Modern warfare has changed, so why haven’t firstperson shooters?

August 29th, 2013, 23:48 Posted By: wraggster

Like just about everyone who picked it up in 2007, I was blown away by the first Modern Warfare. I liked the characters, I liked the pacing and I liked the gameplay. But I also liked it because uniquely it felt – sort of – like it had something to say about the two real-world wars we were busy fighting at the time. On the one hand, we were shown these small groups of very violent, very okay-with-murder soldiers skulking about, off-camera and behind the scenes, hunting down very bad people, as we know they do. And on the other, I liked that for all the ooh-rah bravado of the Marine campaign, the message of that scene in which an entire occupying force of good guy Americans is vaporised by a stolen Russian nuke was that war isn’t always a story of good triumphing over evil.And then in the sequels, that message disappeared. In the CoDs that followed, I’ve stabbed people in the throat, chest and head, trapped someone in a room full of nerve gas, filled a man’s mouth with broken glass and thumped him, hanged someone else, and machine gunned holidaymakers in an airport. But then I’ve also stopped several Russian invasions, destroyed two nuclear missiles and won the Second World War. I’m not sure whether if you could punch all those pluses and minuses into an omniscient ethics calculator I’d come out as good, bad or perhaps some happy medium – maybe on the karmic level of a milkman. But then, in these recent Call Of Dutys, you’re not supposed to ask that. As far as they and the vast majority of modern, hyper-successful shooters are concerned, you are a clear-cut hero, fighting the good fight by any means possible.But while the CoD template has remained the same since 2007, public opinion on the wars we’re fighting has shifted. We don’t like drone strikes, we don’t like digital surveillance and we don’t like Guantanamo Bay, no matter how many assurances we get that they’re a necessary cost of war. We have whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden risking their lives and their freedoms to leak evidence of alleged war crimes, and millions of people around the world loudly coming out in support of them. So why don’t our video games reflect that? Why don’t we have something that gives us war in all its shades of moral grey, rather than just force-feeding us a steady slurry of jingoism and exploding landmarks? What we need is a modern Modern Warfare: a game that gives us what people like Manning and Snowden are proving is so important in modern conflict: choice.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...rson-shooters/

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