It should come as no surprise that playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II involves shooting a lot of virtual guns. The player will, over the course of the game’s story, shoot shotguns and assault rifles, pistols and grenade launchers. They will fire cannon rounds from the belly of a gunship and, as Ed Smith noted in his review of the game, rapidly transform like an industrial Animorph into a missile in order to slam down explosive death on a digital not-Soleimani.
Given the tangled ideological knots that Call of Duty always loops together, the character of these guns—the ways they shoot, the sounds they make, and the people at whom they’re aimed—feels like one of the more constructive ways to cut through the noise and get a handle on where Modern Warfare II’s priorities lie. The nature of its weapons is as important to the narrative as just about anything else it depicts. More than the fast-paced plot Modern Warfare II’s guns reveal creator Infinity Ward’s understanding of—and it would be handy to have an accurate synonym here—modern warfare.
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To get at this point properly, it’s worth taking a step back to the series’ first depiction of post-WWII combat. The most notable change to come with the release of 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, more striking than the soldiers’ appearances, vocabulary, or other aesthetic signifiers, was the immediately tangible sense that the game’s weapons could be employed with surgical precision. During the opening level, the player infiltrates a cargo ship as part of an SAS team, quietly shooting enemies before open combat begins. The bullets are fired and burrow home in flesh and bone with the sound of pistons firing or darts sinking into cork at high speed. Appropriately for both of those examples, the original Modern Warfare immediately demonstrates that 21st century war, if conducted quietly and expertly, can inflict death through expressions of mechanistic industrialism that also feel as frivolous as a bar game’s contest of skill.
Later, in “All Ghillied Up,” one of Modern Warfare and the series as a whole’s best-known missions, players crawl around a deserted Pripyat and furtively dispatch patrolling soldiers in order to assassinate an arms dealer. As in the ship infiltration, enemies are dispatched neatly, combatants killing other combatants on terrain whose general calm hardly suggests it’s become the site of an impromptu battlefield. It’s only when this mission goes awry that the tidiness of far-off sniper shots and muffled killings gives way to an all-out firefight between the player’s SAS operatives and Russian forces, the quiet replaced by exploding mines and grenades, the rattle of automatic fire, and the screams of soldiers no longer concerned with stealth.
Before 2007’s Modern Warfare, Call of Duty was set during the Second World War and the weaponry employed in combat—even in sniper-focused missions—was often blunt. Bolt-action rifles shot like thunderclaps; Thompson submachine guns sprayed bullets like a kid with their thumb on the nozzle of a garden hose; big mounted guns and anti-aircraft weaponry shook the sky. This same approach holds true in plenty of the pre-Modern Warfare II (2022) Modern Warfare games+ and throughout Call of Duty: WWII, Ghosts, Advanced Warfare and Infinite Warfare, Cold War, and the Black Ops games. But the contextual gunfire narrative lessons learned in 2007 would continue to apply afterward. In short, silent, professional killing is a sign of expertise. Loud, messy combat signifies urgency and, as will be explained a bit later, a failure to conduct war properly.
Audiences can see how this works by looking at Modern Warfare II’s many “quiet” missions. A few notable examples: Kyle "Gaz" Garrick and John Price investigate a cartel-run fish hatchery in Spain and eliminate guards from a hilltop half a kilometre away. Gaz and Price follow the trail of terrorists by swimming through an Amsterdam harbour, shooting suppressed rounds into heads or whipping throwing knives into the bodies of patrolling enemies. At the beginning of the game, Marines special forces, John "Soap" MacTavish, and “Ghost,” another member of the fictional Task Force 141, raid a series of homes in a fictional Middle Eastern countryside in the middle of the night, searching through the darkness using night vision goggles and precision shots.
When outright violence does break out, as it almost always must in Call of Duty, it’s because something has either gone wrong with a covert mission, bad people are in control of a violent situation, or some other breakdown in “proper” combat has occurred. In Modern Warfare II, this is shown best through the most effectively unnerving gunship sequence since “Death From Above” in 2007’s Modern Warfare. In “Close Air” and “Hardpoint,” players look through the camera of a PMC’s aerial support ship in order to kill enemies on the ground and cover friendly forces in a fictional Mexican village. While the player cannot kill the civilians trying to go about their day, shooting enemy cartel members eventually requires a good section of the town—which includes a market, school, restaurant, and gas station—to be obliterated. The PMCs in charge of this destruction aren’t too bothered by what they’ve done both because they aren’t paid to care and because they, unlike the heroic Task Force 141, are soon to be revealed as one of the game’s villainous factions.
Contrast this sequence, or any of the game’s other “messy” gunfights, with the Spanish sniping mission mentioned above. When war is covert, conducted by special forces operatives who have achieved the equivalent of a PhD in murder, death is inflicted with the utmost precision. The loving remarks made by Captain Price as he watches Gaz snipe enemies from a great distance are inflected with a professional admiration, his compliments similar to, say, one carpenter praising another for the craftsmanship of their work. When war is loud and chaotic, as in the Shadow Company PMC’s overhead destruction of a Mexican village, we’re shown the group’s commander as a walking parody of “perverted” militarism, the character all but pushing down the tented front of his pants as he paces the gunship and shouts with glee over killing cartel members.
One kind of combat is good: neat, proper, and evolved. Another is bad: sloppy, base, and uncontrolled.
