The war, however, did not officially conclude at that tiny village west of Petersburg, Virginia. To many Americans the word Appomattox is synonymous with the end of the Civil War. Lee (National Archives Identifiers 558769) In a world with streaming services for every medium imaginable, where deciding how you spend your alone time means weighing up dozens of options, this waffling makes it much easier to pass up games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.Įvading statements doesn't make video games apolitical, it just makes them a waste of time.Gen. Games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare don't just abstain from making meaningful political statements, they actively invent fictional countries to dilute any meaningful statements they might accidentally make. We have popcorn blockbusters about war, no doubt, but we also have Apocalypse Now, Zero Dark Thirty or the aforementioned Letters from Iwo Jima. I can safely say Modern Warfare was easily the least satisfying of all those experiences.įor a medium obsessed with re-creating the theatre of war, it's puzzling to see video games terrified of addressing its causes, impact or participants in any substantial way. In the last month, I've played Modern Warfare, watched Letters From Iwo Jima, listened to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on the American-Spanish War and read a longform New Yorker piece on the war in Afghanistan. But Modern Warfare has forced me to admit there's more to the issue than that. I often tell myself it's because I don't have enough time, which is true.

I often lament the fact that I don't play enough video games. As it stands, Modern Warfare's campaign may well be remembered most for taking an infamous US military attack and presenting it as Russian. Games about war, especially based on recent wars, are going to be political no matter what.

That's fine sometimes, but other times it's painful self impairment. Industry largely has an aversion to making political statements. It's hard to imagine thematic ambiguity in a game set in the Syrian Civil War, for instance. Crucially, it also allows creators to evade making statements about those same places and groups. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare takes place in a fictional country called Urzikstan, a mixture of Syria and Afghanistan, and includes the fictional group Al-Qatala.Īggregating real places and groups into fictional ones makes things easier creatively. This failure to, for want of a better term, 'say something,' is at its most perplexing when it comes to setting.

Is there a call of duty civil war