In Defense of Offense: Why We Gamers Shoot
Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Halo 4
If you’re playing a popular video game on your television these days, there’s a good chance that you’re pretending to shoot something.
Call of Duty: Black Ops II.
A screen shot from Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which imagines a Defense Secretary Petraeus in 2025
The worlds of many blockbusters for the PlayStation and Xbox systems are seen down the barrel of a gun, which to an outsider might seem to limit the range of possible expression. More pretend violence. More men shooting men. More expensive virtual realms in which the right to bear arms is about the only right anyone exercises.
Sure enough, two of this month’s (and this year’s) biggest gaming blockbusters, Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, consist mostly of shooting and not being shot. Both games, however, justify this point. Both demonstrate how interesting and worthwhile the shooting in a video game can be.
Forget that Halo 4 is a science-fiction heroic epic, set to begin a second multimillion-selling trilogy, as we control Master Chief, the armored space Marine (and possible species savior), in gunfights on strange new worlds. Forget that Call of Duty: Black Ops II is the nth annual military shooter and possibly the biggest moneymaker of any piece of new entertainment of the year. These trappings don’t make these games fun. The shooting does.
Shooting in video games is ultimately the connecting of Point A to Point B, the elimination of one set of shapes, representing the enemy, from a TV screen to keep another arrangement of shapes, representing you, illuminated and ready for the next encounter. A good shooter game is a laboratory for tactical decisions and a test chamber for your reflexes and wits. It’s armed checkers or chess with no resting for turn taking. Halo 4 and Black Ops II both qualify as very good new shooters, though in surprisingly different ways.
But first, some context is needed. Because even though shooting is the core of these games, it’s neither what obviously distinguishes them nor what the marketers of these games or even your own eyes might suggest define them.
One game bellows barely intelligible space opera; the other spits out well-chewed Tom Clancy mixed with James Bond. One is sci-fi and allows the odd romance to flicker between our faceless supersoldier hero and the voluptuous, artificially intelligent female hologram who tells our supersoldier where to go to find the next aliens to shoot. The other game is a mélange of American anxieties about the backfired partnerships of the cold war and the continuing drone warfare of today.
In one level of Black Ops II, set in the 1980s, the Afghan mujahedeen turn their guns on their American friends. In a level set in 2025, American drones are reprogrammed by a terrorist to bomb Los Angeles. Oliver North, the Reagan-era national security aide at the heart of the Iran-contra affair, advised the production, though his in-game cameo will now raise fewer eyebrows than will the appearance, in virtual form, of the newly resigned director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus. The game’s defense secretary in 2025 is voiced by an actor and mostly just stands around, loyally serving a Hillary Rodham Clinton look-alike president, his programmers doubtless unaware of how unintentionally odd their inclusion of Mr. Petraeus would be.
As interesting as the settings and situations are in Halo and Black Ops II, they’re practically irrelevant to those who enjoy these games. Shooters engage people as a presentation of conundrums that last as long as a quick exchange of gunfire and that are eligible for a painless do-over after any failure.
Someone once said that video games were really just about cleaning, about finding the right tools to scrub enemies from a scene. In Halo games the vacuum, mop and dust rag have been the gun, the grenade and the melee. Recent versions have added equipment like jetpacks or, in Halo 4, a floating sentry turret and glide jets, among other things. The typical encounter has involved approaching an enemy force and maybe tossing a grenade to make it scramble or drop its shields, then shooting it to soften it up further, then running in to punch it, then hanging back to heal rapidly.
Halo 4, which plays more like a stunningly beautiful remake than like a sequel, does little to change this other than to introduce one excellent new enemy, the Promethean. This bad guy is a sort of robo-knight who is often abetted by machine-gun-armed attack dogs and a floating turret that can douse the knight with shields or even revive it. The Promethean presents a challenge for players who must decide during encounter after encounter in which order to eliminate those foes and with which weapons.
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