I'm stopping in to see an old friend during a lengthy road trip, and within mere minutes of meeting him at his home and exchanging stock pleasantries, he has fired up his Xbox 360 and is—with a missionary fervor betrayed by his widened, gleaming 'kill eyes'—trying to convert me to Modern Warfare 2 (MW2), the newest installment of Activision's massively successful Call of Duty line of first-person shooters / combat simulators. "There's nothing nice about this game!" he mordantly chuckles, tightening his grip so hard on his crescent controller that you'd think he was trying to squeeze juice out of it. Like many Generation X casualties that I know, my friend takes the view that only 'negative' and dystopian fictions are trustworthy indicators or predictors of the human condition, and that anything remotely upbeat is a form of cloying consumerist propaganda. So, I can tell my friend is giving a ringing endorsement rather than a condemnation—but, even if his statement had been delivered with a totally flat affect, I would still be able to gauge his enthusiasm by noting the deafening volume to which he has cranked up his TV, driving home the finer points of MW2's game play. After an ominous pre-mission briefing in which a faceless intelligence operative (voiced by Lance Henriksen) warns me "you have no idea what it took to get you this far…" and, more ominously still, that this mission will cause me to "lose a part of myself", MW2's brilliant phantasmagoria of non-nicety comes alive in a most unequivocal way. Before I can mentally prepare for it, my friend—in the guise of a covert CIA operative trying to win the trust of some Russian paramilitary thugs—is emptying several magazines of ammunition into a mass of screaming civilians queued up at the security check-in lines of a Russian airport. Some of his quarry stand frozen in fear, others run willy-nilly or attempt to find some kind of makeshift cover behind golf carts and the like, but pretty much all of them end up dead in the end. [SPOILER ALERT] The icing on the cake is that this singular act of butchery was all for naught: upon the mission's completion, the CIA plant is dispatched with a bullet to the head, and his body (with American I.D. on it) is left behind at the scene in an attempt to cause an international incident. This 'false flag' operation proves to be a success, and soon "all Russia is crying out for blood," to paraphrase the in-game narration. It's only the first in a series of labyrinthine plot twists that see MW2 eventually going into more implausible 'spy thriller' territory, and envisioning Russia as a resurgent military foe under the guidance of upstart warlord Vladimir Makarov (no relation to real-life Russian chief of staff Nikolai Makarov.) As you might expect, the breathtaking realism associated with this game doesn't really refer to any objective reality based on tactile impressions: it is merely true to the popular misconception of 'war' as being a mega-mix of smoothly conjoined combat sequences. Or, perhaps more accurately, the realism in question is really just a faithful porting of cinematic imagery to console game format. That is to say, MW2 is a high-quality facsimile of the previously existing mode of heavily edited, yet highly immersive fiction—a 'third-order simulation' in Baudrillard's reckoning. Yet, just as being 'nice' is not a virtue in the world of gamers with dystopian orientations, a one-way Futurist continuum of total speed and action is not a vice for rejecting a cyclical, 'real world,' biological reality of harm and healing, energizing and fatigue etc. All strains of gamers understandably enjoy the temporary reprieve from bodily reality, and—once their skill for pattern recognition kicks in—enjoy a kind of thought-free automatism as well, an odd 'combat Zen' so engrossing and sustainable that it recalls another Baudrillard lament: "…hallucinations are the only way we have left to feel alive."1
On the basis of satisfyingly providing that hallucinatory state, this game was hailed as a breakthrough in simulated battle: the official Xbox magazine heralds it as "as good a shooter as you'll ever play" and "leagues ahead of almost every other FPS on Xbox 360."2 UK gaming magazine IGN lauds the fact that, along with the astonishing graphic rendering of characters and hallucinatory set piece environments, "your weaponry never feels anything but super authentic."3 All this aside, the game offers few radically new variables in its simulated characters' behavior to bolster these claims. How many infantrymen do you know, for example, who have the ability to auto-lock targets with their rifle at the press of a button, or whose freshly spattered blood seems to have the color and consistency of apricot jam? Occasional amplified heartbeats and breathing, plus the brief moments of tinnitus you experience while under heavy fire, are one concession to the way the sensory apparatus (mal)functions under combat. The woozy choreography of the climactic close-combat scene is very effective. Yet these moments alone can't salvage MW2 from being just one of those combat simulators in which