The video is just a few minutes long, but it may be the most important game footage to be seen this year. It’s a bootleg of a mission from Modern Warfare 2, the first-person shooter certain to be the biggest-selling game.
It shows the player joining Russian terrorists on a rampage through an airport; civilians are gunned down as armed men run through the departures lounge — and it’s evident the player is firing too. In one alarming moment someone is shown dragging an injured person across the concourse — the player kills them both.
The blurry footage was released on the internet and has already provoked criticism with a headline in the British tabloid, Daily Mirror, proclaiming: “Leaked level makes light of terrorist atrocities.”
Many see in it harrowing evocations of 2008’s Mumbai terror attacks in which more than 170 people were killed. For a while, it wasn’t clear whether the sequence was genuine, but Activision (an American video game developer and publisher) released a statement confirming its authenticity.
So what should we make of all this? To some commentators, video games by their nature “make light” of anything they portray. This is partially about semantics — the interpretation of the word “game” as something fundamentally frivolous. Partly, too, it is about the legacy of video games as a pastime for children, not adults.
Interactivity itself brings in complex moral questions. If a movie were to depict a terrorist outrage, the viewer takes no active part. But in a video game, you’re engaged and complicit. The participation is the entertainment and that’s always going to be problematic.
What we’re robbed of when viewing this illicitly posted footage is what happens before and afterwards, the exact nature of the scene and the authenticity of the player’s involvement. The problem is that context can easily become an excuse to portray wanton violence.
Activision’s claim that the scene can be skipped is also questionable. It’s something of a cop-out rather than a pertinent justification. The point is, it’s there — the developers put it there. It is an intended element of the experience.
Responsibility is the deciding factor. Infinity Ward is an excellent developer, using narrative in a mature and sophisticated way. Witness the nuclear explosion sequence and the apparent death of Captain Price in Modern Warfare; moments of sheer emotional resonance that would have been fumbled or avoided by most studios. Both moments work perfectly within the game’s depiction of a desperate global battle. This may be the case here.
That is why this blurry, inconclusive footage is so important. The scene may well represent a statement of intent: this is what games are capable of now — unsettling us with their imagery, backing us into difficult situations, toying with our moral certainties. —