Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's Murderous Mess

This is your official Spoiler Warning for every game ever. No crying about it later, fanboy. But seriously, we discuss the opening plot of Modern Warfare 2 in this article.

Way back when I started my first IGN column, I did a piece on the growing trend of morality-based gameplay. Those were the days when Splinter Cell: Double Agent asked if you'd like to waste long-standing amigo Lambert, and we were just getting early word on a little game called BioShock, with its option to destroy or save children for fun and profit. Exciting times. More freedom of choice meant making tougher choices, and that made for interesting gaming.

Three years later, the biggest game on the horizon is Activision and Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and they're playing by harder rules.

A video of the campaign's opening sequence recently leaked in France, and it puts You The Player in the shoes of an undercover C.I.A. agent embedded with a terrorist cell. These terrorists - and you - are shooting up an airport, mowing down civilians left and right. Civilians cowering in fear, civilians trying to run away. And you're right there, killing those innocent people, too, to maintain your cover.

It took Activision about five minutes to vanish that clip from the internets. The questions are still lingering.

Every story, every game, absolutely requires conflict of some kind to work. The easiest brand of conflict in the world for juicing up your narrative is good ol' violence. It's visual, it's physical, it's immediate, it's exciting. Violence amps up the stakes considerably, as opposed to whether or not Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are finally going to hook up. Sure, we're all pulling for those kids to work it out, but at no point are they threatened by anything more lethal than a few minor misunderstandings.

Video games, on the other hand, generally don't play the romance card because they aren't usually given to that kind of internal conflict. Post-PONG and excepting Sims, sports, puzzle and rhythm games, video games have historically been based on the idea of either destroying the enemy or avoiding an enemy sent to destroy you.

So yes, in video games, we kill. We kill by the truckload, we kill by the ton. We win Achievements and Trophies for killing in spectacular numbers, in spectacular ways. Even Mario, whom we generally think of as the G-rated, family friendly poster boy, kills. He crushes bad mushroom people into oblivion and knocks evil turtles into bottomless chasms that would certainly croak him. We kill to reach an objective; we kill because that is the objective. Developers usually soften the blow by presenting to us things that are okay to kill: terrorists, Nazis, zombies, aliens, mercenaries, demonic forces, fantasy creatures, criminals, supernatural entities, ninja, hostile soldiers, invading hordes, mutants and monsters of every size. And they're all trying to kill us, so it's not just fun, but also self defense. Right?

At least for this short opener, Modern Warfare 2 doesn't fall back on any of those convenient removes. These are unarmed, human victims simply trying to hide or get away, and if you're not implicitly expected to shoot them in the back or execute someone cowering on the ground, certainly you'll be allowed to. That's not simply killing; that's plain murder.

Activision claims there will be a warning prior to this sequence, an opt-out for those who don't care to run it, and players can supposedly elect "not to engage in the gameplay" at all, making it sound like this will be MW2's credit sequence, similar to the previous Modern Warfare. Oh, but Activision claims it's all a non-issue anyway because the ESRB rated the game M for Mature and "the rating is prominently displayed on the front and back of the packaging, as well as in all advertising." Well, never mind, then. Might as well throw a few children and puppies into the shooting gallery, so long as there's an M on both sides of the box.

But here's the thing that's really going to twist this up. It's not simply that gamers can murder normal, unarmed people as they attempt to flee. It's that they'll have the option not to, and they'll do it anyway.