Press F to commit war crimes, but with more gender diversity this time
August 28, 2020 10:07 AM   Subscribe

The next Call of Duty game, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, has announced an expansion to its "gender" options for the player: "Male", "Female", and... "Classified". For gamers and political operatives excited about innovations in reputation laundering and imperialist propaganda, Ronald Reagan will feature prominently in the game as an eerily realistic character who encourages and enables the player to commit war crimes in the name of the "entire free world". Despite all this, Treyarch Studios maintains it is "not trying to make a political statement of any kind".

The 2012 iteration of the popular game franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, prominently featured Oliver North in its marketing and as an advisor for the violent shooter game. Six years later, Oliver North, serving as the president of the NRA, blamed violent shooter games for mass shootings.

Electronic Empire - Orientalism Revisited in the Military Shooter:
Perfectly in line with the tradition of representation described by Graham, the games discussed in this article render or construct the Middle East as a perpetual military frontier where the conflict between American democracy and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is acted out indefinitely. The notion of perpetual war, first outlined by George Orwell in his classic 1984 (1948), suggests that it is in the interest of government that certain wars do not stop. Not only does a perpetual war fuel a nation's (war) industry indefinitely, it also allows the beleaguered nation to believe that the hostile (but never finally defined) Other is being perpetually contained. Lately, the concept of perpetual war as such has been examined by Tony Cliff (1957), and in relation to American hostilities in the Middle East by critics like Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, 2003). With this concept in mind, the gamer involved in a military shooter set in the Middle East is forever performing this strategic containment of the Other.
Don't try to sell Call of Duty to us as anti-war:
“When we started this journey almost three years ago,” Sledgehammer co-founder Michael Condry said during the livestream, “it was really [about] wanting to tell a really impactful narrative and story, largely to ensure this sort of conflict doesn’t happen again.”

While you squeegee the spit off your monitor, let’s consider that claim. If CoD:WWII is "largely" about scaring its players straight on modern history, it has an odd way of showing it. The pacifist message is at odds even with the first in-game footage, which mainly glorifies, or at least maintains the idea that WWII was a brutal but noble conflict—hellish and awful, yes, but with “visceral gameplay.” There are flamethrowers backed by opera singers. A man yelling “we had orders!” before being socked in the face. Drums that pound to the beat of gunfire. A logo that slaps the screen and shakes with anticipation for battle.
posted by Ouverture (36 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'll just leave this here.
posted by SansPoint at 10:14 AM on August 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


not a gamer, no fan at all of combat/pov killing games in particular (though I can certainly see the appeal). Just had to point out --

Press F to commit war crimes, but with more gender diversity this time

Love that title.
posted by philip-random at 10:18 AM on August 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


Not that I was ever going to be the target audience for this, but Reagan is one of the people you can point to as to why we cannot have nice things. So many things from his administration laid the groundwork for our current debacle. To make him a focus of the game? No thanks.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:30 AM on August 28, 2020 [14 favorites]


The whole "we're going to be anti-X or extra-X to show how bad X is" just doesn't work. All you're doing is feeding X.
posted by kokaku at 10:32 AM on August 28, 2020 [13 favorites]


Call Of Duty Trailer Recklessly Promotes Far-Right Conspiracy Theory
The teaser, which was released last week to hype up the more recent reveal, intersperses stock footage of major world events with a 1984 interview of [Yuri] Bezmenov, who claimed to have been an informant for the KGB before defecting to the United States. During the interview, he describes the Soviet Union’s alleged use of “active measures” that, in theory, are meant to destabilize opponents without direct military conflict by way of changing a society’s power structure and economy. In short, Bezmenov’s suggestion in the full interview is that extending equality to the United States’ non-white, non-male population made it ripe for Soviet invasion.

The official Call of Duty trailer refers to Bezmenov’s claims as a “chilling warning,” and implores viewers to “know your history,” which sure feels like a tacit endorsement of the man’s deeply flawed ideology.
posted by skymt at 10:34 AM on August 28, 2020 [12 favorites]


but Reagan is one of the people you can point to as to why we cannot have nice things

Tell me about it. I saved that guy from ninjas in Bad Dudes vs. DragonNinja and all I got was a lousy burger.
posted by star gentle uterus at 10:35 AM on August 28, 2020 [16 favorites]


This kind of stuff becoming the norm (plus the obsession with hyper realistic depictions of slitting a guy's throat; devs, stop that nonsense) are why I more or less stopped playing shooter games. I want to run around a colorful pretend land with a cool/stupid looking Nerf gun shooting at weird aliens/mutants/demons, not shoot at brown people (sometimes Russians!) furthering white supremacy and US imperialism. Shooters can have actual things to say about politics, warfare and the world - the new Wolfensteins were surprisingly excellent - but the way so many developers embraced this level of naked, shameless propagandizing is so gross.
posted by Lonnrot at 10:35 AM on August 28, 2020 [12 favorites]


As someone who grew up in the 80s, God........ I could never play a game where you take orders from that clown.

