The best time I had with Uncharted 2 (which went on to win several game-of-the-year awards) was while eating a submarine sandwich and watching the making-of videos that came with the game disk, fantasizing about what it would be like to work for Naughty Dog as a late-afternoon-lighting designer or a stony-ledge-placement specialist. These people know how to have fun. They’ve even included an optional zero-gravity mode, in which mercenaries, when shot, flip up rag-dollingly in the air and drift there. After one battle, there were two riot shields and six bulletproof-vested dead people peacefully hanging like barrage balloons in the air in front of a temple.
After Uncharted 2 came the biggest release of the year—Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision on November 10. My son and his friends went to a local GameStop at midnight to get their reserved copies; they played it all night and then fell asleep in school assembly. Modern Warfare 2 sold fast — it reportedly made more money in its first twenty-four hours than Titanic or Avatar did. Millions of people play it every day. In less than a year, it has become the second-best-selling video game of all time, after Wii Play.
Here’s what it’s about. It’s about killing, and it’s about dying. Also, it’s about collecting firearms. And it’s modern warfare, which means it’s set in places like Afghanistan. As in Halo, you are a gun that moves — in fact, you are many guns, because with a touch of your Y button you can switch from one gun to another. But this game has a much crisper, brighter look than the murky Halo, and the graphics engine is better, and the telescopic rifle scopes, their lenses pale blue and curvingly reflective, are a delight to peer through. “Yesterday’s enemies are today’s recruits,” says the narrator, General Shepherd, who is full of little bits of wisdom like that, until he slides over to the dark side.
The first thing you have to do is learn how to aim and shoot, and to do that you run through a training course in Afghanistan with pop-up wooden targets. Some targets depict enemies — they have angry frowns and wear turbans and look like Khomeini — and some depict civilians: boys in blue-striped polo shirts, little girls in dresses, and a plump man in a button-down shirt. The training course keeps track of how many civilians you’ve killed and how many frowning Khomeinis, while a corporal shouts at you to hurry up: “Go, go, go!”
You do so well as Private Allen, shooting Arabs in Kabul, that you are enlisted to help out the CIA, which is up to nothing good in Russia. Then, as part of something called Task Force 141, you begin dying in earnest. I don’t know how many times I was killed as I tried to work toward the northeast section of a runway in order to plant a bomb. (This was at a military base in Kazakhstan.) I wandered tensely through cold Quonset huts. Each time, a jeep would park, and there was a sudden surge of Russian voices and men would aim at me and shoot me. I was shooting them, too. My name during this phase of the game was Roach. “Roach, search the northeast part of the runway for the fueling station!” my commander, Soap MacTavish, said repeatedly, in his Scottish burr. When I got someone in the head, MacTavish would say, “Nicely done,” or “Good kill.” When I shot badly, he would say, “That was sloppy.” I always felt better when MacTavish was telling me what to do.
When you’re hit in Modern Warfare 2, the bullets make a zing and then a flump. Your field of view jolts and gets alarmingly blood-dropletted around the edges. You begin to gasp. The sound goes hollow, as if you’re listening through a long tube, the controller vibrates, and you know that you have only a moment of life left. As your head hits the ground, the screen’s image turns suddenly diagonal and fuzzes out. There’s a swooshing in your ears, followed by a brief whistling-teakettle sound. The last thing you hear is MacTavish shouting, once again, from far away, “Roach, search the northeast corner of the runway!”
Then, at the blood-blurred moment of death, you are rewarded with a literary quotation. These come from Einstein, Voltaire, Zora Neale Hurston, Edward R. Murrow, Churchill, Machiavelli, Dick Cheney — all sorts of apropos people — and they are confusingly contradictory. Some quotes are cynical, some pacifist, some earnestly pro-war. Cheney says, “It is easy to take liberty for granted when you have never had it taken from you.” Gandhi says, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” These neat word packets, displayed just as you’ve been shot or blown up by a grenade, mock the notion that there is any body of aphoristic wisdom that can be applied to a fatal firefight. You’re lying in the snow, dead. Words of wisdom mean nothing now.
But of course you’re not really dead. Almost immediately, you respawn. You’re given another chance. You’re given many, many chances, because Modern Warfare 2 is just about the dyingest game out there. It isn’t, in my reading, a glorification of modern warfare. You play for three hours and you think, This? This chaotic chattering absurdity and panic and wasted ardor is what we mean by “troop surge”? It is an unjingoistic, perhaps completely cynical amusement. The CIA, covertly making everything worse, gets mixed up in an airport atrocity in Russia, which prompts Russia to attack a residential neighborhood in northeastern Virginia, not far from the Pentagon and CIA headquarters (both in flames), with paratroopers and helicopter gunships. “Ramirez,” a sergeant shouts, voice-acted by Keith David, “take your team and secure the Burger Town!” Also: “Be advised multiple enemy mobiles have been sighted near the taco joint, over!”
I’d been playing alone, but the “single-player campaign,” with its improbable story, is not what Modern Warfare 2 is really about. Most people want to go online and shoot at other real people, not at software soldiers controlled by artificial intelligence. “Single player is like taking a Spanish class,” my son explained. “Multiplayer is like going to Spain.” In multiplayer, you choose a locale — for instance, the submarine base — and a style of competition. There’s Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and others. And then you run around shooting and setting claymore mines where other players won’t see them when they walk into a room. If you kill three people without dying, you can get a U.A.V. — a Predator drone. A kill streak of nine gives you a Stealth Bomber air strike. If you kill twenty-five people in a row, you can get a tactical nuclear weapon, and the game is over. You get frequent bonuses and awards — new weapons, new ammunition, new scopes, new camouflage, new proficiencies. “It’s like they’ve got you on a drip feed of sugar,” my son said. “The only way you get the next little drip is by playing a little more.”
In multiplayer you kill and die so often that a single statistic becomes extremely important to you: your kill-to-death ratio. As you get better — reviewing your deaths on “killcam” instant replay to see who got you — your kill-to-death ratio goes to one and then to more than one. One of my son’s friends, a good student, has a kill-to-death ratio of 1.65. In 219 hours of game-playing, he has killed 32,884 times and died 19,956 times. My son, who believes that wars serve no purpose, has played for 96 hours, and he has a kill-to-death of 1.17; it was 1.4 when he was playing every day. Mine is 0.08.
In order to give me a taste of multiplayer madness, as I practiced my shooting and my sprinting skills, my son set us up by ourselves in a location called Rust — a place in Afghanistan where there is an old oil installation. Sitting side by side and watching our characters on the split screen, we spawned out in Rust, and he began running circles around me. I could hear his feet going pad pad pad pad in the sand, and then the sound changed and became hollow as he ran onto a pipe. I would look around, trying to find him — and then I’d see that he was a few feet away, pointing his gun at my head. His character was an American soldier, I noticed. My character, which I saw when I looked at his split-screen image, was some bad jihadist with Arabic writing on my head scarf.