all shots that hit a human target decisively kill it, and in which the main exception to this rule—the player's own character—suffers little or no added difficulty in movement when he himself is wounded. I would have found the game much more believable if in-game variables like stamina, fear, and luck affected player performance—in this sense, MW2 is less sophisticated than the hoary pencil-and-paper RPGs of the 80s that, from one dice roll to the next, made these elements so crucial in determining the outcome of battles and other interactions. Now, as other anti-war writers have done before me, I could lambaste such games' ignorance of the pre—and post-combat phases of modern war: the famous description of deployment as long periods of "waiting and boredom punctuated by brief periods of terror." I could insist that, for greater authenticity value, the game include missions reflecting the other grim eventualities that have haunted the headlines of the past decade: regular desertions and refusals of orders, rebellion in the ranks against the Army's 'stop-loss' deployment policy, veteran suicides reaching record highs, etc. To be fair, though, games in the MW2 vein never claim to be anything but combat simulators, and so they have to be judged by their portrayal of this aspect of war where the human sensorium is at its most engaged. I'd be a fool to dismiss, say, the similarly acclaimed EA Sports title NHL 2010 for not focusing on the mundane realities surrounding hockey, nor would I criticize gamers for not wanting to waste time on supplemental 'missions' like helping a virtual Sidney Crosby sort through fan mail or buy a new car. Yet the combat experiences in games like this do not exist in a narrative-free vacuum, and have to be framed by a variety of filmic intros and cut scenes, which is where the questionable ideological element—another distortion of reality—begins to seep in. This is where I begin to suspect the use of MW2 as the latest and greatest military recruitment tool: after all, catching gamers in the aforementioned state of blank automatism gives any authoritative body a great chance to plant some 'guiding' messages. In a now-infamous conversation taking place between NY Times journalist Ron Suskind and an unidentified aide to the Bush administration, said aide acidly dismissed the view of the "reality-based community": 'we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality— judiciously, as you will— we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.'4 Of course, getting to decide what constitutes geo-political reality has also meant having a say in shaping virtual reality as well. The U.S. armed forces' influence on the entertainment industry is increasingly well documented, and over the last decade its partnerships with tech firms like USC's Institute for Creative Technologies have led to a not insignificant number of profitable films and games. ICT was originally founded, according to author Nick Turse, by a $45 million Army contract '…to build a partnership among the entertainment industry, army, and academia with the goal of creating synthetic experiences so compelling that participants react as if they are real.'5 The ICT website mentions the Army contract almost as an "oh, by the way" non sequitur, but we can still see that they are in the thick of military-guided entertainment and education technologies, providing the immersive graphic backdrops for all variety of military projects. The ICT is also instrumental in the eventual creation of a 'Future Force Warrior,' a cyborg combatant based partially on the designs of Star Wars production designer Ron Cobb. ICT's 'Flatworld' virtual environment was chosen by the Marines as the backdrop for battle simulations at Camp Pendleton. Another military simulator, ICT's UrbanSim game, also acts like a version of SimCity in which variables like 'governance' go up and down in accordance with how well you can control local insurgencies (as opposed to the natural disasters of the original SimCity.) Ironically enough, ICT's Light Stage (a high-speed illumination system for creating photo-real animation) was also used in the making of the eye-popping blockbuster film Avatar, with its blatantly anti-imperialist message and critique of resource wars disguised as 'nation-building' outreach programs. Just from poring over MW2's closing credit sequence, there seems to be no direct ICT involvement, but its sympathies lie in that area. The game mission "Wolverines!", taking place after a massive Russian air strike on the continental U.S., takes its inspiration from the partisan American fighters in the 80s war film Red Dawn: a film whose absurd premise of a Russian land invasion of the U.S. is rehabilitated in MW2. Red Dawn writer John Milius has worked closely with the ICT, and his lucrative brainchild is now morphing into a sequel in which China plays the occupying power. Other military personnel—a retired lieutenant colonel, and the Navy Seals—are acknowledged in the game's credits sequence (albeit in the general 'thanks' section, so it's difficult to gauge the actual level of their input.)
