The Prison of Choice
So when Infinity Ward are doing the clicking for you, saying “Hey, you’re an undercover agent now, go kill yourself some civilians,” something just doesn’t sit right. The rest of the game is straight up shooting, so the undercover agent stuff automatically seems odd and out of place. You’re forced to do this horrific thing, and there’s no consequence for how you act or what you do beyond what is assumed by the linearity of the game. It doesn’t matter if you join in with the terrorists and slaughter men and women, or hang back, mouth ajar with disgust. The game treats them as the same.
//Decisions, decisions…
You might be wondering where the title of this article comes in. Essentially, it’s when a game provides you with a set of decisions that allow you to condemn yourself to a certain situation or action. You lock yourself into a path through the choices you make, and have to deal with them yourself. It’s the direction things need to be moving, to provide a convincing experience that ‘No Russian’ can’t, by its very nature, provide.
The upcoming spy RPG Alpha Protocol is a game in which I feel something like ‘No Russian’ might be lauded, or at least respected. If you were presented with a set of decisions that lead you to the terrorist’s side, knowing that they had something far worse planned after the airport job, and joining them on it was the only way of stopping a nuclear attack or similar disaster, I think it would’ve been truly powerful, so long as it’s handled right. But that couldn’t be the only option. Information can be gathered by other means, and if all else fails a last minute attack on the terrorist base would have been another option. Getting close to the terrorists by taking part in a mass murder would have been the easiest way physically, but being able to stomach it would be another thing all together.
Similarly, Quantic Dream’s upcoming game Heavy Rain looks set to provide you with some really uncomfortable decisions in the quest to save a young boy from a serial killer. One scene, although only shown briefly so far, has already become infamous. In it you play a female character being forced to striptease for a fat club owner. Whether she’s doing it to get her closer to saving the boy, or because she’s being forced to, isn’t really the issue. If Quantic Dream can convey the journey there eloquently and believably, it’ll be so much more powerful than the clumsy nature of ‘No Russian’.
I don’t know what Infinity Ward were thinking when they made the level – whether they thought it was a way of giving you the right incentive to take down Makarov and his associates, fuelling you with righteous vitriol, or if they were just trying to outdo themselves for the excellently disturbing AWACS level from the first Modern Warfare. That there isn’t even any pay back against Makarov is a problem; it’s almost an approval that he’s managed to get away with the terrible things he’s done. The cynical part of me believes they placed it there purely as a mass publicity stunt, swelling the hype surrounding Modern Warfare 2 to obscene levels, and making sure it didn’t fade from memory any time soon. Perhaps I’m just fuelling the fire, then, by writing this. Maybe it did its job, and the fact I’ve written 1700 words on one level in a game is proof of that. But at the same time, I feel myself sicken every time I see it praised as being a step forward for gaming, when really, all it’s going to do is provide live ammunition for all those people who think games are murder simulators. If ‘No Russian’ has a place in the future of gaming, perhaps they’ll be proved right.
As much as we disagree on the subject Phill, I must say that this is a strong article which contains a very valid argument.
Counterpoint on sister-blog The Daily Scoundrel: http://thedailyscoundrel.com/2009/11/12/games-modern-warfare-2-no-mercy-for-no-russian/
[...] bit in it. Everyone has written about it. From the Telegraph to the Daily Scoundrel to Resolution (Who have hefty reservations that the whole thing works at all). Anyone seen anything else really [...]
In my opinion the scene doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care what kind of undercover agent you’re supposed to be or what your orders are – if you’re not a maniac you would turn your gun on the men trying to kill hundreds of civilians. I don’t care if the big bad guy you’re supposed to infiltrate your way to might possibly have a nuclear bomb, you would kill these other dudes first. You couldn’t help it without being a psychopath monster yourself.
I think the issue is much simpler than you are making it out to be. IW purposefully made this scene to provoke revulsion in the player and to highlight how horrific the act is. You seem to implying that they just put it in there for shits and giggles and the shock factor was just an unintentional by-product of that, which seems to miss the point entirely. I agree that if the scene was placed in greater context that it would have been more powerful but the fact you are actively encouraged to kill innocents (as opposed to something like GTA where killing innocents is an option, but something I’m sure every player did without thinking twice) is what makes it so uncomfortable, and therefore such a good thing. In something like GTA you can get away with wantonly killing hundreds of innocent bystanders without even having to deal with the consequences, even though those consequences may just be aesthetic. This scene doesn’t let you escape from the consequences of your actions and forces you to deal with the ethical implications. That can only be a good thing.
I understand your point Jesse, but I feel that you need to work a little harder to understand the way the world works. This is just a game, but many people are put in this kind of position on a daily basis, albeit less extreme. If it seems like I am taking a ’side’ then I apologise, it is not intended.
In Afghanistan and Iraq both sides routinely kill large numbers of innocent civilians in their efforts to target each other. They either believe the sacrifice (or risk thereof) is worth it, or are psychopaths. Which do you think? The Israelis have attacked nuclear processing plants in foreign countries. The US have shot down civilian aircraft in the gulf just in case they were hostile. Several terrorist organisations in Europe a few decades ago killed innocents to fight what they saw as the march (back) to totalitarianism. I won’t even try to list the various atrocities committed by organisations like the PLO. The UK infiltrated republican groups in Northern Ireland, even supplying equipment to them in some circumstances are part of the cover. We also supply weapons and equipment to regimes who are likely to use them against their own civilian population.
The world is not so simple that you can presume that anyone who makes this kind of decision is a psychopath. Or perhaps you can, in which case they make up a non-trivial proportion of the population.