Who would have expected a multimillion-dollar, mainstream blockbuster video game to be able to be serious? When the newest iteration of the Call of Duty series was announced in 2007, the prospect of a high budget game about “modern warfare” was not very promising. In fact, I feared the worst: another example of excellent action gameplay wrapped in a pseudopropagandistic narrative that tried to glamorize modern warfare.
Surprisingly enough, I was wrong. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare did have a tendency to fetishize the military, but it also delivered a carefully crafted narrative that questioned the nature of “modern warfare.” Don’t get me wrong: Modern Warfare is a militaristic shooter, an adrenaline rush that combines outstandingly crafted action gameplay with a semirealistic depiction of weapons, tactics, and military lingo. But it is also a narrative-driven game that proposes a different discourse about warfare. This narrative was not presented as conventional cut scenes, but as authored sequences with limited player agency. The careful combination of limited agency with authored narrative made Modern Warfare stand out as a popular yet thoughtful militaristic video game.
Modern Warfare’s economic and creative success led inevitably to a sequel, a title that pushed the techniques pioneered in Modern Warfare.1 However, it did push too far, and one of its central gameplay sequences became an example of militaristic shooters gone wrong. In Modern Warfare 2’s infamous “No Russian” level, players were forced to witness, or participate in, the slaughter of innocent civilians in an airport. The level created controversy, but it failed to generate the same kind of thoughtful interpretations that the previous game had. Still a great computer game in terms of its gameplay design, Modern Warfare 2 failed to create a nuanced emotional experience for players.
Military games, and particularly first-person shooters, are as popular a product as they are criticized for being vehicles for propagandistic discourses. Most of these critiques are right. Many military computer games are propaganda devices that use the medium of games to promote epic stories of misunderstood heroism (see Breuer, Festl, and Quandt 2012). These games do not question the origins, context, or role of politics in wars, trivializing the real consequences of war by turning everything into a visual roller coaster representing basic cops-and-robbers gameplay. Video games can be excellent instruments for propaganda (see Chomsky and Herman 2010) because we can decouple the pleasures of the core loops (shoot-hide-reload-shoot) from the fictional context used to communicate these loops (war in the Middle East). The fictional element of the game attracts us, but the core loops engage us, and then we stop seeing the fiction and its messages as rhetorical acts, but instead as justifications for our actions. But there are alternatives to this approach.
In this chapter I will be looking at these two titles to provide an account of how they tried to create an emotional/reflective bond with the player, and why Modern Warfare 2 fails at this. These two games share a particular design approach to narratives, which I define as “authored agency.” Authored agency was used to create a frame of interpretation designed to engage players morally. This player complicity will be subject to an analysis, using virtue ethics and my own theory of ethical gameplay, to explain why Modern Warfare succeeds at creating player complicity through authored agency, while Modern Warfare 2 fails at doing so, despite the use of similar techniques.
This chapter has a broader mission, though. Militaristic computer games are, together with sports games, the last bastions of classic AAA productions, and can be defined as the games for the core audience. In fact, these games are often defining not only what AAA and the games industry are for a broader audience, but also the image and culture of new hardware. Modern consoles are often sold on their lavish graphics, which are often illustrated with explosions and gore. This is an obvious problem in times of illegal, unethical wars—that our mainstream entertainment glorifies the visual appearance of war without questioning its meaning, impact and role in society.
However, I believe that if we are able to articulate alternative, richer ways of designing and interpreting militaristic computer games, if we dare to address our unethical war times, with wars forged by lies and strategic global surveillance, from a reflective entertainment perspective, we will be able to not only reach a broader audience and perhaps contribute to change their worldview, but also to enrich the cultural presence of games and their role in configuring our understanding of the world around us. We can make even militaristic computer games devices for moral reflection, if we dare to engage players beyond the pleasures of conflict, in reflective practices of gameplay.
Military games will always be popular, because they appeal to our core interest in agonistic play, and because war has a strong cultural, social, and rhetorical effect in our culture. However, not all games need to be propagandistic tools. We can reclaim military games as reflective devices, as instruments for critically engaging with the importance and effect of war, and its consequences. These games might not teach us lessons, but they could give us arguments, ideas, or emotions to deal with the impact of war. We will not lose battles playing these games, but we can, to the extent we demand them to be expressive, win culture wars.
