(USA TODAY) - After gaining a reputation for its immersive first-person Call of Duty action video games based in World War II, game developer Infinity Ward wanted to stretch its creative muscles with an original, contemporary game.
The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, won numerous awards as 2007's best game and has sold more than 14 million units worldwide.
With the sequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (out today, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, rated M for ages 17-up, prices start at $60), Infinity Ward looks to test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in video games. Players can choose to take part in a terrorist attack against civilians, and they defend a bombed-out nation's capital.
"The coolest thing is you don't exactly know who is going to win," says creative director Jason West. "It's actually scary. (A near-future setting) allows it to be more real and, I hope, resonate with people more than the rah-rah good vs. evil stuff of the past."
In the first Modern Warfare, players hunted down power-hungry ultranationalist Russian leader Imran Zakhaev. Five years later, a new leader named Vladimir Makarov has risen to power, and an elite international task force (the player included) must pursue him.
Think 24 with terrorists threatening the USA and Jack Bauer forced to use any means necessary. Or Tom Clancy's 1994 book Debt of Honor, in which the U.S. Capitol is destroyed during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and other officials.
To help pull off its thriller, Infinity Ward enlisted Hollywood hands including film composer Hans Zimmer and NCIS writer/executive producer Jesse Stern, both of whom were impressed. The game, Zimmer says, "takes you to lots of exotic locales and ... has an emotional darkness to it, where sometimes you go, 'I just can't believe they are going to do this now,' and then they do it. It's full of those sort of moments where it just takes things further than anyone would expect. I think it is less a geographic journey than an emotional one."
In recent days, the game's envelope-pushing campaign has had some hiccups. A viral video promoting the game was pulled off the Net because it used a homosexual slur (not from the game) as an acronym. And leaked video showing the player participating in the terrorist attack on civilians raised alarms.
Modern Warfare 2 is "not a play-it-safe game," says Geoff Keighley, host of Spike's GameTrailers TV. "The pace is really well-scripted and, like 24, you never know where it is going to go next. ... I think they want to push buttons with this game."
The controversy is probably not over, says Adam Sessler, co-host of cable channel G4 TV series X-Play. He expects the terrorist scene to ignite another wave of public furor. "But at least the game will be out, and that element can be addressed in the context of the game itself."
In designing the game, the developers spent a lot of time figuring out how to best present that scene. (Note that players can skip it if they prefer.) "We knew it was going to be upsetting," Stern says. "Particularly where it falls in the game, it gets you pretty twisted up. I hope it makes some people a little upset."
An argument can be made that portraying terrorism in games is less appropriate because of the medium's interactive nature. But that's not fair to game creators, Sessler says.
"There is a helplessness for the player in that sequence and games, somehow, are not being allowed to go into that creative territory. It's always somehow supposed to be typified as 'fun.' This will elicit a reaction and create a motivation for the successive events that happen in the rest of the game," he says. "I'm not going to go so far as to say it is right or wrong. I feel that is really in the eyes of the beholder. What I do feel is defensible is it is within Infinity Ward's right to be creative and move into kind of a taboo area for video games."
By Mike Snider
11/10/2009 8:42:30 AM
