Credibility: Modern Warfare 3 Ain’t No Saving Private Ryan

by Nicholas Abbate on November 14, 2011

I don’t generally comment on the big Triple ‘A’ titles. Unless I find an angle that I think no one else has thought of (and someone has always thought of it before you), I just consider it a waste of my time. However, after playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 the other day, I figured I might as well chime in anyway.

You likely know what this post is going to be about. Yup, the Eiffel Tower. How could they do that to the Statue of Liberty – of France? (Fun Fact: The French Statue of Liberty is actually located near the Grenelle Bridge in Paris.) So that was just a joke, and yes, this article is about the little girl getting blown to smithereens.

Now, I’m not going to rant about how that shouldn’t have been in the game because I hate censorship. A large part of the last five years of my life has been writing and whenever one of my jokes or clever lines gets edited out of a post I tend to go a little nuts. Like driving my truck through a shopping mall nuts. When someone is creating a product of media, I consider it their right to include whatever material they deem worthy of that product. If the development company wanted that scene there, so be it.

However, it could be said by some (probably only me) that we aren’t doing the medium any favors by allowing others to highlight what are probably some of the most shallow moments in games. We don’t have our Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia yet (even though Uncharted 3 tried really hard). Therefore, we are going to get flack for all the sex and violence because it is the only stuff that gets covered by the ‘real’ media, and thus the only aspects of the community that those outside of it see. For now let’s just focus on the explosions.

Plain and simple violence is a great theatrical tool. It has been used effectively in film for many years. It can be used to sway your audiences’ affections towards a character or situation. Staying in the realm of military action, look at Saving Private Ryan. The Stephen Spielberg war epic begins with one of the most gut wrenching, violent scenes in cinematic history with the storming of Normandy.

With his opening scene, Spielberg sets the tone for the entire film. He reinforces the idea that what we are witnessing is the most brutal war in human existence and that the soldiers we are watching fight are going to be facing the most defining moments of their lives. Not only that, but it quickly attaches the people watching to the characters in the film. We care about Captain Miller, Sergeant Horvath (cause Tom Sizemore is awesome) and the other men in the unit. You also begin to wonder, during the course of the film, if all the death and violence is really worth saving one soldier.

Saving Private Ryan is an excellent example of how violence can be used effectively in a media product. Now, let’s take a look at our Family Vacation scene from Modern Warfare 3. You get to act out the role of an American father on a wonderful trip to London during World War III. Normally, I could care less about other people’s vacation plans, but this guy took his family to Europe while his own nation was getting ripped apart by the Russians and is just walking around sightseeing.

Okay, I can buy that. Maybe he just wanted to get his family away from the war. Still, taking his wife and daughter to a nation that is vehemently allied with the United States seems like a really bad idea. The United Kingdom is one of the strongest nations in the world. If you’re starting a global conflict that is going to draw in most civilized nations against your cause, you sure as hell better sneak attack the UK and get the jump on them if you want to have any hope of success in Europe. Most adults would understand this and keep their family out of London. (London is to the UK as Washington D.C. is to the U.S., i.e. don’t be there when World War III is going down)

Right off the bat, we have a major issue with plausibility. Now, let’s look at the scene like we did with Saving Private Ryan. I can’t really presume that the developers were trying to use violence as a tool to convey the savage and indiscriminate nature of war. War is horrible, especially ‘total war‘. The concept of ‘total war’ can be defined a few different ways, but for our purposes let’s say that it essentially blurs or erases the distinction between military and civilian casualties. During ‘total war’ everyone is fair game.

Rather than providing a poignant commentary on the vicious effect that war has on a civilian population, it seems like the scene was merely there to show us the release of chemical weapons and to do so in what developers thought was the “coolest” way possible. The scene in Modern Warfare 3 rips us out of the action, stalls the story and does so in favor of a predictable, clichéd, and a frankly boring moment in which it tries to add some shock value to the game. It does this not for the sake of narrative or to illustrate any sort of meaningful message to the audience. It does so in hopes that CNN or FOX will cover the game and thus boost sales in the process.

So when we get scenes in games like this, are we really doing ourselves any favors? Yes, we get attention and the game gets covered by the national media. Modern Warfare 2′s “No Russian” provided a pretty solid template for free advertising and one that will likely be replicated again and again. However, in addition to all the controversy that accompanies a game like this we also cast our community in an unfavorable light.

During the whole Robert Ebert ‘video games can never be art debate,’ I sat back and watched an entire community of young bloggers and game enthusiasts run to their computers in defense of a medium that they care very deeply about. They cited games such as Braid and Flower. They detailed the complexity of rendering graphics on an interactive scale. They showed us that real emotion could be conveyed through games like Shadow of the Colossus or Heavy Rain.

Then we get Modern Warfare’s European Vacation and the rest of the world looks at us and asks why, and more importantly, how, we would defend that.