Reading Call of Duty 4

Getting waylaid once again, this time I'm just going to work on short, brief posts.

There has been some question on whether games can be taken serious or should be taken seriously. The backlash against N'Gai Croal after his comments on the MTV Multiplayer Blog here sparked an outcry across the big gaming forums, claiming that Croal had been taking the Resident Evil 5 trailer too seriously.
That topic has been discussed to death and really, after the GFW Radio podcast from 04/18/2008, the PC editorial staff at 1up.com has covered most of the bases.

What I want to do here is show that games can be "read" in the same way that pretentious, out of touch academics "read" works of literature and film. Disclaimer: I am an PhD student in English Literature, so I'm one of "those" people.

So, why Call of Duty 4? It's one of the biggest games of 2007, tops the NPD monthly sales charts and tops the Xbox Live play charts. Launching the map packs a couple of weeks ago brought Live marketplace to a crawl, crippling it for at least a day. It's one of the few games that nearly everyone knows about and when people think games that can be read, people immediate point to Bioshock, not something mainstream like CoD4.

*spoiler alert*

Let's begin by looking at how the game starts. You take the role of Yasir Al-Fulani, president of an unnamed country that is obviously Saudi Arabia if you know how to use an atlas or Google Earth. You have extremely limited control at this point - in fact, you are basically a moving camera, forced to watch as your capital city is taken over by Khaled Al-Asad. Over the PA system, you are called an American collaborator who has grown wealthy working as an American puppet as the people of the country grow poor. See any parallels to the real world here?
Let's look at the fact that you are quite literally a puppet in this moment, being controlled by the game designers who decided that the game should begin this way. Here, you are complicit with Al-Fulani, a mere puppet for some greater power, forcibly complying with this greater power's wishes in order to get more. In Al-Fulani's case, maybe it was military support or money. In the player's case, it's a desire to progress the plot of the game.

Let's not go overboard here. Someone could keep going with this one scene and I think they should, but in the interest of brevity, let's move on.

Much has been said of the AC-130 gunship scene and I really don't need to cover it again here. If you don't see anything deeper in this scene than just blowing away Russians with a howitzer, maybe you need to watch the news or find some AC-130 footage on YouTube.

No, the big scene I really want to talk about is the end of Act 1. In fact, I would argue that this was the biggest moment in gaming and for gaming in 2007. To set the scene, you are in the capital city of this unnamed Middle Eastern country as part of an American invasion force. Through the course of this mission, a Cobra pilot is taken down by a RPG and your Lieutenant orders you to pull her out and save her life. After you do just that, a nuclear bomb detonates and you are knocked out. When you wake up, you see you are right in the middle of the aftermath of a nuclear attack - the huge mushroom cloud is right there in the distance. You can hear over loudspeakers or your radio that American forces are trying to save survivors... but your controller starts to rumble and you can hear a beating coming from your speakers. Seconds later, the screen turns to white and you are listed as KIA.

That's right. This is the first Call of Duty game, if not one of the first FPSes, where you really die. Maybe you can chalk Al-Fulani up as a throwaway character... but this is a US soldier, your true cipher into the game world. This game changing event even impressed Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame, and that's saying something if you're familiar with his reviews.

But what does this mean? It basically renders the entire first Act a "waste". Al-Asad used the coup as a distraction against the true threat in Russia and it worked, since thousands of American soldiers are dead and he's closer to getting to that Russian nuclear facility that appears in Act 2 and 3. Your personal victory of pulling out the injured Cobra pilot and dragging her back to your helicopter is rendered meaningless by her death, the death of your squad, the death of the thousands of other soldiers in the city and your death. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest CoD4 player in the world and you pulled that pilot out on Veteran difficulty while time to spare. That effort was pointless, because in the end, you still died.

If this moment isn't as thoughtful as a similar moment in Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, I don't know what is.

The game ends in the same way, with everyone in your SAS team getting wiped out. It's implied that you don't die, but you can't know that for sure. You save the United States from a nuclear attack, but at the cost of the lives of your friends. The ultimate price for answering the "call of duty".

Is CoD4 a fun game? Yeah, of course it is. Infinity Ward never disappoints... (well, except for spawn closets) But just because it's fun doesn't mean that it can have a deeper message or that it can be "read". I hope I've shown that here today.