Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and its Ties to ‘The War on Terror’

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Remastered has had a turbulent time this past year - being held hostage by Infinite Warfare, then getting micro-transactions AND DLC forced upon it before finally being sold as its own product (but not including the DLC because Activision's bank balance is low).

Nevertheless, with CoD4 still grabbing headlines, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the games place in gaming and mass-media culture. For the last decade, Call of Duty has captured the minds of gamers across the globe. With ever increasing sales figures and user base, the series has become somewhat of a cultural icon. 

But in this decade another idea has made itself present in virtually every aspect of Western culture, and that is the so-called ‘War on Terror’. Both have dominated the news media, but has a very real war changed how we should look at a virtual one? Is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare part of the ‘War on Terror’ metanarrative?

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We should start by examining the setting. Call of Duty 4 begins in the sands of the Middle East, in a fictional country that stretches from Saudi Arabia to Iran. This fictional nation is not given a name, and is only shown in a state of chaos – there is a military Coupe D’état underway, with the former president being executed by one of the antagonists, Kaled al-Assad, live on national television. 

This is all the player is told in the way of backstory, and is part of a problematic portrayal of the Middle East – that the Middle East is (in this case, literally) a singular nation and usually in a state of upheaval. This attitude is shared by the broader news media; a post-colonial attitude of defining the Middle East as a nation in of itself, much like it has with Africa. By treating the peoples of the Middle East as a singular community, the Western media are engaging with what is called the “availability heuristic” of the audience; a dangerous method of translating ideas as it can create negative and even false associations of certain groups in the viewers mind.

These false associations appear to be most pervasive in the news media, where two thirds of news articles involving the Middle East, Islam, and Muslims in the United Kingdom focused on terrorism and cultural differences. Meanwhile in Pakistan, Call of Duty and Medal of Honor have been outright banned because of their poor portrayal of Muslims and Islam. Call of Duty 4 is therefore complicit in this negative meta-narrative by failing to apply individual identities to Islamic communities or nations.

Raven Software, 2016

The game also engages with some of the ideas and issues born out of Orientalism, and combines them with the ideological differences of the Cold War. The game’s opening cinematic allows the player to inhabit the body of the former president as he is driven to his execution. As they look around, the player will witness many atrocities being committed by al-Assad’s forces. But there is no meaningful context to any of this, and there is no attempt to explain the situation other than the later revelation that a Russian Ultra-Nationalist (effectively a Communist, as the faction’s symbol is a hammer and sickle) funded al-Assad’s Coup against a, presumably, Western friendly leader.

This situation links with older media narratives of the Cold War, and how the West, or the political Right, was in conflict with the East, or political Left. This attitude was often radiated outward by Western leaders, notably by Ronald Reagan, and lead to proxy conflicts like the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. However, the Western media dropped the political narrative because it was dull, and changed it into a narrative of 'Good vs Evil’.

This over-simplified model for the world fits well with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s story, as the lack of deeper context, questions of what life was like under the former president or why al-Assad was dissatisfied with his government, need not be explored or even acknowledged. This simplification bears a resemblance to Orientalism, in that the West does not try to understand what happens in the Middle East or why, but simply takes the present and applies its own narratives. These narratives often serve to undermine and disenfranchise the peoples of the East, and we come back to denying these peoples identities and breeding resentment in a process called "othering".

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Othering in Call of Duty 4 continues throughout the game, even after the brief glimpses of civilians in the prologue, which is the last time we see any aspects of normal civilian life in the game. The only native people of this nation that the player encounters after the prologue are in military uniforms and carrying guns. This re-enforces the idea that the entire nation is militant and aggressively resisting Western intervention. But why? Maybe the people of the fictional nation do not wish to be placed under a Western friendly leader due to bad experiences with a similar, former president? Someone knows, just not the player.

This lack of acknowledgement to why there is such widespread fighting would work well with an element of Adam Curtis’ Bitter Lake, where we’re told of the “allergic reaction” that Afghanistan had to Western forces when they arrived in the country in 2001. Despite the West’s noble intention to bring democracy to Afghanistan, the native people resented and even hated the Western troops because of Western collusion with warlords to bring some order to the country, the same warlords that tore the country apart in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal in the 1980s. This dissatisfaction lead to more violence, which lead to Western troops treating the innocent locals as if they were Taliban. This also draws disturbing parallels to what is now known of the US government’s definition of a militant in Afghanistan: "any male of military age" within the area of operations is seen as a legitimate target by the US military. By excluding representations of civilian life, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare perpetuates the idea that the fictional Middle Eastern nation consists of nothing more than military aged males and that everyone there is a target for the player to engage.

Raven Software, 2016

So how does othering affect the player? For a start we can look at the multiplayer faction referred to as ‘OpFor’. This is a US military term used in training exercises and is given to troops playing the role of the enemy, or Opposing Force. In practice, this allows US military personnel to take on the role of the “bad guys”, Taliban or Iraqi insurgents, without having to actively identify or empathise with these groups – why would you if you’re going to shoot at these people? Its inclusion in Call of Duty 4 is most certainly due to the Western media’s attitude towards these groups: these people are evil, and the West is a force for good. This has been the status quo in the media since the 1990s and arguable since the Cold War, and Call of Duty 4 is not the first time we have seen this in gaming.

