Game Play: Modern Warfare 2 Single Player

I've blogged and tweeted on this quite a bit, so this will be the last word on it. I've been holding out until I could actually play the entire single player campaign and judge it as whole. After all, when the "No Russian" level was first leaked, Activision and Infinity Ward cried foul on the blogosphere because the scene wasn't being placed in context.

So now I have the context.

Let's get a few things out of the way. The single player campaign is fun in a virtual shooting gallery kind of way and has some of the best graphics put to pixels to date. Mechanics are pretty solid, though honestly the game's concept of cover is starting to feel quite dated.

Whether the single player is worth the price of admission is another story. The bottom line is that the game is a multiplayer game and if you aren't buying it for the online experience, don't buy it. Not only is the single player game incredibly short (less than a weekend easily), but it is deeply flawed. Without the multiplayer - which I can't even debate - this would be a rental at best.

The main problem is that Modern Warfare 2 is a product of Valve style storytelling - but it fails completely in actually telling a story (key problems I had with Half Life 2 I might add). It's like watching a bad Hollywood popcorn flick - you better be paying the ticket only to see the pretty explosions, because as a movie there's nothing really to see here.

Spoilers. Many of them. Beginning in ...

The rationale of every scene in the single player game is not to create a cohesive story, but to shove some kind of action sequence in front of the player. You've seen many of these by now - the vehicle chase scene, vehicle escape scene, run the gauntlet, protect the position, etc., etc., etc.

The controversial "No Russian" scene is actually quite a lynch pin moment in just how horrible the so-called storytelling of the game plays out. Army Ranger Allen is plucked from his normal duty and sent undercover to infiltrate Russian terrorist Makarov. Most readers know by now, but almost the entire mission is just watching (or participating) in a massive slaughter of civilian casualties. In the end, Makarov knew the player was a plant and shoots them for dead.

The "context" of this scene exists pretty much solely in the voice over introduction where it's explained that "you don't want to know what it took" to get the player close to Makarov. That's it. Before that, the character was in Afghanistan - and then bam ... you're shooting civilians in an airport.

What follows next is even more ridiculous. Russia invades the United States. How do people know that the shooter was an American? Nobody knows. How is it that Makarov himself isn't fingered even if the American in question was investigating him? Uh, we don't really know. What was the diplomacy following this attack? How is it the entire United States gets implicated for the actions of one guy? Never shown. How does Russia launch a massive surprise attack and becomes the first country to successfully invade U.S. soil since the Revolutionary War?

Oh, that they explain. They stole a chip.

Yeah.

A chip.

The thing is - No Russian is so emotionally draining that all of this nonsense weighs on the rest of the game. If Infinity Ward is going to have a plot where you watch a lot of innocent people get brutally murdered and then shoot you in the head ... is it really too much to ask to make it make sense? There's a lot of crap out there about how "emotionally powerful" or "deeply impactful" the scene is ... ignoring that if I snuck up behind you and beat you with a cricket bat that it would also be "emotionally powerful" and "deeply impactful" but I'm not exactly laying down a good narrative here.

Infinity Ward has a bizarre taste for the morbid, actually. I don't mean in that "Saving Private Ryan" way of showing that yes, Virginia, in a war people really do get their heads blown off. They kill off the player character not once, but twice - the second time is even more gruesome than the first. The game ends with what is a way way overwrought near death scene between three characters. The directing is very into the concept that death is edgy that much of it plays out like a film school dropout's last bad edit.

Bottom line: if you remove your frontal lobe, you might consider what happens in Modern Warfare 2 a story.

I could probably get away with this without a lobotomy if it weren't for the No Russian mission. It's not that the mission is simply offensive, which it is, rather it is that the mission is the reason for all the action that follows. So a big WTF echoes through the entire single player campaign. You can decide to not play the mission, but as I've mentioned before - this is a massive cop out on Infinity Ward's behalf. You can't have it both ways, where a scene sets up the reason for the plot and also have it be optional. Basically in an attempt to be controversial, Infinity Ward ruins what was already a pretty bad plot and in the process hangs such a large sign on how bad the plot is that it makes it pretty hard to ignore.

If you can manage to do this bit of cognitive dissonance, than yes - as I started with ... the single player is fun in a shooting gallery kind of way. It's sad that a game with a profile like this one couldn't even manage the poor storytelling which is industry standard, but rather steps all over itself just for the sake of being sensational.

