Samiul Bashar Samin
Every year brings new CoD games, and the franchise regularly tops charts, racking up more than 175 million sales over the course of the past decade. Each game weaves together a semi-coherent narrative that combines the regular annihilation of its characters at a George R R Martin pace with a wider and more worrying story arc: one of US powerlessness, decline and revenge.
The Call of Duty games are first-person shooters (FPS). ‘First-person’ means that the players see the world through the eyes of their characters – only their hands and weapons are clearly visible. (Some games break this form in third-person cutscenes, but CoD sticks to it resolutely). ‘Shooter’ means that the character interacts with the world almost entirely through the barrel of a gun; the environment, and its endless stream of enemies, exists to be destroyed.
Many FPS are power fantasies, with the child-like joy of being able to murder everything you see. These are little boys’ tales of war, where a finger-gun blows away a thousand foes, and the player is always the actor, never the victim.
Call of Dutyfrequently reverses that dynamic. In almost every other FPS, the player’s death is a constant possibility, yet those are transient endings, erased from the game’s reality by a simple reload. But in Call of Duty, sufferings both permanent and unavoidable are ineffably worked into the game’s narrative. Although the gameplay is a consistent frenzy of violence inflicted by the player on the world, narrative control – the happy freedom to move, shoot, call in drone strikes, knife people in the back – is regularly snatched back from the players, forcing them into positions of constant helplessness.
Victimhood is only the start. The protagonists of CoD games aren’t stopped by betrayal, injury or even death. Their travails are the necessary prelude to their roaring rampage of vengeance, and their passive suffering doesn’t subvert the fantasy of power but endorses it; every bullet fired is justified by ruined bodies, both politically and personally. CoD’s wars are a hysterically exaggerated reinforcement of national wish-fulfilment, consumed by millions of young people: they hurt us first, so we get to hurt them back.