In 2010, Medal of Honor was forced by US news outlets to stop players from playing as the Taliban, despite the game taking place in Afghanistan and making contextual sense, because, according to Fox News at least, it was “disrespectful”. The US military even banned Medal of Honor from being sold on US military bases due to this.

Another example of this attitude comes from America’s Army, a game developed and funded by the US military. In America’s Army, the opponents of the US army appear to be Middle Eastern, but the player is never allowed to play in this role. This is due to the fact that the models are always reskinned, so the player sees themselves and the other members of their team as the US army. These three examples tie together, demonstrating a deep issue within gaming culture – because these people are seen as evil by the broader Western media, the player is not allowed to engage with their representations for fear that they will identify and empathise with them.

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Thankfully Call of Duty 4 moves on from othering Middle Eastern peoples and instead joins the Western news media criticism of the “Rumsfeld Doctrine”. This doctrine is an aspect of US foreign policy during the Iraq invasion of 2003, and involves the use of small numbers of troops on the ground, fast assaults on strategic points, searching for targets and then calling air strikes and artillery on verified threats. In theory, this “evolution” of manoeuvre warfare lowers the number of potential friendly casualties whilst maintaining combat effectiveness, but in reality it was demonstrated as "having just enough troops to lose."

In reality Iraq descended into looting and anarchy after the three week long “Thunder Run” to Baghdad, because the US had not sent enough troops to muster a peacekeeping force. And we see allegories in Call of Duty 4 to this situation – the US invasion of the fictional Middle Eastern nation is achieved through fast helicopter assaults on key targets, reminiscent of Black Hawk Down and the Battle of Mogadishu of 1991. These assaults are quick, and see the Marines only taking a handful of casualties. However, the main objective of this initial strike, capturing al-Assad, ends in failure as the Marines find no evidence he was there in the first place – reminiscent of the failure to capture Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003.

The Baghdad allegories keep coming as well in the final level of the US Marine campaign in Call of Duty 4. The Marines stage another assault into the capital city, but fail to take any meaningful ground – after some apparently ineffective airstrikes, there is sporadic fighting and the player jumps from district to district rescuing cut off comrades. This is all too like Baghdad in 2003, where Fedayeen fighters roamed freely around the city and the airstrikes killed more civilians than legitimate targets.

Parallels can also be drawn to the initial invasion of Afghanistan, where “1,000 civilians were directly killed by airstrikes and a further 3,200 died of starvation, exposure, associated illnesses or injury sustained while in flight from war zones”, according to Medea Benjamin’s Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control. In this regard then, Call of Duty 4 is following the Western news media’s example by using these facts in order to show that the “Rumsfeld Doctrine” often suffered from poor planning and coordination.

Raven Software, 2016

There is also another media narrative that comes into play, and that is something that Adam Curtis has described as “Oh Dearism” (part 1 is linked above, while part 2 resides here). This concept is a way of over saturating the news with stories of terrible events, and constantly updating them to the point where they’re meaningless. Call of Duty 4 plays into this concept by revealing the antagonist Kaled al-Assad is not in fact the central villain, but a puppet. The nuking of hundreds of thousands of Marines and civilians was merely a cover for the real antagonist, Imran Zakhaev, whilst he advances his political goals in Russia. Curtis’ extension of “Oh Dearism” would describe him as a non-linear, post-modern villain because the player cannot be sure who the real antagonist is.

Elsewhere in the games world, Western Special Forces accidentally kill Zakhaev’s son whilst trying to extradite him. The fact that these supposedly ‘good’ men have caused the death of this man relates to what was happening with Special Forces raids in Afghanistan. A thousand people were arrested around the globe and placed in US custody because of poor information, and night raids were often conducted in Afghanistan on faulty intelligence, leading to, in one case, an Afghan police commander and four others being killed - including two pregnant women. The situation was so dire and the attacks so regular, the Special Forces in Afghanistan became known to the locals as “the American Taliban”.

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To sum up, the representation of the ‘War on Terror’ in Call of Duty 4’s narrative is difficult to explain. Being made in 2008, I don’t know if it was some kind of protest as to the events that had happened in the 5 years prior or perhaps a parody, or if Infinity Ward simply set out to make a great game based on contemporary situations. But the fact is it ties rather too neatly with both the advancement/failure of US foreign policy, particularly the “Rumsfeld Doctrine”, and the evolving meta-narratives of the Western media, leaning more towards the latter.

Not content with its undertones of disenfranchisement and othering, it shows the disaster of an invasion blowing up in the United States face, and the game then makes the narrative more complex to the point where there are new antagonists and no one, not even friendlies, can be trusted to do good. This, in my mind, stops Call of Duty 4 from forming its own identity and message. It confuses itself between pro and anti-war, and in doing so it becomes a part of the problematic depiction of the Middle East the West still holds to this day.