Modern Warfare does not hide its cards. A game about war, developed in the period of the Iraq war, it sets its stage immediately. We are in the Middle East, in a land ravaged by civil war. Our character is a prisoner in the hands of an irregular army that controls a city. Without us, as players, being able to do anything about it, we are thrown into a car and driven across a city. We can move our heads, observe. Something will soon happen, we hope. We will be saved, or we will soon have control and the means to protect ourselves. But nothing happens; we just cross the city until we reach a stadium. We are dragged to a pole, bound, and shot. We die.
The starting sequence in Modern Warfare is a reinvention of the narrative introduction pioneered by Half-Life: a narrative introduction with limited agency helps us to recognize environments and get used to basic movement controls and the setting of the game. However, in a clever twist of this design paradigm, Modern Warfare does not give us agency over a hero, but over a victim. We play the dead, in this game of war.
A different type of experience awaits us in Modern Warfare 2. Early in the game, we have to play a sequence where, together with three other characters, we load our weapons and put masks on while going up on an elevator. One last warning before the doors open: “No Russian”—meaning we should not say a word in that language. Once the doors open, we can see our target: the civilian users of an airport. We walk through the terminal, gunning them down. We walk: the game does not allow us to run, or hide. Our only choice is not to shoot or to shoot, but only to shoot civilians; our weapons are ineffective against our murderous colleagues. Of course, that is because we are an agent infiltrated in a terrorist cell and we don’t want to blow our cover. However, we need to walk through the horror, the chaos, the massive murder of civilians. The sequence then turns into a firefight with the police, after which our terrorist partners, who knew about our actual identity all along, execute us.
“No Russian” has a similar structure to the scripted sequences in the first title: players are given a relative amount of agency that is not related to the control they have over the flow of events or the meaning of their actions.2 Players can witness the massacre or participate in it, but they cannot stop it.
These types of limited agency sequences have become a hallmark of the Call of Duty series. If Half-Life innovated by scripting us as almost-passive spectators to our arrival in the game setting, Call of Duty modified that paradigm in order to confer a stronger emotional punch. Instead of using limited agency to present the plot and the location, as in Half-Life, Modern Warfare uses these sequences as pivotal plot points that change both the story being told and its meaning.
There are a number of reasons why this might be the case. First, Modern Warfare is a game designed to test our reflexes and coordination. Once we get good at the game, the world in which we play becomes devoid of its meaning and we are just shooting “enemies,” the narrative becoming nothing else than a wrapping. In order to give more meaning to the narrative, the designers of Modern Warfare occasionally vary the pace of the game to introduce sequences that frame player actions. By doing so, the designers ensure that even the most engaged players who might otherwise ignore the narrative could get a feel for the story.
Second, by modifying player agency and its meaning, the designers of Modern Warfare could experiment with the degree of emotional involvement of players, giving them reasons to think about the meaning of their actions. Instead of streamlining a roller coaster of action sequences, the first Modern Warfare game gave players reflective pauses to engage with the narrative domain of the game. For some precious minutes we could have limited agency in the world, but we did not have to engage in the conventional, mechanical activities of conflict gameplay: we just had to watch and play, we just had to observe. In Modern Warfare, these sequences end up in death, because that’s where their draw their dramatic power from: limited agency that leads to death.
It is a convention in computer games that players should be empowered to act and do within the game world whatever they need to do in order to win. To design games is to design activities that players engage with and that pose sufficient challenge such that we can lose, but that can be won by learning new skills. All actions available to players should have a meaning oriented toward the completion of goals and overcoming challenges.
This classic game design wisdom is challenged in those sequences in which players are only given limited control over the game. We as players can look around and move, but that is the extent of our potential interactions. And we do so in order to witness the unfolding of critical sequences of the narrative. In these sequences the purpose is to slow down the pace of the action so we can reflect, think, and be affected. These sequences break the rhythm of gameplay, the cybernetic loop between input, feedback, and output.3
The designs of these sequences share some principles:
I shall call these design devices instances of “authored agency.” Authored, in the sense that the constraints to player agency have a clear intention, closely tied both to the narrative of the game and to an intended experience. The use of “authored” here does not necessarily reflect on the presence of a designer as author; it here refers to a conscious limitation of the interpretations that can be assigned to a particular sequence.
