20 January 2009
The Inherent Weirdness of Call of Duty: World at War
When I moved to New York, part of my plan was to give up video games. I figured: I’m an adult and adults don’t play video games. I still think that adults don’t play video games. It turns out that I’m just not that much of an adult. Whoops.
I caved in to my materialistic demons and got an X-Box 360 a couple of months ago. I bought a bunch of different games with which to entertain myself, and by different games, I mean I bought a bunch of first person shooter games and a football game that I probably won’t play much.*
The game that is getting all of my attention lately is a little ditty entitled Call of Duty: World at War. For those of you who don’t know, Call of Duty (CoD) is a series of first person shooters (FPS) set mainly during World War II (except for the fourth one, which I believe is set in the good old modern times of Iraq?). World at War is the fifth iteration of the series, previous iterations of which featured levels based on the invasion of Normandy. That’s right, if you so desire you can pretend to storm the beach just like Tom Hanks pretended to do in Saving Private Ryan, except instead of just watching people get shot, you get to pretend to actually shoot people. Or blow them up with grenades. Or burn them to death with a flamethrower. Or stab them to death with a knife.
And that is what makes the entire CoD series really weird. What we have here is an entire series of video games dedicated solely to recreating the experience of fighting in World War II. It’s like wanting to play air guitar to your favorite song, except the guitar is a gun and your favorite song is a collection of really violent and soul-destroying acts. Now, I’m not saying that I’m against the United States participating in the actual World War II. What I am pointing out, though, is that it’s really fucking weird for me to pay sixty dollars to buy a video game that, unlike the complete fiction of a FPS like Halo, recreates an actual war, a war that many people can give you a first hand account of because they were there.
The campaign mode of CoD: WAW features two stories. At various times you play as Private Miller, a low level Marine in the Pacific Theater and Private Petrenko, a low level Russian on the Eastern Front. The game features many real life battles, including the Battle of Stalingrad, the Battle of Peleliu, the Battle of Okinawa, and the Battle of Berlin.
A few snapshots of what happens in this mode of the game. At the start of the game, you are Private Miller. Miller had been captured by the Japanese previous to the beginning of the game, and through his eyes you watch the Japanese torture and kill another prisoner. Keep in mind that although the game isn’t a film, it does look very realistic and I, for one, think it is pretty gross to watch a person get his throat slit, even if it isn’t real. You, as Miller, are about to suffer the same fate, but you are saved by Sergeant Roebuck and a squad of Americans. Sgt. Roebuck is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, so, in a way, it’s like having Jack Bauer save you. Which just makes it weirder.**
Later on, at the beginning of one of the Russian levels, you (as Petrenko) have been captured by Germans and you are in a house and have been disarmed and beaten. Germans are taunting you and are about to kill you.*** All of a sudden, the wall explodes and your compatriots save you. In the process, they shoot but don’t kill your German captors. One of the other Russians wants to kill the Germans, but the Russian leader says that they are already bleeding to death and so there is no need. He then rather casually says that Petrenko (you) can kill them as the entire squad leaves the house. You are then left alone in the house with the two Germans and you get to make a weird decision: do I shoot these two helpless Germans or just leave them to bleed to death? The game gives you the option to kill. As you move the aiming crosshairs of your gun over the German bodies, the crosshairs flash red, indicating enemy. Shooting people who are already bleeding to death, just what I always want to recreate in order to entertain myself.
One more snapshot of weirdness for you to chew on. Fast-forwarding to the end of the game, you find yourself as Petrenko. The final image of the game recreates the moment when the Russians fly the Russian flag over the Reichstag. As Petrenko, you fight your way through the Reichstag, killing more Germans than you can count. Once you get to the top of the building, you are wounded by a surviving German. You are approaching the flagpole when another German pops up. He is about to kill you, but your leader swoops in and you watch as he brutally kills the German, practically disemboweling him in the process. Your leader then helps you the rest of the way to flag pole, and he cuts down the German flag while you plant the Russian one. This is the climax of the entire game.
