Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

In case you haven't noticed - that is, if you've been living on Mars for the past two weeks - today marks the release of a new videogame from Activision called 'Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2' or MW2 for short. It's expected to be the highest grossing game of all time, and to overtake (by many miles) the record opening weekend revenue for any film. MW2 is a follow up to the massively popular and successful 'Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare' (which, in itself, was the sequel to three previous Call of Duty titles), and had its own celebrity-packed premiere last night in Piccadilly Circus. In the world of video games, and in cultural terms (yes, you snobs) this is an epochal event.

MW2 is a First Person Shooter (FPS - basically you get the eye view of a guy with a gun) in which you can play either as a US marine or a member of the SAS. And, to all intents and purposes, the object of the game is to run around killing as many bad guys as you can. That is what first-person shooters do - what they say on the tin. The excitement comes from seeing if you can stay alive long enough to kill them before they kill you. The genre began with a game called Escape from Castle Wolfenstein, in which you had to fight your way out of a secret Nazi installation, killing SS as you went, through the Doom and Duke Nukem franchises, growing increasingly sophisticated in terms of graphics, sound design and level planning, until today, playing a game like MW2 on the X-Box 360 or the Playstation 3, you could be forgiven for thinking you are actually there, running through the ruined cityscape, dodging grenades and taking out snipers with a blast from your AR-15. It's so immersive it makes a trip to the cinema feel like gawping at a zoetrope.

The game has already been decried by the usual reactionary critics, like Keith Vaz MP, who called for it to be banned because of one particular level in which, as an undercover CIA operative, you are forced to accompany a terrorist leader on a killing-spree in an airport departure lounge. But the comments of Vaz and his ilk are only likely to do one thing - heighten interest in the game. Activision must be paying him commission. From my point of view, of course there's something horribly uncomfortable about a game in which you can machine gun tourists, especially after the Mumbai attacks earlier this year, but I think the game tells us two important things:

One, it's fantasy. We've not been able to get this through our heads as a society ever since literature, films, and games have been with us, and we probably never will, but mentally normal people are able to distinguish between a book, or a film, or a picture, or a game, and real life. Otherwise those works of art and imagination would not have any meaning. They would cease to exist as creative artefacts and they would not be enjoyable because they would offer no escape from the real world. I could play MW2 for months, and I would still never want to kill anybody.

No game, and no book, and no film, could make me more prepared to kill anybody or hurt anybody because they are fantasies, where there are no consequences, where no real harm is inflicted, where the violence is tidy and unaffecting. Whereas in reality causing pain is all too disturbing and horrific. Virtually everybody instinctively undertsands this, and always will understand it. There are some people, psychologically damaged people, who may find it more difficult to distinguish, or who may even become more disposed to commit violenec through exposure to violent games and films, etc... but it's important to understand that even in these cases, it is not the film or the game or the book that makes these people commit acts of violence.

Two, the killing of innocent people is wrong and shocking. It may seem absurd that a game like MW2, which is premised upon high-intensity lethal combat, should contain some form of moral lesson, but the airport sequence is clearly designed to upset and revile the gamer, and to encourage him or her to pursue the objective of stopping the terrorist/ultra-nationalists with even greater determination. Of course, that is not to say that some players won't just see the level as an excuse to spray more bullets around randomly and take out a few helpless civvies, but the game's designers have surely included this part of the game to fire up some kind of righteous anger inside the player's conscience so that they are even more stoked for the levels ahead.

The pleasure of games like this is very simple. It's about adrenaline. It's a rush. The art of the game designer is to make your pulse race and make you want to take out the baddies and feel in danger, on the edge of your seat, the whole time. That's what makes the game absorbing. It activates a very basic adrenal response to danger which floods your cerebral cortex and keeps you hooked. The completion of a mission or reaching safety is accompanied by a release of endorphins (success/reward). The airport level adds to the adrenal response by heightening your sense of danger (your cover could be blown at any time) and at the same time by compounding your indignation at the callous actions of the enemy (making you want to 'win' even more).

What is in many ways so surpising about MW2 and other games of its kind (considered from an ideological standpoint) is just how conservative and doctrinaire they are. There is clearly a profound desire to complete some kind of perceived moral mission among the young gamers of the world. They like the division of the world into good and bad elements, the stultifyingly black and white narrative of global terrorism and even unreconstructed Communist radicalism. They don't want to be jihadis, or anarchists or subversives and bring down the real power, they want to do as they're told, go and kill 'the other' on behalf of their own comfortable, imperial nations. In a very important sense, they don't question this.

Game developers, especially those who create FPS scenarios, are tapping into a very powerful set of narratives about the fundamentally tribal nature of our communities and the unserved need to create a moral polarity between ourselves and those who attack us. It's easy to assume that gamers don't really care who's doing the killing and who's being killed, and often they do like to play on the other side, but the most popular games, by far, are still those in which the ostensible objectives of the game are still backed up by some simplistic moral underpinning. You want to fight for the SAS because you can identify with them, with British forces, and you can't identify so easily with the Taliban, or FARC, or Hezbollah.

Perhaps it's not so surprising. But it does render these games extremely one-dimensional, no matter how good the simulated environment is. What if you were able to create your own rebel movement, based on whatever set of grievances or political allegiances you liked, and topple the governments of Europe and America? Now that, my friends, that would be a game.

Anyway, because I have a Mac, and no copy of Windows 7 to run in Boot Camp, I'll have to wait until the heat death of the sun before Aspyr or someone ports this beauty over so I can join in the bloodletting. But it'll be worth it, just to see the look on that back-packer's face when I come hurdling over the check-in desk with an M-203 pointed right at him.