Especially the campaigns, and especially how certain characters and moments are presented in the campaigns.

It's like right on the borderline of being a chuddy glorification of the military and being an absolute pisstake of things that chuddily glorify the military, and I genuinely can't work out which way it's trying to go with it.

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    4 years ago

    No. What it is is a high budget piece of capitalist mass media produced through the combined efforts of anywhere from a hundred to a thousand people on a tight 1.5 year development cycle. Those who make artistic decisions (only some of whom would be classified as "creatives") are under a myriad of conflicting pressures:

    • To make no strong political or philosophical statement that would upset the major consumer markets of North America, Brazil, Europe, China, or Saudi Arabia
    • To maintain good working relationships with the cultural programming wings of the US military and CIA
    • To make a product that the average over-caffeinated 16 year old will find totally engrossing
    • To outdo the shocking moments in the last game and provide enough grist for the gaming press to write articles titled something like "The New Call of Duty's Most Controversial Moments, Explained"
    • To each individually deal with their anxieties that their artistic output is meaningless and that it's in support of the gruesome, fundamentally evil business of war and empire

    I mention this every chance I get, but a fun fact about Modern Warfare 2019 was that, before the list of death quotes was finalized in development, it included quotes from Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald about who counts as a "terrorist" or "enemy combatant," as well as statistics for civilians killed in US drone strikes.