The Gray Morality of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 - Wall Street Journal (blog)

By Christopher John Farley

If you had asked anybody just a few years ago whether or not they could imagine Trent Reznor and Oliver North’s names just inches away from one another in the credits for a creative project, they probably would have laughed. But such is the odd state of pop culture today, or at least the enormous reach of Activision’s “Call of Duty” franchiseâ€"that, six years after Reznor cursed out Fox News for using three of his songs on North’s television show, the two can sit contentedly side-by-side in the closing credits of “Black Ops 2.”

“Call of Duty” aims to be more than a game. Even Mark Lamia, the studio head of “Black Ops 2’s” developer Treyarch, told me that its “really three games” fit into one disc.

Some of these games are incredibly fun, fiercely competitive, or both. But as a story told through the single player campaign, “Black Ops 2” tries to hold all of its strange ironies and seeming contradictions (like Reznor and North) together by reaching back into ugly periods of recent American history and pulling them into a near future of barely controlled lethal technology and looming geopolitical strife. Players run through villages and war-torn slums with Manuel Noriega, only to call on fearsome and animalistic drones to do their dirty work minutes later. It is breathtaking “bombast,” to use Reznor’s own descriptor. But as political fiction or theater, it stretches itself to a breaking point.

I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just note that pretty much every recent “Call of Duty” campaign follows a similar story: a group of soldiers seek information about a possible doomsday device. A sneering and heavily scarred villain from some part of Russia, the Middle East, or Latin America tactfully evades their pursuit, manipulating several major world powers to the precipice of war in the process. One of the more grizzled soldiers has a series of flashbacks about his untimely confrontation with the villain years before he attained the doomsday device, a confrontation that usually occurs behind the scenes of a famously controversial real-world military snafu. Several hours later, you (playing the protagonist) plunge headfirst into a last-ditch effort to stop the doomsday plans. Your squad all but destroyed and the world on the brink of collapse, you end up desperately and brutally murdering the bad guy, usually with your bare hands, in a gruesome final act.

Black Ops 2 changes the narrative slightly, but the paradigm remains. The real innovation in the new game comes less from the spectacular set-pieces than the gadgets placed in your hands. Compared to the magical realism of most video games, military shooters are often criticized for offering a bland inventory of gunsâ€"which, after all, are the main tools you use to play the game. And even earlier Call of Duty games have fallen prey to the syndrome of featuring dozens of weapons that all do basically the same thing in the same exact way.

Here Black Ops 2 does not disappoint. Each of the guns feels meticulously balanced and substantially fresh, offering slight but intriguing developments to modern-day weaponry that subtly refashion their purpose. The Millimeter Scanner (MMS) pulses intermittently on top of a submachine gun or assault rifle to outline enemies through concealing smoke or cover. A new kind of grenade known as the “XM31” launches from a band on the player’s wrist, adjusting the accuracy and speed of its fire compared to the blindly hopeful way players like me usually throw grenades in “Call of Duty.”

And then, of course, there are the drones, which range from chirping and springy centipede-like critters to ominous jet-black aircrafts.

Yet the simple fun of playing with all these news toys is stymied by the self-seriousness of the campaign. On a narrative level, every moment of the game serves to remind of the dangerous and unseen consequences of these gadgets, an over-sombre gesture that the story itself can’t seem to stomach.

“We’re all puppets,” Frank Woods, a particularly old and grizzled soldier who appeared in the original Black Ops, tells his younger counterpart (protagonist Alex Mason) in a cut-scene shortly before the attack of the drones officially begins. An hour or two later, that same young man jumps into an unmanned jet oozing with ominous technological sophistication. A soldier asks Mason if he’s ever piloted a machine like this before, to which he simply says no.

“Well, you’re gonna fly one now,” the brother-in-arms replies surprisingly cheerfully, considering that Los Angeles is in ruins and he held a cowering President of the United States in his arms to shield her from gunfire moments ago.

