Blood Is Compulsory: How We Talk About Advanced Warfare

back in the day after years of begging my parents finally bought me a Sega Genesis by which time all my friends had Nintendo 64 and that was making do with my dad's 386 when they were trying out first Pentiums there was his brief stretch in the late 90s where we had a decent machine and I got to play a few big games the year they were released but I never got into multiplayer because I was still using dialog my parents did get me a Dreamcast when it was new but well you know so it's not chauvinism speaking when I say I've never played Call of Duty my current gaming machines are a refurbished laptop a Gamecube and a Mac Mini and I had shitty Wi-Fi I've long accepted that I just lagged several years behind triple-a but I'm generally aware of what's going on in triple-a at any given moment triple-a spends a shitload of money making sure of that and I have to admit I find advanced warfare fascinating I mean look at it what is this I picked up the basics of the Call of Duty narrative a world war 2 shooter series with an annual release cycle breaks with tradition and puts out a war game set after 9/11 one that is astonishingly well received and astonishingly more successful than the previous games and it basically becomes the symbol of the modern on Rails content munching jingoistic military spectacle shooter you know as a genre the now modernized series continues the annual releases and the games just keep selling but after several years one game isn't as well received and neither is the next one pre-sales drop and suddenly everybody's talking about how days are numbered for the modern on Rails content munching jingoistic military spectacle shooter and into that environment comes advanced warfare jumping into the future where a modern warfare jumped into the present trying to make up for the flagging sales quote-unquote of the previous entries needing to insist that yes Call of Duty is still relevant advanced warfare is sci-fi it has boosts it has double jumps it has this greater emphasis on speed and verticality it's doing something the other military shooters aren't doing by doing what basically every other multiplayer shooter is doing every Cod game has to compare itself to modern warfare every Cod game is more or less trying to recreate modern warfare but this one especially now that the pressures on that game achieved what it achieved by rejecting the rules of its series so here's advanced warfare in the position of having to both reject and be modern warfare it changes the formula are incredibly safe but it has to package itself as a Hail Mary and even that is in a way a kind of Hail Mary and that's all really interesting the advanced Warfare's existence is fascinating to me as like a cultural object skeptical as to whether I personally would enjoy the actual game had I the opportunity to play it and also unsure whether enjoying it matters I asked myself why do I even know so much about it I don't have cable I have ad blockers and all my browser's I only see ads if I'm on a public computer or when they physically drive past me and all this [ __ ] about it because everything Activision is doing to get people talking about it is working I have opinions about it without even playing it and that's not just everyone on the internet has to have an opinion [ __ ] it's really good marketing I want to experience it for the same reasons I experienced the passion and 300 and a 'but are not to enjoy them or to hate on them but to take part in the conversation good or bad Call of Duty is significant so let me ask you a sincere question if I the dude who only gets to play old [ __ ] and Andy [ __ ] and was still curious enough to dig up a bunch of reviews for a game he can't even play if I can spew all those words about what makes Call of Duty interesting to me why aren't any of these glowing reviews more interesting to read I mean like everything above a 90 is not bad but kind of boring if you like advanced warfare poses all kinds of interesting questions and I don't think I'm alone in that so let me rattle off some stuff the most positive reviews invariably spent half or more of their texts talking rather approvingly about the story campaign is that weird it mean really is that weird it's a well-known fact that Call of Duty is a predominantly multiplayer series that still has a story campaign in the way that the human species still has an appendix it's a gorgeous expensive and lavishly produced appendix and appendix with Kevin Spacey in it and literally 18 percent of players pay attention to it it seems to me that if a game series doggedly insists on having a story mode pours inordinate amounts of money into its story mode and makes that story the centerpiece of its ad campaign with the full knowledge that a four out of five players will ignore it and be both players and reviewers usually ridicule the story the circumstances of such a story actually being a nine out of 10 would be pretty goddamn interesting but across the board the reviews read like any other mostly single-player affair that just has a solid multiplayer component as if singleplayer were the deciding factor in the audience's decision to buy I don't get the sense from Cod's fan base that the story is terribly important to them but if the story isn't important to the people buying the game then this is consumer advocacy for a consumer that doesn't really exist I find that weird or what about Kevin Spacey pretty much all these reviews agreed that this is the best performance ever in a Call of Duty game but me when I'm curious about is is it a good performance