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Jacob Minkoff, Modern Warfare II’s campaign gameplay director, says that his work isn’t interested in politics. The latest Call of Duty, from his viewpoint, involves “topics that bear a resemblance to the geopolitics of the world we live in” but doesn’t have “anything to do with the specific governments of any countries that we’re portraying.” He and narrative director Taylor Kurosaki argue that because the game gets into “concepts like colonialism, occupation, independence, and freedom,” it could be set during the American Revolution or 1980s Afghanistan and discuss the same themes.
It’s possible, to some extent (and if these comments are approached with a lot of generosity) to see where Minkoff and Kurosaki are coming from. Modern Warfare II is excellent at both raising specific issues and abstracting them simultaneously, whether those issues be the relationship between Iran and the United States, corruption in Mexican and American politics, or some combination of all of the above.
The game’s creators will posit that "global forces" have made nations like Iran, Russia, and Mexico into hotbeds of criminality and terror, but will stop short of outright blaming these issues on some inborn cultural fault. Rather, the only identifiable evils in Modern Warfare II become the desire for money or personal revenge. When it comes to money and revenge, people from any part of the world can do terrible things, the game suggests. It just so happens that the trio of nations listed above are filled with dangerous men motivated by these factors for the purposes of the game’s plot++. And yet, Modern Warfare II equivocates, the desire for money will corrupt anywhere it’s allowed free expression—even the fictional, US-based Shadow Company PMC.
One striking section of the game illustrates this. In “Alone,” Task Force 141 has just been betrayed by Shadow Company. Soap, injured, is left for dead in a Mexican city. As he works his way through the night, Soap witnesses the PMC massacre the town in a reckless search for leads. They kill for no reason other than that they've been ordered to, their obligations belonging to nothing but the pay offered to them by their government contract. American capital turns the streets of the city into a horror movie, the gunmen’s tall shadows distended by car headlights in dark tunnels, dead bodies lying crumpled in a garage next to a door leading into a home with framed photos of happier times hanging neatly on one wall. He hears mysterious thumps coming from the darkness of an abandoned apartment and discovers a man dying from gunshot banging on a door for help. Seeing all of this, the player, as Soap, fosters a hatred borne of revulsion for the people who would do such a thing. He sneaks through the enemies, quietly killing them in turn with improvised weapons built with a special forces operative’s expertise. At one point, as he does so, he overhears a PMC soldier ask a colleague who’s in charge of the bloody operation.
“Whoever signs the cheques,” the soldier responds.
This scene brings together the disparate threads that run throughout those tangled political knots mentioned above. During the massacre, players see the opposite of a “good war.” Civilians are slaughtered. Gunshots ring out throughout the night. Blood runs in the street. Soldiers kill sloppily. They can only be stopped by a hero who, motivated by no explicit desire other than the selfless need to stop a terror plot from killing innocents, expertly and quietly dispatches his enemies as he moves through the city to reunite with his aptly named Task Force 141 partner, “Ghost.”
Greed is at the root of Modern Warfare II’s evils, more than the patriotism that past games would reference or the intertwined religious and political motivations that the series has always been too shy to outright cite. In this, when further context is stripped away, Minkoff and Kurosaki’s beliefs that the game doesn’t have “anything to do with the specific governments of any countries” it depicts makes a certain, blinkered kind of sense. Centring on money and revenge alone makes for a pretty shrewd way to pinpoint the nature of modern war, which is outright explained less often as being fought for religion, nationalism, and imperialism—because modern Western culture no longer views these motivations as righteous enough to admit—but for the achievement or maintenance of a security that comes from a (selectively) thriving economy.
But still, as the title of the game they’ve worked on makes clear, this theme manifests in ways that are far more modern than the Cold War and American Revolution settings that Minkoff and Kurosaki state could just as easily serve as the latest Call of Duty’s setting.
Again: the guns. Modern Warfare II is a story that sees war as something that ought to be fought not out in the open between occupying armies and the regular forces and militias arrayed against them, but in the quiet of night without collateral damage, and with precision by expertly trained special forces. War is something that only becomes “messy” when those who control the levers of power have failed—when stumbling into enemy view or accidentally discharging an unsuppressed firearm throws precision to the wind in favour of “going loud.”
This comes to the heart of what Modern Warfare II—and, to an extent, its 2019 predecessor—understands as the natural order of 21st century war. When the civilian population is at home sleeping in homes made secure by their warrior elite, hushed bullets are fired into dangerous skulls in darkness. Nefarious plots are foiled by deadly ghosts who sacrifice themselves in order to avoid the greater sacrifices of open combat. Professionals, belonging to without being unencumbered by military bureaucracy, employ weapons of terrible precision to defeat the base urges of evil people the world over. They do so like robots playing whack-a-mole, piston-slamming with powerful, violent efficiency into each new threat just as it emerges, ever vigilant in their protection.
Modern Warfare II reinforces the prevailing Western belief in order through reaction—of clean wars fought between civilized nations’ special forces that are good and right until they spill over into crude, loud, disordered brutality. The guns shot by its players are meant to be silenced, fire quietened by suppressors through a darkness selectively illuminated by night vision goggles, guided by laser sights hidden from the naked eye.
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+ Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.
++ In Modern Warfare II, as in so much Western foreign policy, historical responsibility plays no role in why certain countries blame nations like America for the kind of poverty and political instability that fuels violent anger.
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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.