Modern Warfare 2 may be crossing a line
A good video game can be shocking. Take, for example “Bioshock,” the game that had a story that could knock you off your feet. A bad video game can also be shocking for many different reasons, think of the gratuitous violence of the "Manhunt" series or the often questionable judgment of the “Grand Theft Auto” games. Infinity Ward’s masterpiece “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” was shocking for all the right reasons: story, gameplay and overall fun. But Infinity Ward is slowly swaying public opinion to the wrong kind of shocking: the one that loses fans.
Early last week, a clip of the new “Modern Warfare 2” game, a sequel to their earlier smash hit, was leaked to a less than thrilled crowd. The clip featured a playable sequence where the player joins a band of what we’ll call “terrorists” for the use of imagery in a full out assault on an airport. The elevator doors open and the player takes control of one member of the group as they walk through the crowded airport, gunning down completely helpless citizens. As shocking as it reads, it is even more so when seen.
Now with a game dealing with current conflicts, hence “Modern Warfare,” events in the game are going to coincide with real events, and in this case it begs to ask the question, is it too soon? “Call of Duty 4” had its set of shocking set pieces including a nuclear device being detonated and decimating an entire city while the player watched, but this new sequence hits close to home. Granted, we know nothing about the context of this clip. It could be at the end of the sequence the player takes down the terrorist group or leads them to arrest but by then the impression is already made.
A few days later a viral video was released to hype the game, even more than it already has been, that featured Cole Hamels of the Philadelphia Phillies talking about how he hates grenade spamming in video games. For those who don’t know “grenade spamming” is when players in the game toss grenades as far as they can in random areas hoping to get a kill. At the end of the video Hamels states that “random grenades are for pussies” before being blown up in front of the camera by a gang of the grenades that fly from out of nowhere. To sum it all up, the end of the video informs us that the public service announcement was brought to us by the Fight Against Grenade Spam. Check the acronym. The video was taken down only days afterward following rumblings from all over the Internet.
Loud, belligerent video game trash talking is something that will never be done away with, but this steps into the area of endorsing words that are taken by many to be a very hateful. To make the assumption that every one of their fans would be OK with these slurs was not an intelligent move on Infinity Ward’s part and a slip up considering the clip that had been leaked earlier that week.
While I completely disagree with IW’s decision to run the Hamels video with that ending attached, the gameplay clip has me thinking. Shocking yes, but that is the calling card of the Call of Duty games produced by this company. It might not sit well with some of the gaming crowd but let’s see how the overall game and story runs.