how does Jonathan iron stack up against verbal Kint Lester Burnham David gale the pay it forward guy they only ever mentioned the characters similarity to Spacey's role on house of cards I get that this is pretty good for a video game but god that's so condescending be it fem shep alyx vance or prince alexander i'm not sure good for a video game is a real qualifier anymore think we can just talk about good bad or mediocre and what I suspect they mean is good for Call of Duty and the graphics well apparently they lovingly rendered Kevin Spacey's face and okay it's pretty impressive how far we've come that as soon as he walks up you can tell like Kevin Spacey that arms worth more to me than this entire facility can't they fix his eyes I heard one of the greatest actors in the world and then they give him the eyes of a carp it's been in the refrigerator for three days is this still impressive in a post LA noire universe I know no one can actually afford to do what Team Bondi did Team Bondi couldn't even afford to do a team bond I did but it's still less impressive than this while still less expressive than something simpler all I can tell is that it obviously cost a lot of money now look I'm not just trying to beat up on the game but it's strange to see it put all its chips on realistic celebrity faces that look numb with novocaine and then see it reviewed as though the same thing hasn't been done better what standard is it being held to it's Call of Duty even the multiplayer is compared almost exclusively to previous Cod games not to other games that are doing similar things let me be clear about something I don't get any sense that this game deserves bad reviews but I think it deserves curious reviews it's not that these reviews offer insufficient answers to all the questions advanced warfare raises they don't ask them all so what I kept wondering was who is the five-star review of advanced warfare 4 and I don't exactly have an answer to that question but it got me thinking about a few things first the review is not for me the frame of reference for a positive review of Call of Duty is not other forms of entertainment you could spend your time and money on not gaming at large not other shooters not even battlefield or medal of honor its Call of Duty how is this Call of Duty better or worse than the rest of Call of Duty that may speak to its monolithic nature where good or bad no longer matter the game is coming out and it's going to sell the question is just how much so given that context this series isn't really trying to expand its audience and when a series has made ten billion dollars maybe there isn't anywhere to expand haters aren't likely to change their minds and the fanbase is probably already going to buy it unless someone warns them it's and other ghosts it doesn't need to reach people like me it only needs to reach its fanbase which I think the five star reviewer is part of so perhaps the reason this multiplayer game has so much extra stuff tacked onto it is to generate the conversation needed to reach that fanbase certainly my eyes glazed over reading the minutiae of the multiplayer this information is useful to a fan but it's not hype it's not gonna get a thousand retweets needs to latch on to something newsworthy and I suspect Kevin Spacey is there for the same reason there was a German Shepherd in ghosts it's in part to give the reviewer something interesting to talk about there are multiplayer games but with no professional competitive scene because the gameplay changes up too frequently the games are meant to be purchased exhausted for a year and then discarded for the next one each has to engage its audience for hundreds of hours and still be ephemeral it's a strange business model each game has to feel momentous Call of Duty is the best [ __ ] game ever and the next one is even more best and Kevin derpface and everything that comes with him just feels more momentous than what would otherwise be the same old multiplayer game with an app pack some new movement options and a physics patch people don't need to play the campaign but they want to know it's their means they got their money's worth and they want to hear that it's good not Prust good but klancy good gamers these days seem very self-conscious about their hobby being taken seriously as a worthwhile way to spend their time but not so seriously that they should ask questions about the plausibility of one sold are killing this many enemies or a PMC actually declaring war on America or thorny er questions they want the games to be taken seriously but only on the developers terms and these reviews oblige the analogy comparing the story of a video game to the story of a porno is an old saw but it's more apt than people often realize the reason pornographic films used to always have stories was because of obscenity laws a film that was nothing but people having sex could be considered holy without social merit and therefore be censored as long as the film had a story any story it could claim legitimacy and call of duty doesn't have to deal with censorship so much as the court of public opinion cod has a story perhaps so it can insist it has more on its mind than multiplayer shooting matches the player doesn't care the reviewer doesn't care it's debatable whether the developer even cares but there's this expectation that you're gonna make a show of caring because that means the game is serious and you can enjoy that or you can question it and some of the most interesting conversation around Cod does both but if you want to unabashedly love the game there's a lot you have to overlook and this