Suddenly chainsawing grandmas in Vice City seems rather tame

Activision and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has found itself splashed all over the media in the last couple of days because of a video of gameplay footage that was leaked onto the internet early on the 27^th of November. It depicts scandal-making scenes of a terrorist group mowing down innocent civilians in an airport, a group of which you – the player – are a part, being undercover for a mission. It’s brutal stuff, and certainly enough to make your cuddly Guardian reader gasp let alone the doubtless apoplexy that will occur should the Daily Mail or Fox News get wind of it. Suddenly the deaths of all those innocent grandmothers you offed with an Uzi, safe in the third-person confines of your drug-toting ice cream van, nestled in a quiet corner of Vice City, don’t seem quite as shocking.

The furious questions over the legitimacy of the video have been cleared up thanks to official developer statements not only confirming the footage, but also suggesting that there will be warnings at a mandatory checkpoint beforehand, and in-game options to skip the scene in question: “The leaked footage was taken from a copy of game that was obtained illegally and is not representative of the overall gameplay experience,” said Activision’s PR department. “[...] The scene is designed to evoke the atrocities of terrorism.” Nevertheless, there’s nothing like a snippet of simulated slaughter to set the forums alight with the age old debate of censorship and acceptability. Accidental leakage or well-planned publicity stunt? Who knows? Although I do love a conspiracy theory from time to time, and it does all seem a little convenient. I’d actually forgotten MW2 was even coming out this year until my RSS feed started going mental at me!

For my part, having been advantageous enough to see the footage in question before the virtual blinds came down, I think it’s an incredibly gutsy decision by Infinity Ward to implement a level like this. Unlike the cartoonish antics of Grand Theft Auto or State of Emergency that permitted a level of detachment  by approaching their sandbox gameplay with a heightened sense of the carnivalesque and (importantly) a third person perspective, MW2 with its gritty realism and purportedly engrossing storyline puts you directly behind the gun barrel, staring down the sights. The stakes are higher because instead of Rockstar’s darkly-comic flippancy, Activision and IW are bordering on near-simulation with their realism, which begs the question that gets rolled out time and time again: as games are becoming more realistic, and more prominent in today’s society, should this level of interactive media be more closely scrutinised than more passive entertainment such as cinema?

The phrase ‘interactive media’ is the important part of that question. There is a key difference between cinema and gaming: When Daniel Craig shatters someone’s skull with his Walther it’s him pulling the trigger on screen, not us. That line gets blurred when it’s our hands idly fingering the controllers, and it is a line that will continue to fade as motion control, hyper-realistic graphics and immersive MMOs progress further and further. Certification arguments only provide so much defence: It’s the same with White Lightning, bootlegged horror flicks or grainy porn; there are means and ways for the underage to get their mitts on mature materials.

But the folly of the few should not spoil things for the game’s intended audience. Gaming is still, arguably, an artistic medium and should be judged as such. What Activision and IW have done, although the result ultimately remains to be seen, is attempt to create a visceral and realistic experience that doesn’t pull its punches, and that should be applauded if handled well. Evocation is not endorsement. The safeguards that they have put in place – the skip option and all of the regulation warnings – are almost all that they can do. Why shouldn’t gaming as an experiential artistic medium have the chance to tackle mature themes in a mature way? These are perfectly valid questions that go hand in hand with assertions of choice: You don’t have to play the game. You don’t have to shoot the pixellated civilians. You don’t have to do any of it.

It is, however, a shame that this argument has been triggered by a video leak rather than the game itself as there’s no way to tell whether or not the full game succeeds in presenting such mature themes as provocation or glorification, and indeed much of that choice will rest in the hands of the consumer. If games are to be judged on terms of artistic merit then difficult subject material requires superior handling, just as with cinema. I would hope that the game succeeds in carrying the weight of its subject material, but we shall have to wait for the complete game to ship, and the context that it brings, before that hope can be vindicated.

If it was a publicity stunt then it was a pretty good one. For whatever reason – from highbrow culture shock to morbid curiosity – Modern Warfare 2 just tripped my radar again.