Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Are You Not Entertained?


I know I'm weeks late to the No Russian party. But there's a good reason for it, I don't know where I belong.  Am I in the pro- or anti- camp?  I feel like I would be unwelcome in both.

To eliminate myself from the pro-No Russian camp, I just dont' think the scene was all that effective at accomplishing its overt goals.  Maybe I'm just a cold unfeeling sociopath, but shooting civilians (or watching them get shot) in the context of a video game is not that big a deal to me.  This, likely, is because I do things like that in video games all the time.  In Fallout 3, I blew up Megaton because I had already pissed off people in the town by breaking into the sherriff's house and stealing stuff from the town doctor.  In Red Alert, I mowed down civilians with Yak fire as part of a mission goal.  In Bioshock, I killed little girls because it made me marginally stronger in the short term.  In various GTA games, I did all manner of terrible things for no reason at all.  Then there's all the brutal genocide and ethnic cleansing from my hours and hours of playing Civilization.  The fidelity of the slaughter in MW2 was higher than in most of those examples, but that wasn't enough for me to feel significantly worse about it. 

I'm treading dangerously close to the "it's just a game" argument, but that's not my point.  It's not that Video Games cannot affect me emotionally because they're video games.  It's just that killing civilians is too close to what I do in every video game (killing stuff) to be titillating of it's own accord in a specific video game.  The No Russian scene was a particularly condensed dosage of amorality, but I felt like I had just read a book that stopped mid-sentence to repeat the word "rape" for 50 pages.  It's weird and unsettling to the extent that I don't like rape or slaughtering innocents and thinking about those things is unpleasant, but it's not affecting in any meaningful way. The problem is that there was little context and little sense of consequence.  No Russian's context is mitigated by both the pre-mission blather explaining it's all for the greater good and by the general weakness of MW2's story.  Narrative consequence is neutered entirely by the immediate death of your character, ensuring that we never see him struggle with or even consider the meaning of his actions.  And, because Russia launches a retaliatory war, which is not only well within the range of expected and just responses to a foreign national turning an airport into Hogan's Alley, but also a somewhat predictable event in a game that's about a war with Russia, the literal, if-A-then-B consequences we see are only the broadest, least nuanced, most boring ones possible.

This sounds a lot like I'm in the anti-No Russian camp.  But I don't think I am.  Saying a scene is ineffective is different that saying it's a bad idea.  I think the scene was a great idea.  The critical community that has sprung up around video games is always on the lookout for new twists on old formulas and games that do or try to do interesting things (I know that's an uncited "some say" type of argument so this would probably be the best place to start your counter argument).  And, wow, Infinity Ward did a risky and new thing here.   Modern Warfare 2 is a super-high exposure game that would have sold millions of copies had they taken no risks at all.  Further, we have a cultural environment that includes people who flipped out about the naked shoulders and implied sex of Mass Effect and municipalities that won't run bus ads for GTA IV.  The risk/reward balance does not favor provocative choices.  Nevertheless, Infinity Ward has the player actively engage in admittedly heinous terrorist actions, without coating him in the Noble Guerrilla trappings of a game like Red Faction.  They did so to establish an interesting scenario: Modern Warfare 2 is a game about a war where the player causes the war.  That's a pretty neat trick, especially for a medium that aspires to create meaning through action.  Every subsequent event is a result, if not always a direct result, of that one No Russian mission the Player did, that one mission that felt kind of dirty and wrong.  The bombed out Totally-Not-T.G.I.Fridays, wasted D.C., and hilarious, non sequitur dead astronaut are all your fault.  That's why the poor use of the scene is so frustrating.

I think that is where the failure ends, though.  So my opinion differs from Anthony Burch in that I think the mission could have been effective exactly as presented if the context around it changed.  Burch argues that the scene failed because it prevented him from shooting Makarov and his buddies, that Infinity Ward forced Burch into their narrative.  I think this is a non-starter, largely for reasons that Anthony himself cites in his piece.  Not every game is a sandbox and, as Burch mentions, Modern Warfare 2 is unabashedly linear.  But nor does every game strive to let players extensively role-define the playable character.  I've never heard anyone say that the time-limits in Super Mario 3, for example, were poor design choices "because my Mario is an explorer."  The playable characters in Modern Warfare are soldiers, actors within a framework where following orders is paramount.  That your specially selected, highly skilled, elite soldier follows his General's orders, even when those orders are unambiguously atrocious, enhances the verisimilitude.  No Russian's orders might make you uncomfortable.  I think they were supposed to.  Burch bemoans the lack of choice, but forcing the player to do something can be just as strong a tool for the interactive storyteller as letting the player do something.  The problem is that Infinity Ward did nothing to leverage their forced action.

With proper context, Infinity Ward could have raised some very interesting questions about rule-following, either in a general Milgrim/Bioshock way, or in a specific War/International Relations way.  What if  instead of shooting the player, Makarov dumps an impostor American body, the discovery of which leads to the same Russian-American war?  The player character, still alive, would be forced to deal with watching this consequence, knowing he helped cause it, hearing what the world was saying about his impostor stand-in, and still needing to work with Makarov and keep his cover.  What if Makarov shoots you, but you survive and end up in an international prison, struggling with whether to betray your mission and your commander, or to risk going down in history as the terrorist who caused World War III?  Maybe that wouldn't be feasible in Modern Warfare's bare-boned storytelling format.  But if that's the case, why did Infinity Ward knowingly include a scene like No Russian, which clearly needs nuanced development to be worth anything?

So, I guess, I come to bury No Russian, not to praise it.  For Infinity Ward was ambitious.  Too ambitious says Fox News, and Fox News is full of honorable men. 

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