Also, the companies depicting politics in their games without being "political" is straight up white supremacy. To stand aside is to endorse the status quo, you miserable shits.

That said, as long as we're having him use gender neutral pronouns in some kind of really sick attempt at scoring PR points, can we also have him send you to secretly poison the water supply for the School of the Americas?
posted by selfnoise at 10:38 AM on August 28, 2020 [7 favorites]


Call Of Duty Trailer Recklessly Promotes Far-Right Conspiracy Theory

Holy cow, I'm not sure how I missed this. How many more iterations until they are laundering Obama's reputation or promoting QAnon nonsense? I give it 3 years.
posted by Ouverture at 10:40 AM on August 28, 2020


I don’t know much about Bezmenov, but it actually would not be surprising to me if the KGB were funding and pushing civil rights organizations and such, just as the CIA did. Now, that doesn’t mean that the entire civil rights era or any particular group were some sort of KGB front to blow up America.
During the interview, he describes the Soviet Union’s alleged use of “active measures” that, in theory, are meant to destabilize opponents without direct military conflict by way of changing a society’s power structure and economy. In short, Bezmenov’s suggestion in the full interview is that extending equality to the United States’ non-white, non-male population made it ripe for Soviet invasion.
I mean, we know that the Internet Research Agency basically did this in 2016, and the GRU had agents on the ground doing research about Black Lives Matter groups. In fact, this is still happening today, we just don’t know the details.
The official Call of Duty trailer refers to Bezmenov’s claims as a “chilling warning,” and implores viewers to “know your history,” which sure feels like a tacit endorsement of the man’s deeply flawed ideology.
This is where it gets extremely dodgy. We shouldn’t be warning against civil rights for people, we should be warning against the co-option of genuine popular movements by foreign actors and corporate interests.
posted by gucci mane at 10:51 AM on August 28, 2020 [8 favorites]


> The official Call of Duty trailer refers to Bezmenov’s claims as a “chilling warning,” and implores viewers to “know your history,” which sure feels like a tacit endorsement of the man’s deeply flawed ideology.

That sounds an awful lot like the Qanon (and other conspiracy mongering cults) line about "doing your own research" or whatever. I don't know that I can credit it as irony, either.
posted by Godspeed.You!Black.Emperor.Penguin at 10:54 AM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


Despite all this, Treyarch Studios maintains it is "not trying to make a political statement of any kind".

I can believe that. The worst political statements are often the ones people make without trying, because they don't even realize their beliefs are political.
posted by biogeo at 11:07 AM on August 28, 2020 [22 favorites]




Don't try to sell Call of Duty to us as anti-war

Whether or not Truffaut's opinion of anti-war films is correct, and I suspect it is, there is definitely no such thing as an anti-war FPS.

I don’t know much about Bezmenov

There is at least a little evidence that he was a KGB-adjacent propagandist (not actually a KGB agent as is often claimed) in India, but as far as I've ever been able to determine from casual searching there is no evidence for any of his other claims (which he seems to be the sole source for), and in my opinion he was a bullshit artist peddling to the John Birch Society what they wanted to hear to put some bread on the table. He seems to have been entirely forgotten until an old Bircher video got unearthed a couple years back and shared around the right-wing internet.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 11:41 AM on August 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


It’s also worth noting that Activision pulled their original trailer and replaced it (for ALL regions) after the Chinese government was upset that it contained footage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests. I don’t buy games from self-censoring CCP appeasers.
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 11:58 AM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


> This kind of stuff becoming the norm (plus the obsession with hyper realistic depictions of slitting a guy's throat; devs, stop that nonsense) are why I more or less stopped playing shooter games. I want to run around a colorful pretend land with a cool/stupid looking Nerf gun shooting at weird aliens/mutants/demons, not shoot at brown people (sometimes Russians!) furthering white supremacy and US imperialism.

lucky for you you're basically directly describing an already-extant shooter game franchise, except instead of nerf guns it's super soakers and instead of aliens/mutants/demons it's preteen squid punks skipping school to do paintball war.

one of the great things about it is that getting kills splats isn't even necessarily the focus of the game; in most of the play modes, the way you win is to some degree or another about covering ground with your team's paint rather than attacking the other players.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 12:25 PM on August 28, 2020 [5 favorites]


this franchise is my problematic fps fave, but maybe i'm going to have to figure out a way to, uh, play it without paying for it
posted by inire at 12:39 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


Call Of Duty Trailer Recklessly Promotes Far-Right Conspiracy Theory
In his various lectures and interviews, Bezmenov said that any attempt to establish social equity for women, for Black folks, or for the LGBTQ+ community in the United States was merely a Soviet ploy to weaken American society from within. He frequently criticized leftists, feminists, and those involved in the equal rights and anti-war movements as “useful idiots,” or pawns whose demands were an opening for the Soviet Union to destabilize the United States.
I.e. equal rights will destroy America.

