Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Sound and the Fury and the Stupidity!

This week I did two things.  They won’t seem to be related at first, but bear with me.  They are.  I saw the 2006 Paul Walker film Running Scared.  And I played through Call of Duty: Black Ops 2’s single player campaign.

The experience, in retrospect, was quite similar.

Running Scared is a movie about raw bombast and hyperrealism.  It has long boring portions where incoherently terrible things happen for ill-defined reasons punctuated by moments of intense, frenetic action.  The hero emerges as the victor, regardless of what the people around him do, because that’s what heroes do: they win.  If things look dark, a random Deus Ex Machina will always come along and fix things for the hero.  There are lots of incongruously selected threats that these DEMs have to address.  There are mobsters, who are obsessed with finding a McGuffin.   There are other mobsters, also obsessed with finding a McGuffin.  There’s a cartoon pimp, a bunch of Mexican stereotypes.  There’s even a pair of child molesters who have shape shifting shadows.  It’s weird, confusing and at times profoundly stupid, but the ride itself is strangely enjoyable.  Even as I lambasted the stupidity of the film, I was enjoying the sheer spectacle of it.  The strange internal logic it constructed made the whole thing seem profound, even as it was head-shakingly dumb.

CoD:BlOpsII has more or less the same set of issues.  It’s a Call of Duty game in a new era where Call of Duty games are all about presenting the biggest possible spectacle for your buck.  It jumps around at random, flitting between conspiracy theories of the past and conspiracy theories of the future.  It leaps into a narrative about a character from a previous game who totally died except now, nope, not dead, so that’s cool.  Then it takes you through every dirty war that America was engaged in during the 60s, 70s and 80s in what is an unusually circumspect move on Activision’s part.  Usually they eschew the moral complexities of war by portraying enemies as baby eating monsters and soldiers as chest thumping heroes of unassailable moral fiber.  CoD:BlOpsII has you and your allies torturing people, assaulting civilians and murdering prisoners and teammates.  At one point you’re encouraged to shoot the people you usually spend your time allied with.  It’s weird.

And it’s rooted in a narrative so arbitrary that its attempts at introducing consequences seem totally asinine.  In CoD:BlOpsII, your mission performance determines your ending, in that you can actually fail objectives, permanently injure your teammates and, at certain points, will have to make binary choices that impact the game’s outcome.  The idea is that you can replay the game to see each of the endings (a fact reinforced by an intractable “mission performance tracker” that makes it impossible for players to go back, replay the game and selectively engage with a mission in order to view a new ending) and have a distinct experience replaying a Call of Duty game, a game which would, if it were sold in portions, likely have fewer than one eighth of its overall sales targeted at its singleplayer market.   In the end, the story is so incoherent, so poorly told and so arbitrary in its twists and turns that I’m less inclined to play through it to see if I can avoid burning my buddy’s face accidentally and more interested in seeing if I can beat my friend’s score on each level.  Treyarch chose to include a scoring system and the ability to see a friends-only leaderboard if you choose to do so – one of the best design choices they made in the single player game, and the one most likely to get me into a second playthrough.

The campaign itself is an exaggeration of the qualities that Call of Duty has taken on in the wake of Modern Warfare’s success.  It leaps around widely, taking pains to remove you from the Call of Duty gameplay formula to insert you into brief setting-establishing scripted segments that ask you to do things that Call of Duty’s engine and controls aren’t very good at doing, like flying jets, guiding robots through tunnels and riding horses.  There’s even an enduring minigame where you try to get Call of Duty’s infamously terrible AI to do its god damn job consistently so you can complete an objective. 

The end result is a sloppy, formless campaign, full of sound and fury, signifying little, if anything.  There are interesting elements, but it’s weak tea.  Moronic, bombastic storytelling with the same kind of convoluted, nonsense plot that I encountered in Running Scared.  But unlikely Running   Scared, I didn’t emerge with any kind of concept that it was aware of its own stupidity or bombast.  Running Scared had the good nature to make a handful of nods to its contemporary fairy tale aspirations.  CoD:BlOpsII ended on as serious a note as it could.  It opened with a well constructed, heart wrenching introductory cutscene with a starkly evocative musical backdrop and introduced a tremendously likeable, sympathetic villain.  If the game was intended as a high-level joke of some kind, a commentary on the nature of the franchise, I missed it, and I’m poorer for my failing.  Because it’s dumb.  Really, really dumb.

I would, to a select group of friends, highly recommend Running Scared.  It has “holy shit” elements within it that make it a profoundly watchable experience, and I honestly think I’d watch it again, especially if marijuana is ever legalized in New York.  I would not say the same for CoD:BlOpsII.  There are people who will enjoy this campaign.  They aren’t the people who listen to me.  They aren’t the people who grasp the difference between Modern Warfare’s tightly focused and successful gameplay formula and sharp, snazzy level design and the bombastic mess that CoD:BlOpsII is (for example, certain levels require you to walk along an invisible path and, if you deviate, cause enemies to fire on you more rigorously, effectively constructing a series of invisible walls that kill you if you walk through them – these portions almost always occur in wide-open environs and you are never told what you did wrong, simply left to sort it out on your own).  There are glimmers of greatness, moments of tremendous fun contained within this game, but they’re concealed by moments where you take control of drones, engaging in forced stealth which is less about being stealthy and more about following directions and driving cars and planes that feel more like fat kids on skateboards than vehicles.

I long for a return to Call of Duty games where the focus remains on the gameplay that people enjoy – the gameplay lovingly re-created and tweaked time and time again in its superlative multiplayer game (though the profound balance issues therein prevent it from its previous aspiration towards e-sports glory – more on that another week) that people flock to it for.  I’d love to see Global Achievement stats for CoD:BlOpsII, just to see how many people finish the campaign compared to how many people move past their first prestige level or move into ranked play.  There’s a product here people seem to love, and rightly so.  It’s a great core game, and I actually think the most recent set of multiplayer tweaks were good (love the point system!) but a signal was crossed somewhere.  That cold, sterile profundity that happened in Modern Warfare’s AC-130, where the truly terrible nature of war in our current day and age was laid clear in a few minutes as you fired not at jowling enemies but tiny, dehumanized heat signatures on the ground below, was mistaken for a laudable fist pump in favor of war.  The tension of the first, meticulously designed sniper level of Modern Warfare has been stripped away and replaced with a set of formulaic missions wherein a series of sneaks lead you to a cutscene or a scripted series of moments, usually in a war-torn present day city where the frequency of enemies is used to justify your decision not to engage with them.

The state of Call of Duty as a franchise is queer, at best.  It’s selling like hot-cakes, which is great for Treyarch (and terrible for Infinity Ward, who put so much effort into building the god damn thing in the first place before it was more or less torn away from them in one of the fouler tasting moments in business history) but it’s also becoming a sort of “Madden with guns” faster than most people want to acknowledge.  This isn’t good for the core fan-base of Call of Duty, and the decline in sales, however small, isn’t a good sign when you consider the rapidly expanding video game marketplace.

I don’t mean to be apocalyptic in my rhetoric.  Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 has a solidly constructed multiplayer game, a great take on the “zombies” formula and some pretty okay moments in its single player campaign.  But it’s muddled by high cost bullshit and a business model focused around a perennial release schedule which relies on retail markets to make up its sales in an increasingly digital marketplace.  It emphasizes iteration over revolution, moving away from the traits that propelled Modern Warfare to such great heights and made the franchise great.  In the end, developers and gamers are the ones who really stand to lose here, as originality fades and reason and intellect grow overshadowed by bombast, the running and gunning of the franchise eventually overwhelmed by a series of robot-launched explosives.