“Call of Duty has always celebrated violence and war, but the Modern Warfare trilogy (and Advanced Warfare) all contained a built-in ambivalence about how war had to be fought and who had to be sacrificed along the way. Soldiers get moved around like pawns on a map in these games, and the mission always comes before anything else, but you often got a sense of the toll that this violence took on soldiers. We played through a man dying in a nuclear blast while trying to retreat, saw someone driven to war by grief, witnessed lives snuffed out by betrayal from top brass.”
“However light it is, it’s commentary that has room for thinking about how war works. Infinite Warfare doesn’t have that. It’s OOH-RAH and do or die all the way. It’s a game that tells us that the monstrosity of the enemy must always be matched by monstrosity of our own. It’s a theory of war that says that the only way to win is to mimic the methods and ideologies that we find most abhorrent in our enemies. It’s a race to see which side can lose any semblance of humanity first.”
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is an Unambivalent Celebration of War
www.pastemagazine.com
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare agrees with its bad guys a little too much.
