Kahunaburger said:
I've definitely seen this. There's someone on this forum (I forget who) who unironically believes that CoD4 is a landmark in vidya gaem storytelling because a controllable character gets nuked.
Yes, the guys name is Zero Punctuation or Yahtzee. You may remember him from his work as one of the (if not thee) most followed game journalists ever. And he is completely right. In terms of story telling it's was a giant break from every other FPS game where you just waded through 'baddies' essentially invincible and without consequence. Because all of a sudden you became very mortal, very weak and insignificant for a very short time. It made a statement no other FPS game yet had.
Sixcess said:
The only one that bothered me was "No Russian."
In retrospect I'm not entirely sure why. I've done my share of casual bystander slaughter in the GTA games. I enjoyed Prototype, a game where you slaughter civilians almost literally every time you walk down the street. I think what bothered me about MW2 was how blatantly cynical it was - there's no reason for it to exist other than for shock value and lulz.
Thing's can serve multiple purposes. It can be there to make the press pay more attention to the game, to get more media and make people think its edgy. It can also be there at the same time to say something that hasn't really been said before in games. Which is that the people who you think are the protagonists aren't always the good guys(which was something of a theme with the game, considering General Shepherd.) You had always been used to games where the good guys were the good guys, and the bad guys were muahahah evil and twirled their moustaches. Which isn't to say there aren't evil people out there, just that things are more grey in real life.
And they showed that by having you play as one of the 'good' guys. Gunning down civilians. Civilians who ran, who tried to surrender, who helped each other out by braving the bullets to try to help the wounded. Who acted human and real in ways that GTA(and presumably prototype) never portray. Because GTA is too wrapped up in the cartoonieness for people to take it seriously in that way. And if you look at the history of the US, things are never black and white. They are like MW2 presented them, grey on grey. The US has done some pretty despicable things as has every other country. And at the forefront of that is the CIA, which routinely tortures people, kidnaps innocent people and yes performs acts of terror in the name of their greater good.
It is a scene which I think should either not be seen by children or anyone not capable of handling it on an intellectual level. Or it should be something that parents sit down and talk about. Because it says a lot of things that people, especially youths, have a hard time processing and its likely that as you did they don't take away anything valuable from it. Or the potential opposite, they unnecessarily take away something bad from it.
Sixcess said:
It's not a moral dilemma - since the option to shoot your 'friends' is artificially blocked.
This was the first thing I tried : (
It does, however, let you not attack the civilians. I simply shot over top of their heads or around them. But I did end up getting clipped by a security guard and had to gun him down. For which I felt bad for having to do, as he was only doing his job and protecting civilians.
Sixcess said:
It's not even shock/gore or 'realism' - since your targets just fall over when, let's be blunt, firing a gun that size, that calibre, at close range against unarmoured targets should leave you ankle deep in entrails.
Realism comes in many different ways. You can tell an emotional realism without presenting superfluous gore, and I think that's what they were trying to do.
Sixcess said:
I guess it was there to grab headlines, and it certainly succeeded at that, but it's irresponsible for Activision to use one of the biggest selling gaming franchises in the world to provoke a negative media reaction in the name of publicity.
I don't find that to be irresponsible at all, anyone playing the game should either have an emotional maturity wherein they can process the information they are getting correctly, or they should have the resources to help them get there(IE parents.) Its not a game for children, it got a mature rating. I actually don't have a problem with younger people playing the game, the first call of duty came out when I was 15, and I had been playing violent games before that(Doom and Quake 1&2.) But my parents didn't ignore me. We never really talked specifically that much about video games in that light, because back then they were mostly killing demons and evil space aliens. But we talked about right and wrong through other mediums and we debated morality pretty often. This isn't the era(I'm pretty sure there never was one though) when you can ignore your children and pop in a DvD or turn on a video game. For some things that might be fine(Disney's Tangled has probably not scarred any children to date.) But you have to take an active roll and an actively interest in what they are doing. And if something comes up like a level where you pretty viscerally, in terms of emotional toll, hurt unarmed people. That bears either not buying it for your kids, or having a serious sit down with them.
Muspelheim said:
True, I had forgotten about that... In a way, I can understand what they were going with, and it was interesting to (sort of) see the perspective of the baddies, while also taking the role of the ultimate modern villain we have in this day and age; the merciless terrorist.
You don't play as a terrorist. You play as a CIA agent infiltrating terrorists. Which is true to life and shouldn't shock you any more than reading the history of what the CIA has done. What it showed was that America wasn't all powerful or all good.
Muspelheim said:
But it fell completly flat the moment the game expected me to feel enraged when the Russians did the same thing, creating a silent statement of "Well, those were foreigners, they're less valuable", which really got under my skin.
If you're talking about the third game when they kill civilians, that was entirely for shock value. Because all the good people at Infinity Ward got fired/quit. If you're talking about the second game where they invade the US, what makes you think you're supposed to feel at all different about the videogame people dying than when you did in the airport scene. Perhaps you're supposed to feel enraged at both; because I certainly didn't feel like either side was in the right; but that's war. So it sounds like your personal problem reading into things that don't exist.
