{"id":140595,"date":"2022-11-27T05:09:09","date_gmt":"2022-11-27T05:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/the-problem-with-call-of-duty-isnt-that-it-makes-us-violent-its-that-it-makes-us-numb\/"},"modified":"2022-11-27T05:09:09","modified_gmt":"2022-11-27T05:09:09","slug":"the-problem-with-call-of-duty-isnt-that-it-makes-us-violent-its-that-it-makes-us-numb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/the-problem-with-call-of-duty-isnt-that-it-makes-us-violent-its-that-it-makes-us-numb\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem With Call of Duty Isn’t That It Makes Us Violent \u2014 It’s That It Makes Us Numb"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n Breaking: for the nineteenth consecutive year, the new Call of Duty<\/em> video game does not offer a thoughtful pacificist critique of human affairs. Per usual, the newest in Activision’s annual first-person shooter series is not exactly War and Peace<\/em>. try War and More War<\/em>.<\/p>\n Call of Duty:<\/em> Modern Warfare II<\/em> opens with a ripped-from-the-headlines war crime set in the recent past. The player must pilot a missile through a remote desert valley to assassinate an Iranian general named Ghorbrani \u2014 clearly a thinly veiled reference to the real-life 2020 drone-strike killing of Qasem Soleimani ordered by Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Simulating Soleimani’s extrajudicial murder to kick-start a Tom Clancy\u2013like \u201cWhat If?\u201d story about a special ops unit preventing World War III is far from the game’s only politically questionable narrative choice. The seventeen-mission globetrotting campaign also sends players to hunt Mexican drug cartel members along the US-Mexico border wall, which involves pointing a loaded assault rifle at civilians in a Texas town to \u201cde-escalate\u201d the situation. The game also turns a tourist neighborhood in Amsterdam into a war zone in order to nab some terrorists.<\/p>\n Considering the ugliness of the spectacle, it’s not surprising that many journalists have responded by hurling insults. Critics have called Modern Warfare II<\/em> \u201ctone deaf,\u201d \u201ccynical,\u201d and \u201cspineless\u201d with \u201cmoments of violence that feel uncomfortable at best and morally questionable at worst.\u201d All of that rings largely true. But it strikes me that we’re still having the same shallow conversations about media messages and their impact on players.<\/p>\n Is the most harmful thing about Call of Duty<\/em> Really just its writers’ dogshit takes on global politics? What if the real danger is not that players will be indoctrinated, or even turn to real-world violence, but that they’re being trapped in an extractive and ever-worsening cycle of gaming addiction that diminishes their quality of life while lining corporate pocketbooks ?<\/p>\n<\/section>\n <\/p>\n I don’t mean to sound overly dismissive of the \u201cCall of Duty<\/em> is Problematic\u201d crowd. After all, I’m a former game critic and credentialed member of the finger-wagging content police.<\/p>\n On Christmas morning ten years ago, the front page of the New York Times<\/em> quoted me expressing reservations with Medal of Honor: Warfighter<\/em>a Call of Duty<\/em> clone that directly marketed guns and knives to gamers. I’d just written a viral essay about how upset I was that anyone could shoot a branded assault rifle in Medal of Honor<\/em> and then buy the real thing through the game’s official website, which, as I told the times<\/em>\u201cfelt like a virtual showroom\u201d for real-life weapons.<\/p>\n I cited as an example my nephew Aidin, a Call of Duty<\/em> devotee who had just been suspended for taking a gun to school. A little nagging voice in my head wondered if Aidin was on the path to committing gun violence, and if Call of Duty<\/em> and similar games were the gateway drug to get him there. Weren’t these shooters just an overt marketing tool for the peddlers of death in the civilian firearms industry?<\/p>\n Many of my media colleagues agreed with me, and in the face of a growing backlash, Medal of Honor<\/em> publisher Electronic Arts severed its licensing ties to gun manufacturers.<\/p>\n Yet something funny happened in the decade since I wrote that essay: I’ve been proven wrong in my belief in a direct correlation between war games and real-life behavior. First-person shooters keep attracting millions more users, but gun homicides dipped through most of the 2010s. There’s been a recent uptick in gun homicides since 2020, but the rate<\/em> of gun deaths remains below the levels of previous years. My nephew stopped touching guns shortly after my dad passed in 2017. Turns out that my father, who had an extensive gun collection, was initiating Aidin into gun culture, and Call of Duty<\/em> was merely an extension of an interest cultivated by a family member.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, psychological studies \u2014 even ones that cite my essay as an influence \u2014 have struggled to find a strong link connecting digital and a positive affinity toward guns, much less real-life gun violence. And notably, the US military isn’t getting a substantial Call of Duty <\/em>bump. According to Activision, more than four hundred million people worldwide have played a Call of Duty<\/em> game at least once, most of them American. But the Pentagon says recruiting numbers are at their lowest since the end of the Vietnam War, with the Army missing its targets by thirty thousand soldiers.<\/p>\n The reasons for this are varied: the pandemic cut off access to military prospects at high schools, an improving job market has meant less financial pressure to settle for the Army, and high obesity rates among young people are ruling out military service. Not only are video games insufficient to offset these trends, but in February Army major Jon-Marc Thibodeau argued that video games were making quality recruiting harder. \u201cThe ‘Nintendo Generation’ soldier skeleton is not toughened by activity prior to arrival,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n