The aftermath of Modern Warfare 2's 'No Russian' scene.

If you’re into games, you’d be hard pressed to have been able to avoid the super-mega-enormo-release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this week.  This is the first game ever to have a full-blown premiere event, a la the movies.  It is, according to initial stats, the fastest selling computer game ever. The hype train’s been miraculous. And, as you may know if you’re into this sort of thing, the game contains a level, called ‘No Russian’, in which you murder people in an airport.

Okay, more context than that’s required.  You’re a secret CIA operative infiltrating a known terrorist group.  Doing so, you tag along on an attack on an airport, which… well, I just cannot fathom in my mind at all.  But that’s what happens. “Are you sure you want to play this bit?” the game asks you, twice? It could be disturbing for some players, we’re informed. Yes. You can only hope that was the point.

There’s a big debate about this level, in which the terrorist group fires assault weapons into multiple crowds of unarmed civilians.  You can shoot too, if you want, though it’s never necessary.  The game doesn’t acknowledge whether you do or not, though.  That, depending on your viewpoint, might be a big problem.

Below the jump: the scene in question, and some thoughts.  Is it the most horrible, offensive nonsense in the world of gaming?  Is it a brave step for developers Infinity Ward to take?  Read on to find out what I reckon.

[Er, actually, the video's too wide to embed. Bloody template. It's here.]

Right. Crikey. Let’s discuss.

My initial reaction is to be, well, horrified.  Of course, the video was leaked some time before the game’s release on Tuesday, but I’d not bothered watching it because, well, it seemed like another videogame controversy thing a la Grand Theft Auto.  So when I finally saw this a few days ago, I was pretty shocked.  I mean, man!  It’s vicious, brutal and unpleasant.  I showed it to my girlfriend, who sat down before it and said “I doubt it’s as bad as people are saying. I’ve never felt that shocked at anything in a game before.”  She ended up sitting with her hand over her mouth, finding it deeply disturbing.  That was kinda my reaction too.  It’s fucking horrible, y’know?

My reaction after that has been to sway madly between two points of view.  Because first, I thought it was wonderful.  Really wonderful.  Film, literature, television, whatever – they’ve all been doing unpleasant stuff for decades, attemping to instil a sense of genuine horror into the consumer for an aesthetic effect or otherwise.  Art and entertainment have an amazing ability to evoke emotions and thought-processes that might not crop up otherwise in our day-to-day lives.  As I watched this scene unfold, I felt awful.  Really awful.  I hated that I was having to watch it all unfold.  And I really, really love that.

There are a few problems with it, though.  Friend and game critic Phill Cameron found the whole thing to be so ludicrously out of place in what is otherwise a no-brainer shooter that it came to represent “war porn” rather than anything truly poignant.  Others note the suspicious pre-release leak of the video, and suggest it might be a straight-up marketing campaign.  Another writer-of-games-related-stuff, Quintin “Quinns” Smith, noted that it may have worked to then, as a different character, arrive at the airport too late, and be forced to soak up the bloody atmosphere of the aftermath of what you’ve just done.

I’ve considered all these ideas, and agree to an extent.  To bounce off Quinns’ idea, I found myself thinking it would be nice to play as the CIA operative, barricaded into a room somewhere with a group of civilians, watching on in horror as the scene unfolded, powerless to do anything.  I find the agency troubling in a way: that I have to partake in this, rather than watching from afar.  Yet at the same time, this agency is sort of key to why it works.

Indie game Edmund also features a particularly disturbing sequence. Do the low-res graphics make a difference?

‘No Russian’ makes me feel guilty for even watching it, let alone playing it.  With that gun in hand, whether you shoot or not, you’re forced to be complicit with this terrible massacre.  It does not have to be a statement of intent from the player – this is a scripted event, after all – but it is placing you in the shoes of someone doing something unthinkably horrible.  And the feelings that emerge from this enslaved act are beyond what a great majority of videogames are capable of.

That’s why I think ‘No Russian’ marks an important and significant moment in the history of gaming.  Tuesday 10th November was the date on which a piece of mainstream interactive entertainment had you gun down unarmed, innocent civilians, with no tongue in cheek, with a look of deadly seriousness, and in a way that made you feel utterly horrible.  It is a step towards the unthinkable in videogames, a real boundary of taste demolished, and I can only get behind that.

Do works of art have to be morally sound to stand up?  That’s been a great dillema in a few media.  Consider the Triumph of the Will, a film that glorified the Nazi party, condemned by critics but lauded by cinematographers as one of the most beautifully crafted, intentionally uneasy works of cinema in all of the medium’s history.  I wouldn’t want to hold Modern Warfare 2 on the same pillar as that, but the parallel’s there.  If The Path did it for indie games back in March, asking that you marched young girls into the woods in order for them to be “ravaged” by “wolves”, Modern Warfare 2 is doing it for the mainstream gaming hardcore today.  I’m going to give Infinity Ward the benefit of the doubt, as for this, I really want to praise them for being fantastically brave.

Interestingly, another indie game played with a similarly repugnant act and the agency thing a while back.  It’s called Edmund, and features a scene in which your character rapes a woman at a bus stop.  I’d be interested to hear from people who’ve played both (Edmund is free, incidentally, and will run on everyone’s computers) what they thought of the comparison.  Obviously, Edmund is pixel-art whereas Modern Warfare 2’s animations are almost uncomfortably realistic.  I mean, check out the bit in ‘No Russian’ where the guy sits, obviously panicking, bleeding from the stomach.  I have no doubt that this added to my repulsion.  So is it because of the agency that we aren’t comfortable with this, or is it a realism thing too?  Are we pushing it too far?

Yeah, we probably are.  But I’ll defend devs’ right to do so for all time.