Why I've made such a big deal out of this is because by largely giving Infinity Ward a pass on the single player, the gaming media has rubber stamped the myth that games can't be effective storytellers. Modern Warfare 2 embraces this notions, extends it and makes its own. Basically becoming the Microsoft of bad narratives - they've just lowered the bar for the entire genre.

Modern Warfare 2's "PSA" Funded By "FAGS" (Update)

I couldn't make this up if I tried, people.

As if I didn't just get done decrying Infinity Ward's poor content choices, now we have this fake PSA ad (pulled now).

The PSA portrays the Phillies' Cole Hamel warning against random grenade tossing. It's "sponsored" by the Fight Against Grenade Spam.

Get it? It's sponsored by FAGS. I'm not quite sure what the rationale from Infinity Ward's PR people to toss a homophobic slur so blatantly into what could have been a light hearted ad, but then I again I don't know the reasoning behind having American soldiers willingly partake in mass civilian slaughter is either.

Maybe I'm just not Modern Warfare's core demographic? True, the gay-bashers and the rage-players are two huge groups which make me dread playing with the random public - and since that seems to be what Infinity Ward is marketing towards, I guess I'll stick with other shooters.

Update - Ad has been pulled thanks it seems to some responses ... here and here.

I think the root of all this problem is this response from Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling:

@pkollar I think it was more of a social commentary joke of that stereotype than it was a fist-bump of acceptance to it.

[fourzerotwo twitter]

Word of advice to Infinity Ward: stop trying to make social commentaries. You seem to kinda suck at it. Whether it's commenting about gay-bashing players or sociopathic acts - it's striking derision ... not dialogue.

Modern Warfare 2's Airport Scene - A New Low?

When I first started to hear about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's airport scene, I thought - nice PR ploy. Look, we have this scene so violent that we'll make it optional. Cue forum chatter and lots of free advertising.

Yeah. Then I watched it (pulled now). And, um.

What the fsck was that?

I'm not even going to debate whether material like this should be allowed in a game. I don't condone censorship, if Activision and Infinity Ward want to make it ... let them make it. Trying to determine the finer lines of what should be legally distributed and not legally distributed when it comes to virtual violence is a futile, pointless debate.

That's not the same as me agreeing that Activision and Infinity Ward are in the right and there's nothing to discuss. This material is wrong. It's exploitation, it's grotesque sensationalism and has no place as a part of packaged entertainment. Let's get real specific here: this is not Modern Warfare this Modern Selling Games By Being Extreme.

According to Activision and Infinity Ward, I should be OK with this material partially because they make it optional. This is a total cop out. It places the obligation on the player to determine the morality of scene they haven't actually played out. This is them basically saying "We know this is over the top, but that's OK because we made it your choice."

If it's over the top, it shouldn't be part of the game. The player is not the producer here, Activision and Infinity Ward should take responsibility. If they feel so strongly that this material is acceptable - just keep it in the game, no if's and's or but's.

Worse, though, is narrative angle. This is Activision:

Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 features a deep and gripping storyline in which players face off against a terrorist threat dedicated to bringing the world to the brink of collapse. The game includes a plot involving a mission carried out by a Russian villain who wants to trigger a global war. In order to defeat him, the player infiltrates his inner circle. The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.

And this is Infinity Ward:

The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them...

Infinity Ward: Modern Warfare 2 Airport Scene is Real, Optional[GamerRiot]

Well, it certainly evokes terrorism. And, it certainly establishes evil. What both companies so neatly sidestep, however, is that it plants the player into a character that is a complete sociopath. That the player is, if I'm reading the description of this scene correctly, shooting innocent unarmed civilians in the back as they run screaming from them, pulling others to safety, and destroying an elevator full of people all in the name of justice and The American Way - makes absolutely no sense whatever. It doesn't "add to the urgency to stop them", it makes the player a willing participant in the atrocity. No reasonable character would go through this experience and come out the other side a military hero - there's no good side to this scene, it's just evil carried out by evil people. By playing through this scene, the player is in the role of a a cold-blooded murderer ... the very kind they're likely supposed to be fighting. This isn't narration, it's exploitation.

And let's get realistic here - this is only going forward because this is an A-list franchise with a lot of weight. If it was say, a game mod or a military shooter about Fallujah - we wouldn't be having this conversation, because the material would already be shouted down.

Activision and Infinity Ward should be ashamed and players should move on to better games.

Thanks to goodgaming for multiple tweets on the subject.