BITMAPS 103 – Modern Warfare and the Advent of the Non-Game

Though I find the idea deeply flawed, gaming enthusiasts have always pointed to the escalating scale of games a progressive evolution of the entire medium. “Ah yes,” they say, looking at the latest Modern Warfare, “I remember a time when games were mere beeps and squares of color! Now we have games where buildings fall on you and you can experience the wholesale destruction of New York!”

Only recently, that mentality has snapped back the other way. Now, media, enthusiasts, and even casual gamers alike have soured on the Call of Duty experience. While entire books have been written on sociology to try and map the mood swings of a populous, my theory is that everyone has slowly discovered the truth: Call of Duty campaigns (and other minimally interactive single-player fare like them) are hardly videogames at all.

That may sound a bit harsh so let me define what I mean by “videogame.” I heard the most succinct and accurate description at a GDC a year or so ago and have since adopted it. While I can’t remember the man’s name who came up with this (sorry whoever you are!), the description is “a series of interesting decisions.” Apply this to a few games you know of as a litmus: Tic Tac Toe is a series of decisions, sure, but after the first two turns, your decisions boil down to “put an X here or lose.” Not exactly an interesting choice, so there’s not much reason to keep playing. Conversely, chess is far more interesting. With any given move, you have to balance a multitude of factors and ultimately make a judgement call without having all the information available. That’s what makes the decisions interesting and the game exciting.

Take that logic back to a Modern Warfare campaign and you can see where the system breaks down. Even at the game’s most interactive, it essentially boils down to “shoot guys to progress or just stop playing.” The shooting of guys is not particularly interesting either — the screen simply floods with faceless gun fodder that you cut down through glorified whack-a-mole. The scripted sequences that look oh-so-impressive in trailers are less interesting still. During one sequence my character was sliding down a hill, while my job was to steer him around the folderol littering his path. It reminded me of a game I made myself on the Commodore 64, and only when I tried to die did I discover failure was possible. Ultimately, Modern Warfare’s campaign is a series of minimally involving roadblocks before you can see the next “wow moment,” just like Battlefield 3 and interactive movies like Night Trap and Psychic Detective before it.

That said–and this is the important bit–that doesn’t mean the experience isn’t entertaining.

That’s the key word. We are playing games to be entertained. A meaty, game-rich experience like Skyrim, Borderlands, or Dark Souls may be what entertains you, but sometimes you may just want to drink a beer, click your brain off, and watch some explosions. In this way, Modern Warfare 3 is the ultimate popcorn experience. Just as the story revolves around manly grim-faced killers that do nothing but massacre hundreds as they wade through an absurd plot, the gameplay is equally superficial; the Schwarzenegger movie of gaming. Of course, this only applies to the single player campaign–Spec Ops and Multiplayer fare far better as videogames.

Objectively, this single-player experience is no worse or better than other games… it’s just different. Not every movie can or should be Inception. Superficial entertainment may not be your thing, but the moment you look down on those games, you’ve become the equivalent of a scarf-wearing elitist that looks down on movies that aren’t black and white and foreign. Rather than reacting negatively, embrace the populist game as the surest sign yet of video games’ wide-scale acceptance, if the sales numbers didn’t convince you of that already.

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