The degree to which real military collaboration brought about the final product is ultimately irrelevant, though. Whether voluntary or no, the civilian script-writers for the game have infused certain of its loadscreens with sentiments so in keeping with the U.S. military's current modus operandi, you'd confuse them with TV recruiting campaigns if they were shown out of context. As you head to the training / orientation mission set in Afghanistan (yes, real country names are used in this installment, rather than the silly pseudo-'Stans' of the ICT-aided Full Spectrum Warrior game from 2004 - pictured above) a faultlessly smooth military montage shows a convoy of armored vehicles purposely rolling towards their Viking destiny. Meanwhile, the Henriksen voiceover intones some platitudes about how 'we' are the greatest fighting force ever assembled, and how 'what we do over there, matters over here.' The first claim seems sadly true to the prevailing military logic, i.e. a nation spending more on its "defense" budget than the rest of the world combined is necessarily the strongest nation. Such 'metrics' as soldiers' mental stability, and their ability to constantly readjust to the ever-shifting and confusing objectives laid out for them (read up on "mission creep") are not considered as important as the sheer amount of ordnance available. As to the 2nd claim above, yes, there's no argument against this, but more pessimistic conclusions can be drawn from that statement than what the load screen's triumphant orchestral music may suggest: when 'what we do over there' is to terrify local populations with the mere presence of gear-encrusted cybersoldiers whose motives and language are difficult to decipher, desperate and violent reprisals 'over here' are never out of the picture. For the load screen of the mission 'S.S.D.D.,' players are again told in Henriksen's foreboding tone that "we fought and bled alongside the Russians…we should've known they'd hate us for it […] yesterday's enemies are today's recruits—train them to fight alongside you, and pray they don't eventually decide to hate you for it, too." Here, at least, there is some acknowledgement of the complications that can result from an 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' approach to foreign policy, but the onus is always placed on said 'friend' for not living up to their part of the bargain—never on the naiveté of the enablers who, despite being burned time and time again by these arrangements in the past, continue to arm and finance fringe organizations that, once empowered, use that power in unforeseen and unapproved ways. So, why does any of this matter? These days, the military-entertainment complex is showing a downright casual propensity for kicking at live hornets' nests, rather than just settling on the portrayal of vague fictional powers as 'metaphors' for actually existing threats. As regards Russia in particular, the timing for these nose-thumbing exercises in speculative fiction could not be worse. After all, Russia remains the only country with enough long-range thermonuclear weaponry to launch crippling attacks on American infrastructure, and therefore the closest thing to a 'symmetrical' threat still existing. Perceived encroachment on their territory by the pushing of NATO statehood for rivals Georgia and Ukraine (remember, it is the duty of all NATO nations, the U.S. included, to come to other members' aid if attacked) was not viewed favorably at all, initiating a defensive Russian posture not seen in some time. Ditto for the earlier attempt at placing 'missile defense' systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. It seems a foolhardy thing for one of the all-time highest selling, internationally distributed action games to paint a major military power in overblown and cartoonish terms. Really, what is the Russian-on-the-street to think about being referred to in this mega-hit game's dialogue as a "seen one, seen 'em all" 'Ivan'? Or what about MW2's rescue mission that takes place in a Russian 'gulag,' the likes of which were dissolved by order of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at the beginning of the 60s? And should they not be incensed at a game that portrays them as being gullible enough to blindly, immediately 'cry out for [American] blood' without first considering a 'false flag' operation as the cause of their grief? A greater concern than these breeches in cross-cultural etiquette, though, is the fact that the bloody immersive fiction of MW2 is so popular in this age of the "one percent doctrine" (the strategic assumption that if an enemy has a 1% ability to launch an attack on U.S. interests, it should be treated as an inevitability.) In such an over-vigilant and fatalist climate, where a 'hot' confrontation with Russia may already be seen as an unfolding reality, third-order simulations like this game could become self-fulfilling prophecies. Believe me, there will be nothing nice about that. (1) Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p.93. Verso, London / New York, 1993. |
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