As I have mentioned, in these sequences player agency is limited in relevant ways, often to only movement. Besides the narrative elements, this is where we can see the authorial imprint that seeks a particular interpretive mode: by limiting the agency capacities of players, the interpretive process is directed toward specific meanings. In “No Russian,” we can only walk, not run. We are forced to have the agency of witnesses. In the opening sequence of Modern Warfare, our agency as players is as restrained as that of the character we are playing. We are therefore as helpless as he is.
One could claim that all games have authored agency, because designers create mechanics for players to use in their experience of a game world with the goal of creating particular experiences. However, the widespread use of this concept would not really help us better understand game design. Therefore, I propose to use authored agency to describe those situations in games in which player agency is restricted for expressive purposes—to create frames of interpretation and emotional experiences directed from an authorial presence in the game.
The concept of authorial agency helps explain how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare contributed to broaden the expressive palette of military computer games. Through the use of authored agency, the developers of Modern Warfare attempted to engage players in emotional experiences.
Engaging with the “No Russian” sequence is a voluntary act. We need to explicitly agree to play this sequence. And playing the sequence requires strong willpower; it is a gruesome, gratuitous succession of brutal, unjustified murders. It can easily become a very discomforting experience. Arguably, however, the goal was not to promote violence, but rather the opposite: “No Russian” can be read as a critique of the very concept of (secret) wars and heroic sacrifice. This interpretation is suggested by its authored agency; we are forced to spectate or participate in an event we cannot stop in order to create a reflective, moral experience in players.
I will call this consequence of authored agency “player complicity.” Player complicity defines a type of interpretational and experiential gestalt created when players are forced to submit to an authored agency sequence. The purpose of creating player complicity is to engage players as reflective beings in the activity of playing the game, to tease out the ethical player and force it to interpret the experience of the game.
Player complicity can be seen, then, as a device for engagement: engagement in the emotional sense—creating a particular response to a sequence that is pivotal as far as plot is concerned—but also engagement as an interpretive mode, in which players are given the opportunity to reflect critically about their play experience. The success or failure of authored agency should be measured by the level of player complicity.
From an ethical perspective, player complicity means that when playing, we become complicit with the moral system we engage with, as well as with the fact that, as players, we also have values we play with. Playing is engaging with a game that has its own values, and negotiating ways in which we can reconcile the values presented in it with the values we want to live by. Player morality is negotiated in the wiggle space between the ethics inscribed in the game as an object, the ethics in practice of the game as an experience, and the player as a moral, embodied being with a history and values of her own. Player complicity is a way of directly invoking the player capacity to interpret these values, to read the game from a moral perspective. Player complicity is a challenge to the conventions of interpreting and experiencing a game, a challenge that is designed to take place through particular gameplay structures, like authored agency.
It is this complicity that allows us, as players, to experience the kind of fringe themes often present in games without necessarily running into risks to our moral integrity. Complicity is a type of interpretational opening, a challenge to subvert our expectations and to experience the game using our own moral sense. By becoming complicit with the kind of experience that the game wants us to enjoy, we are also critically open to whatever values we are ourselves going to enact. And the degree of our complicity, the weight we will give to our own values and not to those of the game, will determine our moral behavior in the game.
The use of player complicity in the militaristic context of the Modern Warfare games, then, allows us to read them also as moral experiences. That interpretation will be the focus of my argument that player complicity succeeds in Modern Warfare, while MW2’s “No Russian” fails.
Before analyzing the authored agency of Modern Warfare and Modern Warfare 2 from an ethical perspective, we need to frame what we mean by “ethics” and what its relationship with gameplay is. To do so, I will quickly summarize here my own theory of ethics and games as a framework for analysis.
The first important distinction to make is the one between ethics and morality. Even though I have used these two concepts casually up to now, they are actually specific concepts that we need to have clearly defined in order to use them appropriately in our analysis. Briefly, morality is a public system that defines how we should behave with ourselves and with others, and what are our notions of good and bad, the desirable and the undesirable. Morality is based on a general set of heuristics that can derive from religion, law, or philosophy. The branch of philosophy that asks questions about the nature of good and bad, and that develops heuristics that are then turned into moral practices, is ethics. Colloquially put, ethics is theory, morality is practice.
When looking at games, I argue that we need to take as our analytical starting point the ethical bases of players and of the game. All players come to the game with an assemblage of different ethical systems that govern different instances of their lives. The actions they take in the game, their specific moral understanding of a game, is partially derived from those ethical systems. However, it is only partially derived from it, because games also have ethical systems inscribed in them—sometimes consciously, as part of the design of a gameplay experience. When we talk about the morality of a game, we should be referring to the way the act of playing that game by a moral agent configures those ethical inscriptions into particular moral discourses.
