game-stories out there. In a sense, I didn’t have a choice. I chose to play the game originally, but now I am in a warzone, and who I am fighting (and why) no longer matters. I am just a soldier; I do not make decisions; I do not question the merits of the conflict; I simply kill in order to not die.

My characters (I control about five throughout the game) rarely possess much agency over their situations. Someone else is always in charge, making the shots so I don’t have to: my squad’s sergeant barks orders; my gunship’s pilot points out targets; my kidnapper keeps an eye on me. Does this lack of agency, this disempowered play, detract from the overall experience? I think not. Personally, I felt that by removing my agency, Modern Warfare ensures my experience is meaningful. The game holds my hand through carefully staged battlefields to ensure key plot moments are experienced in a certain way. However, like any decent game, I am always in complete control of my character. It is not me, but my character who is never really in control of their situation. In this way, Modern Warfare justifies its removal of my agency: I am just a soldier; following orders is what I do.

My disempowerment begins—symbolically and literally—as the game’s opening credits role. I am pulled from my presidential palace and thrown into the back of a car—two gun-wielding goons keep an eye on me as what was my country descends into war beyond the windows. I know, somehow, that I am being driven to my own execution. This level is as powerful because of the agency I do not have, as for the agency I have left. My death is inevitable; I cannot escape, but I can still look around. As this is all I have, I savour it. I glance left and right, desperate to take in the final moments of my country’s existence.

Importantly, though, this scene is completely scripted. I still have complete control over the character—the character just has no control over his circumstances. This minimal agency, this emphasis on the fact that I cannot meaningfully effect the world I exist in, this undeniable proof that I cannot meaningfully interact the world around me, is a powerful way to tell a story, and not one I imagined to ever work in a videogame.

When the bullet finally comes, there is no fanfare, no shock, no time to accept that this is really happening. I am dead. This story can and will go on without me. This is the precedent for the rest of my time with this game: I am not in charge anymore; I will go where I am told to go and do what I am told to do. My agency as a player just got executed.

Once I learnt to cede the power one normally expects as a player, I became quite good at staying alive, at following orders, at doing exactly what I was told. Or perhaps, when it came down to it and the barrel of that pistol pressed against my head, I did not so much cede power as simply accept how little power I have ever truly had in any linear shooter.

And then I am in Chernobyl, levels later: I am the second man of a two-man sniper team, sneaking into the abandoned city of Pripyat to assassinate some terrorist leader. By this stage of the game, I am well used to following order. If the game had been holding my hand before this mission, now I am clutching it for dear life—if my grip slips for a moment, I am dead. My CO, Captain Macmillan, dictates my every step through this level. “Stop. Duck. Move. Shoot. Don’t Shoot. Follow me.” This man is a professional and it does not take long for me to build up a kind of reverent awe towards him. His every move is flawless; his every shot is perfect. His constant orders do not detract from my experience; rather, I am happy to follow this man, to perhaps prove to him I am worthy to be on his team. Certainly, I would be dead a dozen times over if I had to find my own way through the enemy patrols and radiation hotspots. I have grown comfortable with following orders and not making them, to cede power and responsibility.

Most memorable moment of this level (even if utterly unrealistic) is dashing between and under cars of a large patrol. I don’t know how Macmillan got me through it. My heart pounded the whole time. The game was holding my hand, yes, but that hand was all that protected me from a very, very sudden death.

But then I got too comfortable in my powerless, responsibility-less position as Number Two. Macmillan is crippled and now it is up to me to carry him (literally) through the level. The sudden empowering is not as intoxicating as I would expect—it is utterly paralysing. I am just a lowly lieutenant—this guy just sniped a helicopter out of the air. Who am I to lead him? I do not think I have ever been so concerned with what a fictional character thinks of me.

Thankfully, the empowerment doesn’t last. Set consistently in warzones, Modern Warfare makes good use of the technique of crippling my character to further disempower me and further control what I experience. The infamous nuke scene (which I had known was coming) was breathtaking and all the more hard-hitting because I was all alone and there was nothing I could do except limp stupidly towards the mushroom cloud.

However, it is the game’s final minutes that I found the most exhilarating, when I finally had a chance to reclaim just a pinch of my own power that was taken from me in the opening level (as opposed to near-drowning in all of Macmillan’s power that was suddenly thrust upon me in Pipyat). I finally stopped holding on to someone else, and took matters into my own hands.

I lay crippled on a Russian bridge after an attack helicopter obliterated my squad. Everyone is dead and, judging by the way I can’t move, I am fairly certain I am about to join them. I’m not sure where I am hit, but it doesn’t really matter. My vision is beginning to blur, everything sounds like my head is underwater. No one is left to tell me what to do.

Zakhaev, the terrorist that removed me from power and assassinated me at the start of the game, is standing right before me, shouting orders as his troops command the bridge. He doesn’t realise I am alive, but it hardly matters—I am alone; I have no weapon. I look to my left (or perhaps I just collapse) where another soldier is writhing in pain, out of sight behind a burning car.

“C’mon! Pass me a gun!” I actually shout at the television.

The game is using slow motion for dramatic effect, but it is unnecessary—everything slows for me as the pistol slides across the asphalt. As my character’s arm stretches and picks it up, my fingers begin to tremble on the controller. I am not taking orders; I am making this decision myself. But neither am I free to make any other choice. After all, I am a soldier—I kill in order to stay alive.

I am still unsure if Zakhaev took away my power, or merely exposed how little power I had to begin with. Either way, this final action won’t empower me, but it is the closest I will get in the entire game, and I am desperate for it. The scene is scripted, but it isn’t a cutscene—if Zakhaev is to go down, it is I who must take the shot.

I grab the pistol and turn. In a split-second of clarity I expect is my last, I fire a shot into Zakhaev’s head, dropping him. His two bodyguards are confused and I franticly empty the clip into both of them before I collapse back again.
I am aware that my agency in this scene was minimal and identical to every other player’s experience. But because my agency, my power as a player, had been stripped from me so convincingly at the start of the game, Modern Warfare enticed me through to an exhilarating endgame with breadcrumbs of empowerment scattered through the levels. For ten seconds, I didn’t care that the scene was scripted—the fate of the war was in my hands. I didn’t take the shot because I had no choice. I took the shot because I wanted my palace back.