If Video Games Are Art, Let Them Challenge Us
We can handle it
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, announced last week and releasing in October, is a realistic take on the global conflicts happening today, and apparently its harsh depictions of war are enough to prompt a prominent games journalist to call for the outright censorship of certain scenes.
Frankly, it disgusts me whenever someone with actual clout and influence calls for the banning of things he or she doesn't like, which is happening more and more these days. It feels like an authoritarian temper tantrum, where those offended think because something isn’t to their tastes, no one else has the right to experience it.
But it’s even worse when calls for censorship come from games journalists—people who should understand and support free speech more than anyone. Those among the gaming press are usually the first to classify video games as art, so why are they the same ones calling for censorship whenever developers actually make an effort to create a mature, thought-provoking product? It’s an incredible cognitive dissonance that needs to be called out.
According to a piece by Venture Beat journalist Dean Takahashi, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a reimagining of 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The new game apparently takes the Modern Warfare moniker seriously. As Takahashi describes, one mission has you playing as a soldier who rushes into a house of terrorists and shoots unarmed enemies, including women, who make breaks for weapons and bomb detonators.
In another scene, you play as a young Middle Eastern girl whose town is destroyed by enemy combatants. After being dug out of rubble, you run home to find a Russian soldier who kills your father and begins hunting you. You hide and make sneak attacks on the soldier to eventually kill him. Grabbing a gas mask, you escape the town, which is being bombarded with poisonous fumes.
Apparently this was all too gritty and realistic for Takahashi.
“My reaction is not that the developers should censor themselves or someone else should censor them,” Takahashi writes, saying only a few paragraphs later, “this single-player campaign should not ship with these scenes.”
Not only can Takahashi not keep his principles consistent across articles, he can’t keep them straight in the same piece.
For the life of me, I cannot sympathize with Takahashi’s viewpoint. In fact, considering Takahashi’s numerous other blunders, he should do the world of games journalism a favor and find a new profession. To call for the censorship of a video game is ridiculous, especially coming from someone who wants, or at least should want, the hobby taken seriously.
The scenes Takahashi described are on par with any modern book, movie, or television show depicting war. I’ve heard worse stories from the evening news. I immediately think of Saving Private Ryan, a 20-year-old movie that depicts incredibly graphic violence and the deaths of child members of Hitler Youth. This and other media that show the realities of war don’t do so to glorify it, they do it to give the world a stark, harrowing reminder of the atrocities that happen in the world. Why can’t video games be given that same privilege?
What’s strange about Takahashi’s opinion is that graphic, disturbing content is nothing new to video games. In fact, I’d argue it has been much worse in the past, and Takahashi’s book-burning mentality here shows only how sensitive some have become to uncomfortable creative expression.
I vividly remember the first time I played the No Russian mission in 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The opening scene has you playing as a Russian terrorist who guns down hundreds of unarmed civilians in an airport. I was wide-eyed and horrified as I played this mission—something that would never be released nowadays, I might add—because it gave me probably the most chilling perception of what it would be like to be the victim of a terrorist attack.
Not every game needs this type of shocking content, and there’s a right and wrong way to handle it. But that doesn’t mean we should call for censorship when a developer wants to address these issues.
The message in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s trailer is that in war, there is no black and white. Morality is gray, and the game presents that fascinating idea by giving players to ability to choose how to react in battles. If done well, the game will mirror the intensity of that scene in American Sniper where Chris Kyle regrettably shoots a child and a woman to protect his fellow soldiers. Those are feelings worth exploring, and I applaud Activision for its attempt.
“All we ever really want to do is make players feel something,” said Jacob Minkoff, the company's campaign gameplay director. “Players have unanimously told us they want those emotional connections. They want complex, morally gray characters. They want gameplay that feels ripped from the headlines and delivers relevant, relatable and provocative moments that only Modern Warfare would have the guts to show.”
To that, I say, “Bring it on.” If Activision can pull it off, Modern Warfare might be able to grow past its reputation as a mindless, Hollywood-esque shooter into something that makes its players actually think and challenge their perceptions of the world.
Do you really want games to remain stagnant, Takahashi, or do you want the medium to mature and actually be taken seriously? Because calls for censorship will do nothing but hinder the industry.