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By Daniel in Entertainment, Games, Thoughts ⋅ February 11, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Buy Call of Duty 4 from Amazon

I was struck by this fact when I completed Call of Duty 4 last week - games are becoming increasingly like films every year. Not so much due to the graphics, the score or any aesthetic reason. This game drew me in, so much so that I even began to empathise with the characters. I'm bound to drop spoilers here, so if you plan on playing CoD4 at some point, save this article for another day.

I don't play many new singleplayer games. For the past three years I've had a rather unhealthy obsession with Counter Strike - it started off slowly, I joined a clan and found myself hungering for organised matches every evening, I even went to a LAN at one point. The urge to shoot at virtual representations of real people was so great, it became a dominant part of my life. It was something of a social thing, more about the people than the gaming at times - but that's a seperate story. Most importantly, I began to realise how important a human face can be on a computer generated character's body. I barely touched a singleplayer game during my time with CS; and aside from the Half-Life series, Call of Duty 4 is the only new shooter I've properly played since 2005.

Before now, empathy wasn't a matter of great importance to me; it certainly wasn't something significant enough to consider alongside other factors. People have described feeling guilt when the friendly artificial intelligences die in their favourite games, which makes me feel like something of a sadist when I admit that I relish games with a friendly fire option. To give a small example, Valve explained their decision to make Barney (the security guard) more prominent in the sequel to Half-Life, by describing the people they asked having felt a pang of guilt when he was killed protecting them. Me? I used to shoot the guy for fun. I'm not psychopathic, it was simply that the game wasn't real enough for me to consider it a big deal.

There have been a few games which I've connected with on an emotional level. Grim Fandango was one of them, when I wasn't cursing it for some of the less obvious puzzles. The Broken Sword was another. In a way, of course, that's one of the fundamental features of an adventure game; unless the purpose is all-out comedy, at the very least you have to have a vague understanding with the characters you play - otherwise half of the motivation for continuing would be lost. But first person shooters, not so much.

Half Life 2 left me awestruck. But again, it wasn't because of the characters - in the majority of cases the interactions just weren't subtle enough to create the illusion that these were actual people. Perhaps this was due to the fact that much of the interaction occurs in between bouts of action, rather than during it; bonding in games is catalysed by firefights, and dampened by the absense of them; HL2 seperates the two far too much for its own good. Episode Two, incidentally, does a far better job, but misses the mark ever so slightly in parts.

So what makes Call of Duty 4 special? Put simply, continuous war.

The game starts by throwing you in with characters whom you have never met, you feel no great attachement to, and then throws you into action upon action, tense escape sequences which are tense despite being transparently scripted, and firefights, during which you genuinely feel part of a team, rather than a lone hero battling the entire middle-east. Empathy for your fellow soldiers is not crammed down your throat from the first minute; instead, it is allowed to develop. When your Captain pulls you up into a climbing helicopter the moment before you lose grip, your first feeling is gratitude rather than skepticism for an obvious cliché. The game is incredibly subtle in the methods it uses to draw you in; and when it spits you out, you are genuinely shocked and disheartened. At one point, I began to feel a sense of detatchment as I drifted away from yet another daring escape, in a chinook helicopter. And then a nuclear bomb detonated, in the city behind me. The next moment, I was spining towards earth, not sure if I would survive - the next moment, I was given the opportunity to crawl away from the burning wreck, dazed from concussions and radiation. And the next moment, I was dead.

Call of Duty 4 glamourises war, but at the very moment you ask yourself if it is not just another propoganda tool, you are sharply corrected. From the assassination carried out from the harsh, deserted landscapes of Chernobyl, to the execution depicted through the victim's eyes, the game is far more harrowing than many I have played so far, and does not shy from showing both sides of its story.

The poignancy of the empathy which CoD4 instilled in me struck me very close to the end of the game. After having escaped from a missile silo, I was trapped alongside your team at a collapsed bridge which served as a dead end. From the perspective of a fallen man, I watched my companions, shot one by one by the surviving opponents. With his dying breath, your captain throws you a pistol. I desperately empty the clip .. and then help arrives. The ending provides no closure, and you are left, bitter with the consequences of the war your friends have laid their lives down for, and sad at their deaths. Call of Duty does not simply present the ideals of conflict, allowing the player to act a part. The game, if anything, is an emulation of war, one you feel part of until the closing moments.

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