The gameplay itself echoes this tension. Military shooters are referred as the rollercoaster rides of videogamesâ€"short, adrenaline-filled bursts of excitement in which the entire system derails if you veer too far from the track. No doubt, this allows developers to script some of the most stunning moments when explosions trigger and buildings collapse at just the right moment for you to narrowly escape them. But the lane left open for actual gameplay between each of these big explosions is frustratingly constricted.

More than anything else, the arbitrariness of these rules punctures whatever realism or “plausible authenticity” a military shooter like Call of Duty is meant to have. There were countless moments where I simply walked the wrong direction, stood up or crouched too soon, and the screen inexplicably fadedâ€"the sign that I had been killed or failed an objective. In the middle of a heated firefight, a title screen would calmly remind me to step back and not accidentally shoot civilians, an awkward way to absolve the player of any meaningful moral dilemma by rendering the notion of civilian casualties or collateral damage a moot point.

By this point in the history of games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honor, they feel more akin to the old Time Crisis arcade shooters of yoreâ€"carnival-like games that simply forked over fresh batches of bad guys and even highlighted which ones to targetâ€"than the nuanced strategy that other first-person shooters Halo 4 or Dishonored provide today. It may be comparing apples and oranges, but the lack of meaningful choice for your own action starts to feel like an actual physical restrain in Black Ops 2.

Combining authored storytelling with dynamic gameplay is a complicated and thorny task. And Black Ops 2 tries to snake its way around this dilemma by introducing branching storylines and varied outcomes, a first for the series. But the emphasis put on the dialogue as opposed to the spectacle of the narrative stifles a coherent story. After wading through mountains of technobabble and Tom Clancy-ish jargon, important details are hidden in the most untimely moments, and seemingly major characters vanish without a trace. The one primary emotion expressed in the game is the inchoate rage of the villain, whose real human grievances are overshadowed by a pathological and not-too-subtle sexual obsession with his dead sister.

The difference in the game’s final outcomes are correspondingly maximalist, forcing the player to choose between a handful of outcomes that seem to resolve little else but the likelihood of a sequel. But that’s almost part of the captivating experience of playing Black Ops 2: the sense of being enthralled or encaged by something bigger than yourself. Because Call of Duty itself, after all, will keep moving forward with its legions of Zombies players and e-sport competitors whether or not you choose to buy this particular installment. The real “choice” of the player is whether or not to give in to the game’s fiction at all, a choice that feels like Activision and Treyarch basically telling you to either join the party or just go home.

When I spoke to the political scientist P.W. Singer, who served as a consultant for Black Ops 2, he described a real-world concern that “we rely on technologies that we increasingly don’t understand, and don’t even control.” It’s a fear the game winks at in jarring moments and tiny details, such as when I first realized that the futuristic retina scanners you occasionally have to circumvent bear an eerie resemblance to the power button of the Xbox 360â€"the very machine that millions of people will be playing this game on. Lamia told me that the 360 now packs more processing power “than the entire computational power of the most powerful mainframe systems that use to run our military infrastructure” just 13 years ago.

Lamia paused when he said this, and then added that the detail is “mindblowing.”

The use (or misuse) of violence in life-like videogames like “Call of Duty” is a taut debate, and one that Lamia settles by insisting his game is purely an entertainment product. Then in the game itself, the doomsday device is first introduced by a scientist who warns that “this single device has more processing power than your entire military infrastructure.”

Which is truly more “mindblowing”â€"the game, the doomsday device, the console itself? In questioning our power over our own technology, Black Ops 2 simply reasserts its own power over us.

In the most stunning moment from the single player campaign, you wade through a flooded and war-torn street when suddenly you turn a corner to see a predator drone for the first time. Massive and glistening with moisture, it cranes a single beam of light hungrily across the street. Mosquitoes buzz ravenously next to your ear as your squadmate tells you to avoid the spotlight. The unquestioned power of this machine, and my subordination in relationship to it was suddenly legitimately terrifying. Then a moment later, I veered too far from the given path.

“Holy shâ€", he spotted us!” My squad-mate yelled. And the game once again screamed too loudly to ask its most important questions.