And it feels pretty good. Until you realize that you’re an American pretending to be a Russian. And then it gets weird again. Because not only have you spent hours pretending to take part in a real war, half of the time you weren’t even pretending to be an American while doing so.
I don’t know what real war is like. I’d venture to say that I never want to know. I don’t want to know what the real life versions of the game would feel like. What would it feel like to watch a fellow prisoner get murdered, knowing that if he could have held on for just ten more seconds that he would’ve been saved. I don’t want to know what it is like to shoot people who are already bleeding to death. I don’t want to strap a flamethrower on my back, shoot flames from it, and then listen to the dying screams of other men burning to death. And yet, I and whole bunch of other people apparently want to pay money to pretend to.
In the end, it all boils down to how we want to tell stories to each other. How do we, as a culture, remember WWII? It seems that we’ve decided that video games are an appropriate medium for such memories. The question, though, should be asked: is this a good way to pass on memories? Should we conflate our entertainment with our important cultural history?
Here’s another problem. At the end of the game, before the end credits roll, there is a tribute to those who died in the war, as if the game was made as a memorial to those that died in World War II. Is this how we make memorials now? Our memorials have to entertain us? Did our grandfathers storm the beach of Normandy, thinking that some day their great-grandchildren would take their life experience and turn it into disposable entertainment? Probably not.
Ultimately, the CoD series commoditizes our history and then sells it back to us as entertainment. This is troubling. We should probably be more wary of the commoditization of our own history**** than we currently are, because to sell our history as entertainment cheapens it to the point of triviality. If we aren’t careful, the line between history and entertainment will become so blurred that will it will become impossible to tell the difference. Not everything is meant to be entertaining.
*It’s nothing against the football game, I just don’t have the patience to learn about all the defenses and offenses and what goes against what and all that “real life” football stuff. I’m a child of the NFL Blitz style of football gaming. No penalties. 4th and 30 from your own 10? You better believe I’m going for that shit. If I want to play real football, I’ll just watch it on television.
**Can you imagine Jack Bauer in WWII? Yikes.
***Why they don’t just get on with it and kill you instantly baffles me. Your German captors seem to stupidly take their dealing-with-enemies strategies from every terrible Bond villain. In this sense, the story of the game falls victim to the same lapse in logic that most of these kinds of stories do: when your enemy has you captured in real life and determines that you aren’t worth anything, they will just kill you. But because killing you would screw the story up, they jabber on until the cavalry arrives.
****We should be especially wary of the commoditization of someone else’s history. Why are we pretending to be Russians?! Why are we co-opting important moments of their history for our own entertainment? Just because they were our allies during WWII does not mean that we get to tell their side of the story.
3 Comments currently posted. Trackback URL
Jason says:
Mikel says:
So then you’re recommending what? That they don’t make games that do this, or that we don’t play those type of games?
Ryan says:
Obviously I can’t recommend not playing the game, because I still play it now (although only in the online multiplayer, which isn’t really about story telling at all).
I can’t really recommend not making the game… it’s not my call, and at any rate the game itself would probably qualify as free speech. I think I’m more or less lamenting the fact that a lot of people’s exposure to this kind of important history is coming through a video game and not through classes. I had to look up most of the Battles that are referenced in the game, because I had barely heard of them.
Ultimately, though, the existence of the game itself seems problematic to me. War games as entertainment I certainly have no problem with, in real life (paintball, for example) or in video games. A game like Halo, though, makes more sense to me. It’s completely made up fiction, and the violence is handled differently (in Halo, if you kill another person, their body just falls limp… in fact, you never see a body b/c the bodies are surrounded by body armor). In CoD, death is graphically violent, which in and of itself is disturbing. The real problem, though, is that we can talk to people from our grandparent’s and great-grandparent’s generation and get first hand accounts of the war itself, because it happened to real people. Real people died in WWII, a whole hell of a lot of them. So, I don’t know, it seems weird to make interactive entertainment based on such events (movies, I’d posit, are different, since their function, if done well, is to tell a story).
hyalineskies
My favorite sentence/thought: “If I want to play real football, I’ll just watch it on television.”