From an imperial point of view, there's some truth to this. If you stop believing that white American men should rule America, you might start doubting that white American men should rule the world. You might stop believing that all atrocities by "friendly" dictators on our side are okay. You might be willing to listen when a Black athlete says, "I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong." You might start thinking that it's more important for America to put its considerable economic might to work building an equal and prosperous society, instead of using it to dominate the world.
posted by clawsoon at 12:43 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I wanna piggyback my previous post and say I wouldn’t be surprised if Call of Duty was a CIA psyop by now too :P
posted by gucci mane at 12:43 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


I liked Activision when it was a bunch of ex-Atari 2600 programmers who were mad that they weren't getting royalties. What the hell happened?
posted by box at 12:54 PM on August 28, 2020 [10 favorites]


Whether or not Truffaut's opinion of anti-war films is correct, and I suspect it is, there is definitely no such thing as an anti-war FPS.

The closest answer here would be Spec Ops: The Line. I don't think it was entirely successful at this, but I still give it some credit for the game it played. To all appearances a stock military shooter that instead pulls the rug out and openly questions the player why they do this for fun.

Ultimately it was all a little hypocritical (although meta-aware of being so), but it's worth considering when discussing the idea of an anti-war FPS.
posted by malphigian at 12:59 PM on August 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


What are the odds that the average Call of Duty player will even know that the Reagan character in the game was a real person? The majority wouldn't be alive in the 80s and history classes do a very poor job of anything modern.
posted by meowzilla at 1:04 PM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


What are the odds that the average Call of Duty player will even know that the Reagan character in the game was a real person?

All they need is one person in a chat to say "you know that stuff is real" and point them to a Youtube video featuring Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin, who is, incidentally, quite excited about this trailer.
posted by clawsoon at 1:07 PM on August 28, 2020 [8 favorites]


The majority wouldn't be alive in the 80s

The average gamer is 35 years old. And I would imagine COD skews older than Fortnite or Minecraft.

BTW, for a more satirical take, Wasteland 3 drops today and features a Ronald Reagan AI with multiple wives, who inhabits a giant statue and shoots lasers from his eyes. (I haven't played it, just read this review yesterday.)
posted by frogstar42 at 1:33 PM on August 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


The average gamer is 35 years old. And I would imagine COD skews older than Fortnite or Minecraft.

Works both ways, though. COD may skew younger than the average WoW, FF14, or LoL player. First-person shooters put a high emphasis on reaction time which begins to drop around age 24.
posted by meowzilla at 2:07 PM on August 28, 2020


based purely on the pitch of the voices screaming abuse on modern warfare voice chat, i'm going to say there's a strong teen contingent
posted by inire at 2:35 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


actually i lied, it's not just the pitch that leads me to that conclusion; it's the combination of pitch and a limited range of insults except for those that involve incomprehensible cultural references

yes i'm over 30, why do you ask
posted by inire at 2:37 PM on August 28, 2020 [6 favorites]


Yeah, I'm aware of the awkwardly named Spec Ops: The Line, and I still stand by my statement. Regardless, I've played Spec Ops: The Line. Spec Ops: The Line was a friend of mine. CoD is no Spec Ops: The Line.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 2:38 PM on August 28, 2020 [2 favorites]


This is a Day One purchase for me.

...as long as it lets me shoot NPC-Ronnie, right there in the Oval Office. I'll play that mission a few hundred times, then call it done.
posted by aramaic at 3:46 PM on August 28, 2020 [4 favorites]


I have 0 time for AAA FPSes or pro-war bullshit in general, but I LOVE the idea of gender="classified", which already has a somewhat infamous history.
posted by doop at 3:55 PM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


This is a good and cool development in a genre where you see yourself as an arsenal of floating guns
posted by ikea_femme at 5:28 PM on August 28, 2020


The first Black Ops had JFK and Nixon (and Zombies!) in a bunker underneath the Pentagon, just as long as people are looking for dead presidents to get worked up about.
posted by sideshow at 7:07 PM on August 28, 2020 [1 favorite]


First-person shooters put a high emphasis on reaction time which begins to drop around age 24.

Tell me about it. I'm 55 and never play multiplayer because I instantly get whacked by teenagers. I love the World War II CODs but not Modern Warfare.
posted by kirkaracha at 9:28 PM on August 28, 2020


I saw a Bezmenov video on youtube, in which he describes the process of "active measures" to destabilize a nation, namely to demoralize, manufacture shock, swap in authoritarianism and then normalize the horror, and the comments were full of Trump fans remarking how important it is to keep this in mind.

Good joke. Everyone laughs.
posted by Reyturner at 10:50 PM on August 28, 2020 [9 favorites]


As an older gamer I don’t get it. I rolled my eyes when grand theft auto came out, presumably coded in between fart jokes and talking about boobs. Lame.
posted by freecellwizard at 6:08 AM on August 29, 2020


MetaFilter: presumably coded in between fart jokes and talking about boobs.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:29 PM on August 29, 2020 [2 favorites]


« Older "spotted cool things their listing bots had...   |   It's a bird, it's a plane... No, it's a train! Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments