the challenge of criticizing a game series like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from any kind of perspective that doesn’t affirm its existence as a franchise is that you’re already at a disadvantage. the game exists. it’s going to exist because a lot of money has been spent to ensure that it exists. The company that makes it thinks it’s nothing but an earnest exploration of modern combat. The company that publishes it literally hires old Bush-era and Trump-era bureaucrats who love the war on terrorism and want it to go on forever. People buy it by the millions and make every entry a fucking record-breaking bestseller. It is ideologically one of the most status-quo-ass video games to make, so it will keep getting made. How do you criticize that if you: don’t think war should happen; don’t think the United States should exist as it currently does; don’t think video games should be involved in propaganda? At every turn, a Gamer is ready to dunk you in a trash can and tell you to “get fucked, loser” before resuming their favorite pastime: sniping little kids from a mile out in Warzone.
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another big issue with trying to critique call of duty is that it essentially has two identities that cancel each other out: the self-serious single-player campaign that nobody likes and the dumb as hell battle royale mode that’s all anyone really cares about. when you go after the campaign people line up to tell you nobody gives a shit and you shouldn’t either. when you go after the battle royale they come back to let you know that you’re taking it too seriously and just let people have fun. it doesn’t matter if CoDMW depicted the “highway of death” and retconned the responsible party; it doesn’t matter if MWII reenacted the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in its first five minutes. It has perfect cover under the guise of its two identities. it is in many ways a “counterinsurgency” campaign against criticism itself.