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. 

You've Lost, Karma

When I was in elementary school, my teachers always went over the classroom rules on the first day. Every year, the rules were the same: prohibitions on chewing gum and wearing hats and entreaties to stay in my seat and to keep my hands to myself. Don’t punch anyone! In fifth grade, though, everything changed. Instead of presenting “rules,” the teachers presented “rights.” Most of these were silly, just the same rules rephrased in hopelessly vague ways. You have the right to a learning environment free from distraction. Don’t get punched by anyone! I couldn’t grasp the fine points of pedagogical theory that led to this new iteration of the old rules. It didn’t seem like a big deal to me; I wasn’t really given the opportunity to do anything new, even if the teachers told me otherwise. But I was pretty sure that the teachers and the administration could not imagine a school where everyone went around punching each other.

Morality systems in video games make me feel a lot like that fifth grader. Developers sell morality as an innovative new aspect of gaming but deliver something that is just a sloppy rewording of the most persistent rule of video games. It’s a rule that has existed since Space Invaders and has flourished since Doom: In this game, you will engage in combat with increasingly able enemies, so press the fire button until you win. Morality systems arbitrarily highlight some of that combat, but do little else. Several times during the game we will allow you to choose which of two people you’d like to punch or, maybe, whether or not to punch anyone at all! I’m left feeling pretty sure that game developers can only conceive of video games as experiences viewed down the barrel of a gun.

People exist within dozens of rule systems that dictate which behaviors they can engage in and the consequences for deviant behaviors. If I rob a bank, I will go to prison because I violated a rule of law. If I jump out of a plane without a parachute, the rules of physics will make me go splat. Video games are interesting because they can offer new sets of rules to explore and manipulate. That’s what separates video games from other entertainment media. That’s agency. True innovation is something that offers a new kind of agency or changes the way a player experiences an existing kind of agency. Innovation can be as simple as Wolfenstein’s first-person perspective, changing the rules from “shoot everyone before they can kill my guy,” to “shoot everyone before they can kill me,” but it has to be systemic. Morality systems in action games have not yet provided new agency, they have only superimposed themselves onto the same old game mechanics and rule sets. Whether or not these systems are well imagined, well implemented, or internally consistent will be irrelevant until they do something to change the kill-kill-kill rule set of those games.

Bioshock was at the forefront of the morality movement and is an example of why morality systems fail to deliver their promised innovation. Many critics discussed how compelling the Little Sister choice was (is choosing whether or not to kill a little girl really ethically gray?) or whether the developers hedged too much, making the consequences too similar no matter which option the player chose. But all that misses the point. Despite its presentation, the morality system asks the player the same question about Little Sisters that the rest of the gameplay asks about every other living thing you come across: Would you like to kill this? Consider Bioshock’s treatment of Big Daddies. The game structures Big Daddies identically to Little Sisters. Big Daddies are drones conditioned by Rapture’s bad-guys to do a particular job, just like the Little Sisters and even the player’s own character. They won’t attack unless provoked and you could simply skip them. And, hey, if you don’t kill a Big Daddy you won’t get any Adam at all. Now there’s a choice with consequences. Bioshock does not present Big Daddies as parts of the morality system. The decision to kill them is taken for granted. Should players care about the fate of Little Sisters more than the fate of Big Daddies because one looks like a cute little girl and one looks like a weird comic-book villain? Bioshock provides no better explanation. Subsequent morality systems have primarily addressed the same types of combat questions. Would you like to kill Wrex or not? Would you rather kill Ghouls or Tenpenny Tower residents? Would you like to kill all these bad guys and get cool electrical powers, or leave them alone and get different cool electrical powers?

The desire to innovate and to move video games towards cultural relevance is understandable and commendable. But the way to innovate is to take advantage of video games’ unique ability to manipulate rule sets. The Guitar Hero franchise created an entirely new rule set and sold millions of copies without ever asking me how virtuous a drummer I wanted to be. Morality systems that merely allow players to specify the manner and target of combat do not change the rules of action games, they reword them. That’s no more of a leap forward than the “fully destructible environment” was. There is literally nothing in this game that you cannot punch! Change the rules, young man. Change the rules.