While Modern Warfare did a decent job of immersing me in the stories of its characters, it failed to immerse me in their war. The horror of war is that you are killing people however, just as the US troops in the apache seem utterly detached from the men they gun down-rendered as identical, grey silhouettes on the other side of a low-res computer monitor-the enemies running at the player in Modern Warfare are not individual men with their own histories and stories but cloned NPCs spawning just off-screen indefinitely until the player passes a certain point. It never really works, though, as inevitably the player behaves like they are playing a videogame. As an extension of this, the series has tried to depict war as truly horrible, by stressing that the people dying around you are people and the people that you are killing are people. The games do this by constantly switching the player’s perspective between different characters, collaboratively building up a network of warfare. The Call of Duty games have always tried to stress that wars are not won by any one individual hero, but by thousands of individual men and women (though, the series has failed to depict those women particularly well) who do not fight for ‘good’ or ‘evil’ but merely for different sides. Less than a week after watching the leaked video, I started playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The most gut-wrenching aspect of the video, then, is not the behaviour of these individual troops, but the depiction of an environment that fosters and encourages such an irreverent othering of enemy combatants and civilians alike. Though I have (thankfully) never experienced a conflict situation personally, I imagine that constructing a barrier between “Us” and “Them” is the only way one could handle consistently having to kill fellow humans. Part of me wanted to hate the troops involved-the way they hope the wounded man curled up in the gutter would pick up a weapon so that they can finish him off the way they chuckle when US ground troops arrive and a tank runs over a body. It was gut-wrenching, made only more harrowing by the disconnect in the crew’s voice as they seemingly cared not at all for the men they were slaughtering. ![]() I have seen photos of battlefields before I have seen planes smash into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre from a hundred different angles but I have never before watched through the eyes of someone lining up an individual in a crosshair and opening fire. ![]() In early 2010, Wikileaks released deeply disturbing footage from a US Apache helicopter that showed the gunship’s crew gunning down civilians and a Reuters’s journalist in Baghdad.
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