If we want to look at the ethics of computer games, then, we should look at the ways the ethics of a game and the ethics of players fuse into the morality of the gameplay experience, understood as the specific, phenomenological interpretation of a game by a particular individual or group of individuals. I am taking here what ethicists might call a constructivist approach (in the tradition of Aristotelian ethics; see Bynum): there are no a prioris in the morality of the gameplay experience; the experience itself is configured as a moral experience, constructing the morality of the game(play) experience as we play it. That is, we cannot say that a game is ethically wrong, but we can say that the experience of a game by a moral agent is wrong. Violent games, to use a classic example, are not necessarily ethically wrong (they may be tasteless, but that is an aesthetic judgment), but they can yield experiences in which a moral subject is harmed (for instance, by being exposed to a cultural taboo or to a sequence that triggers a trauma), and therefore they can be ethically wrong. We can only make these judgments about the experience of play, not about the game as a cultural object.
My approach to the ethics of games is a hermeneutic one: players approach a game with their ethics and interpret the ethics of the game from that perspective; the moral experience a result of that process of interpretation. This hermeneutic process is filtered through the values of the player outside of the game experience. It is not only the game we play and our ethics as players that define the moral gameplay experience, it is also who we are as moral subjects who engage with a game.
Any ethical analysis of a game, then, needs to define the ethics of players and the game before making any analysis. And to define those ethics, we can use classic philosophical theories. In my case, I am mostly a virtue ethicist, in the classic tradition of Aristotle (see also May), and deeply influenced by Brey (1999) and Verbeek’s (2007) philosophy of technology. I argue that ethics can be seen as a constellation of values that we want to live by, all guiding us toward developing and fulfilling the best of our potential while respecting others and their well-being—and that this moral development cannot be isolated from the experience of technology as a mediator (such as ubiquitous computing) or as a medium, as computer games are in this case. In the case of games, my argument is that when we play games, we interpret the values of a game through our own values as players and embodied beings, and we develop the practices of play, the actual morality of gameplay, by developing a sense of who we want to be as players, and what values we want to foster by that experience.
From this perspective, let’s look at the types of experiences that Modern Warfare proposes, and how they can create ethical gameplay experiences.
In Modern Warfare, authorial agency sets up a particular mode for the interpretation of the game. To make a virtue-ethics interpretation of these sequences, we need to see them as laying the foundations for developing a certain understanding of the virtues the game wants to foster in players as creative, engaged, moral beings. The reason why authored agency works in the context of militaristic games, and particularly in the case of the first Modern Warfare game, is that it breaks the pleasures of agonistic play, of skill-based combat gameplay, in order to make us, players, take a step back and reason about our own agency in the game. Instead of overpowering us, authored agency disempowers us without making us pure spectators. We are spectators, but we still get to participate. We are reminded of our actions as complicit with the narrative of the game. Authored agency creates complicity, and complicity develops a critical view on the narrative and the actions of the game. This critical view allows designers to address complex topics, and to engage players in the narrative of the game not just as a succession of events that they trigger with their actions, but as a story they are helping to unfold. Complicity involves players moving beyond the consumer role into that of the critical interpreter, who has more at stake in the experience of the game than just playing it. In other words, players can understand this military game not as mass-produced propaganda discourse, but as a thoughtful reflection on the role of soldiers, and their vulnerability, in modern warfare.
Therefore, I argue that the first Modern Warfare constructs a fictional world in which players are not heroic, superhuman soldiers, but human warriors, heroic but not invulnerable to combat that is beyond their control. Unlike in many other games, Modern Warfare makes players realize that their actions take place in a larger context, that they are just pawns, vulnerable to the brutality of war. Furthermore, by authoring agency on key sequences of the game, players can take a reflective step back and contemplate their actions. The game lets us foster a critical view on the actions we take, and on the nature of war and conflict. As a spectacle of war, Modern Warfare actively refuses to become an epic work. This is not The Iliad or a John Wayne film. It is a complex intervention in the discourse on war, an appropriation of a medium, maybe even a daring intervention in the core rhetorical structure of the most popular core genre of the AAA game industry.
