Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Preliminary Game Analysis

The game I chose to play was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on the Xbox 360. At the most basic level possible, the premise of the game is that there are terrorists abroad that must be stopped before they do something terrible. While the story is purely fiction, it serves as a powerful commentary of the “modern” world. This analysis will focus on the political subtext of the game as a whole and on a specific mission that I found particularly interesting.

The very title of the game tells the player that this game is going to take place in the present. This is important in understanding what it illustrates about today’s world. One of the most blatant political positions that the game takes lies in the role that the player takes on. In this game, the “good guys” are the British and the United States and the “bad guys” are fictional Eastern-European/Russian terrorists. This clearly reminds one of the politics of the Cold War. I also find it interesting that the designers chose to make up an enemy, but chose to use real-world “heroes.” Furthermore, like many games, it is always assumed that the position of the main character is the correct one and the game never stops to question the motivations of the terrorists. We never get to explore both sides of the conflict. This political subtext is clearly indicative of the position that it is the role of the United States and its allies to police the world. The game makes it look like it is our responsibility to do this because nobody else will.

There is a mission in the game where the player is in the gunner position on a helicopter and his job is to protect friendly forces on the ground. The mission is played through the lens of an infrared camera that positively correlates the heat of an object with how white it is. The only way to tell who is on your side is by the presence of a flashing strobe on the friendly characters. I found this mission to be particularly telling of the ideological framework under which this game operates. For example, this mission is incredibly easy on all the difficulties. Nobody ever shoots at you and the only way to fail is essentially to shoot the wrong things. You are given the option of choosing between three completely different weapons. The first is an extremely powerful machine gun that makes people explode when you hit them. The second is a grenade launcher that fires pretty quickly and can take out hordes of people in one reload. The third is a huge missile that takes out large areas and reloads slowly. I go into details on the weapons because it becomes clear to me that the mission is only there for “fun.” In this mission, you essentially get to take out dozens of lives from an omnipotent, overhead position in any way you please. The fun is supposedly derived from the simultaneous lack of danger and desire to kill as many people as possible in a short amount of time. This becomes even more interesting when one discusses the few ways to fail the mission. For example, you’re free to destroy whatever buildings you like except for a large church. The church doesn’t have any implications to the game besides the fact that you’ll fail if you hit it. Although blowing up civilian buildings and homes is perfectly acceptable, the game suddenly has a problem with the destruction of a Christian house of worship. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if an enemy kills a friendly soldier because you can only fail if you kill one. You don’t fail if you kill civilian. The existence of these rules perpetuates the idea that casualties are acceptable as long as they aren’t allies. This mission is a perfect example of the real-world political subtext under which this game operates.