Summary
Modern Warfare 3 came out just weeks ago, but we’re already looking ahead to the next entry in theCall of Dutyseries. Reports suggest that the next instalment in the series will be a new Black Ops title led by developer Treyarch, and it will focus on the early 1990s Gulf War in Iraq.
According toWindows Central, “multiple sources” familiar with Activision’s plans said the next Call of Duty game will “attempt to explore a nuanced narrative of the Gulf War, with a critical focus on different participants within the conflict”. It will also supposedly “dovetail into the end of the Cold War era and explore some of the consequences therein”. Yes, the Gulf War, a conflict that triple-A gaming and the wider media have notoriously handled with tact and delicacy. I’m sure that Call of Duty, a long-running series of video games about American exceptionalism and interventionism, will do a great job of representing both sides of this contentious conflict and the historical root causes that led to it happening in the first place.
Editor’s note: heavy sarcasm.
I have written beforeabout my distaste for the Call of Duty series, and I don’t feel like rewriting all those words here when I could just tell you to click on a link. Suffice it to say, Call of Duty is not a series made to look at military conflict with any serious, significant level of nuance. Call of Duty games are distinctly pro-American intervention, never reckon with the cost of war beyond a shallow surface level, and the American military famously has agive-and-take relationship with the developers. Do we really think this series is going to portray the Gulf War with any more nuance than ‘war is bad’? Can we even expect it to say that much? It’s not clear at this point which perspectives are going to be highlighted, but I’ll put money on America taking the role of moral victor here.
Nuance Matters, Especially Now
I did my semester abroad in the United States in a Midwestern liberal arts school, and the things I was provoked to read there radicalised me entirely against the military-industrial complex. It was during that semester that I read Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, a collection of essays about media coverage of the conflict in Iraq and whether the Gulf War was really a war at all, or a humanitarian atrocity that was portrayed as a war to appease the West. It is a text that, in recent times, has only become more and more relevant: scholars referenced it during the war in Ukraine, and there are endless similarities between the Gulf War and the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.
Baudrillard is not typically an inspiration for big-budget video games about wars, but my pipe dream is that some of this radical sentiment eventually makes it far enough into mainstream thought that we start seeing it in popular media. Call of Duty is part of the problem, and it has always been. It reinterprets real history, real war crimes, and real atrocities into fiction without having players deeply question the ethics of what they’re doing and consuming beyond ‘killing is not always good'. Call of Duty, because of its conflicts of interest, willnevertell the truth or be genuinely critical of American military conflicts. That promised nuance is a lie.
Call of Duty has previously been criticised for its depiction of the ‘90s Gulf War,changing key facts about the Highway of Death incidentto depict the US as the victims rather than the instigators.
The game will probably be out in the second half of next year. Hopefully, it doesn’tsuck as much as Modern Warfare 3 did, but the quality of its shooting means little when the series continues to push such a pro-interventionist narrative. I’m not going to play it either way. My little way of saying no to Western imperialism is by saying no to Call of Duty.