This critical view is closely tied to the sequences with authored agency. These are sequences focused on the aftermath of the actions we take, or that lead into to the game’s story—the sequences happen on the margins of the main narrative, framing it. We are not direct participants in the major events that drive the plot; our position in the narrative is that of a pawn that makes the story. And by being complicit, we as players can reflect about the meaning of the game, both as an experience and as a cultural artifact embedded in a particular sociocultural time. Complicity challenges us to be reflective, moral beings. And in the context of militaristic games, this means questioning the very nature, meaning and role the games play in our understanding of the mediated imagery of modern warfare.4
The failure of “No Russian” is precisely a failure of complicity. Unlike Modern Warfare, in which the authored agency sequences occupy the fringes of the narrative we play, “No Russian” puts us directly in the action. Complicity is not used as a way of distancing us from the narrative. The ambition of “No Russian” is high: to create complicity not with the story but with the actions themselves—to distance players from the narrative and give them instruments to reflect about the narrative through those actions. Hence the fact that players must participate in the terrible actions that lead to the main narrative of the game. Unlike in Modern Warfare, players do not encounter these actions as active spectators but as participants. This should theoretically lead to a more intricate development of moral complicity, but it does not.
It does not because in order to develop a critical understanding of the game, player agency needs to be closely tied both to the narrative and to the player autonomy in interpreting this narrative. In “No Russian,” player autonomy is very limited, yet the actions are central to the narrative development of the game. We are tasked to be passive observers in a situation in which there are few reasons to justify that passivity. Our character is of course framed as an undercover agent, but even in that case, as players that construct our moral values by playing the game, we need to be able to play by them.
In “No Russian” there is a dissonance between the requirements of the scene as authored agency, and the way moral values at play are developed. We are forced to be spectators on a sequence that demands action, particularly if we want to build our moral being as a player. We are not allowed to create our values if we want to stop the assassination. No matter what, we observe, and that position is a gimmick, a trick of authored agency. Complicity in “No Russian” fails because we are placed in an uncomfortable middle ground that does not help develop a critical understanding of the game actions. “No Russian” does not lead to reflective engagement with the narrative of the game, and therefore it does not give us sufficient interpretational cues to read it as a moral experience.
Authored agency can create complicity that opens a game for interpretation, for the creation of a moral hermeneutics of the game. But for that moral hermeneutic to take place, we need to create a liminal space, an opening in the authored agency that allows us to reflect. If that space for reflection is occupied instead by direct action, as in “No Russian,” complicity will fail.
The design of complicity for ethical reflection is complicated, and it does not require an absolute limitation of agency. However, in the case of authored agency techniques, complicity has to be designed as a consequence of limited agency that allows players to contemplate the experience of the game from a moral hermeneutic perspective.
The success of Modern Warfare in creating complicity through authored agency, and the failure of “No Russian,” can be seen as a way of understanding the cultural role of military computer games in their capacity as expressions of the intersection of propaganda and entertainment. If we want to perform moral readings of military games, we can observe how they fail to create player complicity with the worlds they create. This is my core argument: if we want military games to be instruments for reflective engagement, and not just cheap thrills that are tone-deaf to the state of world affairs5, developers need to look at the expressive possibilities of player complicity. Player complicity should be nothing new for a developer—it is, after all, a modality of engagement. But it is crucially different in that it subverts expectations and engages players not only as consumers, audiences, or input providers, but as complex moral beings.
In this chapter, I have argued that there is a way of vindicating military computer games as devices for reflection, and that some franchises, despite their partial glorification of military conflict, have created experiences that are open to more nuanced interpretations.
I have argued here that player complicity can be an instrument to design “moralized” military game experiences. If developers treat their players as moral agents, and if they give them the spaces to act or reflect upon their actions from a moral perspective, then we will be fulfilling some of the promises of the medium.
Player complicity needs not be a consequence of authored agency. A game like Spec Ops: The Line6 offers a variety of design methodologies to engage players in this kind of experience, from manipulating their agency to breaking the fourth wall. The key is to acknowledge that to interpret these games as moral products that play a role in the configuration of our discourses and understanding of our world, we need the players’ complicity. And this complicity can be a consequence of deliberate design choices.
Miguel Sicart is a game scholar based at the IT University of Copenhagen. For the last decade his research has focused on ethics and computer games, from a philosophical and design theory perspective. He has two books published: The Ethics of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2009) and Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (MIT Press, 2013). His current work focuses on playful design, the subject of Play Matters (MIT Press, 2014). He teaches game and play design, and his research is now focused on toys, materiality, and play.