Brief classical thoughts on "No Russian"

This blog may have some readers who have managed to miss the controversy surrounding the single-player campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2). To orient you, my VGHVI colleague Erik Hanson brought together some of the most important responses to the controversy on the VGHVI Context Clues blog.

There's really no need to divulge the nature of the atrocity here; if you're interested you can follow-up through the link to Context Clues. What you need to know is that there's a chapter of the game in which the player-character is forced (if he or she chose to be forced, at the start of the game, since the game asks you if you want to play the disturbing sequence or skip it) to aid in the commission of a terrible atrocity. What's important for the purposes of the classical comparison is that 1) it's something that no rational person could view as anything other than an atrocity; and 2) the player (if he or she has chosen to play the sequence) is forced to aid in committing it.

The game critics whom I consider worth reading are near-universally agreed that the chapter does not deliver the profound meaning it seems pretty clearly to be attempting to deliver. There are a host of reasons for this impression that arise in the execution of the chapter, ranging from its context in the larger story of the game to the odd and jarring way its interactivity is managed. With regard to this failure of execution, it's perhaps worth noting from my classical point of view that there are several tragedies of Euripides that are marred (if we wish to put it that way, though scholars disagree) by a similar failure to integrate horrific acts into their plots in a meaningful way. I would hesitate to credit Infinity Ward, the developer of MW2 with this level of depth, but it's just possible that 100 years from now what looks now like the inappropriateness of the sequence will be hailed by scholars hoping to get published as a brilliantly dicomfiting coup de jeu.

There is, however, another point about "No Russian" that appears more strongly from a classical perspective than perhaps any other. It seems to me an undeniable fact that Infinity Ward, who put analogously atrocious action in MW2's predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, is maintaining a commitment to bringing the players of its games face-to-face with the ethical ambiguity of war. That fact by itself shows a development of game culture that mirrors the development that we can see in the homeric tradition when we look at that tradition diachronically, and pick apart its strata: in the Iliad, for example, the ethical simplicity of tales of glory becomes, over time, the ambiguous story of an Achilles who drags Hector around Troy, in front of his grieving parents, and then kills Trojan youths on Patroclus' funeral pyre. Indeed, this development leads in ancient Athens to tragedy, the ne plus ultra of literary ethical thought, where atrocities are used over and over to expose the fragility of our ethical claims and to strengthen our understanding of why we must make those claims nonetheless.

MW2 reaches in an old, old direction. Its failure to lay hold of the profundity it seems to seek is sad, but the reach itself means much more than I think many have acknowledged.

Noted: Michael Abbott on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 marketing

I'd be quite surprised if there were anyone who reads this little blog who doesn't also (and indeed more frequently) read Michael Abbott's The Brainy Gamer, but just in case, and in tribute to his wonderful post this morning, I'd like to point any such hypothetical reader to a great example of the power of the blog form, which is at the same time the most incisive analysis of the forces controlling AAA gaming I think I've ever read.

Here's what I posted in Michael's comments:

From my hobby horse, blaming Infinity Ward for this callousness is like blaming the homeric bards for the graphic violence and smacktalk of their battles. By doing that kind of blaming, we certainly assert our own superiority (which is not an unimportant thing to do). But we also start from a position of having missed something that's culturally interesting about the game and its marketing. You catch precisely that interesting facet here.

A reflection on the importance of shooting games, in the light of ancient epic

Bloggers whom I respect greatly, Michael Abbott in particular, have over the last few months been registering discontent with the continuing dominance of the shooter—loosely defined as any game in which the primary gameplay mechanic involves shooting a firearm—in the games industry. I share the sentiment, to the extent that I hope that games will keep expanding the range of stories they can tell and facets of the human condition on which they can shed light.

I’m very tired of shooters, myself, having played a great many of them over the last few years—some of them extraordinarily good as vehicles of immersion in tales of death and glory. I want to play more games like Pixeljunk Eden, the wonderful art-game released this week for the Playstation 3. But I worry that we might let our desire for richer games stop us from understanding how important, and how meaningul, shooters are as a sort of baseline for game-narrative.

I say that because of my appreciation of the books of the Iliad that are usually called the “battle books.” In these books, epic heroes kill one another with great abandon and in spectacular ways. Here’s a sample, from Book 4, in Richmond Lattimore’s translation:

Antilochos was first to kill a chief man of the Trojans,
valiant among the champions, Thalysias’ son, Echepolos.
Throwing first, he struck the horn of the horse-haired helmet,
and the bronze spearpoint fixed in his forehead and drove inward
through the bone; and a mist of darkness clouded both eyes
and he fell as a tower falls in the strong encounter.
As he dropped, Elphenor the powerful caught him by the feet,
Chalkodon’s son, and lord of the great-hearted Abantes,
and dragged him away from under the missiles, striving in all speed
to strip the armor from him, yet his outrush went short-lived.

It goes on like that, and on, and on, and on. (One analogy with the battle books that I find very compelling is MMO grinding, the game mechanic in games like World of Warcraft in which players must slay enormous numbers of the same enemy, but that’s for some posts down the road.)

The battle books clearly represent a very early layer of Homeric epic—the kind of thing warriors and warrior wanna-be’s would have loved to listen to at a feast. The analogy with shooters like Halo and Half-life seems pretty clear to me. What we might call the expressive range (that’s Iroquois Pliskin, following up on Michael) of this material, whether Iliadic or game-ish, is not great: it consists of various interesting ways in which people might kill other people in battle. What I want to point out, however, is that the meaning of the profound bits of the Iliad (like the ones I’ve talked about before) could not have come into being without the battle books, because it is in the battle books that prowess is defined, and the themes of epic (both the Iliad and the Odyssey) revolve around how we are to understand prowess.

To take it a sort of fundamental step back, playing war is something boys do. Oh, man, did I do it myself. I did it to such an extent that I was convinced, at around the age of 10, that I was going to go to Annapolis and become an admiral. I played with my cap gun, and my ship models; my ancient Greek herdsman must have done it with stick-swords and ships made out of wood instead of plastic; my five year old son does it with his squirt gun, despite the fact that my wife and I have assiduously kept the slightest mention of armed conflict from his ears.

Unless you know what glory is, the idea that glory is hollow makes precisely no sense. The battle books and the dominance of shooters tell me that glory is fundamentally the feeling one gets from annihilating one’s opponents with the coolest possible technology in a culturally-approved situation, and that other versions of it are metaphorical and transferred. Thank God we don’t actually have to kill anybody to become thoroughly acquainted with the feeling, and the notion. Thank God, that is, for the battle books, and for shooters.

Should we have peaceful games like Pixeljunk Eden, in addition to our shooters? Of course. Am I tired of shooters? Of course. But I really believe that the peaceful games would never seem quite so peaceful had I not played so many hours of Halo and Call of Duty.