mentality of overlooking seems to have trickled all the way down to how does it compare to the last game like it I was paid to review that wasn't Call of Duty there are those three questions you're supposed to ask of a creative work and Cod passes the first two neatly it is precisely what it wants to be but the third question is is that a thing worth being and I'm not saying the answer is no but that people who love the game don't seem to want the question asked second the review is uncontroversial given all that's going on right now with ethics in games journalism I think it's worth mentioning when and where people pitch fits about ethics people see a high score for gone home and they start looking for connections right before the review came out the reviewer was invited on to a podcast where the lead designer used to be a co-host gur collusion when people see low marks or even just a conflicted opinion for a game like grand theft auto 5 they look at the credibility of the author look how much attention this controversial opinion got she's clearly doing it just a booster on Fame her corruption nobody will cry foul about these reviews they may not like them the haters will still roll their eyes and write low review scores and Prout maybe even claim the reviewers were paid off but it's not gonna end up on a wiki the disjoint between the critical reviews and the user reviews of gone home on Metacritic has been cited as proof of journalistic corruption no one has cited advanced warfare for having the exact same disjoint people could easily find connections if they went looking for them I am positive Activision's advertised on most of these sites I'm sure somewhere on Twitter a developer as a friendly relationship with a reviewer because if you're hell-bent on seeing corruption you will always find it but it's not gonna set off alarms because this is what people expect they expect a highly polished triple-a game to be generally well-received they expect an extremely Pro military and pro American game to be treated as a political this is what they're used to this is the kind of review I was raised on they go in with certain expectations and are unconcerned when those expectations are met but I have to ask if they go into a review with an expectation of what it will say and what they want to find is more or less what they expected what was the point of reading it and to the best as I can determine this is the popular notion of what ethical journalism would look like ethical journalism reflects their opinion back on them ethical journalism is a tastemaker telling them something they already like is good ethical journalism is when the reviewer doesn't ask any tricky questions and quietly reassures them that they don't have to ask them either let me be clear I don't doubt that these reviewers are sincere in their opinions the question of whether a journalist is obliged to discuss the trickier parts about games like Call of Duty at least in some of the killing lots and lots of non-white foreigners broad strokes is a big topic I won't get into right now but I don't think it's any sort of problem that these reviews exist but I feel we're grappling with the expectation that all reviews should read like this that no one should ever ask those broad-stroke questions that are to me the most interesting thing about the game and I'll be the first to say that has nothing to do with ethics and if that's all journalism ever was I'm not sure I'd call it journalism third the review is shooters in microcosm if Call of Duty is held only to the standards of Call of Duty then it's functionally its own genre it has seanrid trappings and genre expectations and asking why is this game so pro-military feels like asking why aren't there any mages on this spaceship that's just what it is but this kind of pussyfooting around has become a default way of talking about shooters in general if you're making a triple a product that's going to take years and hundreds of people and millions and millions of publishing company dollars it's going to be an action game probably a first or third person shooter you want it to be about something you got to hang that something on a shooter because that's what makes money and players and reviewers accept it because at this point they're acclimated to it it's been this way for ages a game is judged for what it is not what it maybe should have been if the shooting is great great if the shooting is terrible and we'll mention that it's terrible but barring those two extremes we barely even notice it it's invisible it's just the thing we do on the way to the next good bit unless it's one of those shooters where the stuff that isn't shooting is what we do on the way to the good bits we often only condemn the game if both the shooting and the stuff is crap or one is crap enough to ruin the other but we don't often enough ask even if the stuff is good and the shooting is at least inoffensive does the stuff benefit from being in a shooter and frankly it's hard to see the point in even asking that I mean what's the point of asking why wasn't BioShock Infinite an adventure game because that would have made more sense but it doesn't matter that game wouldn't get funded so this is what it is this is what we expect you can put in a nice well-written love story you can put in some fancy rhetoric no matter what high-minded stuff it's about it'll also be about well we can do you blood in love without the rhetoric and we can do you blood in rhetoric without the love and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive but we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood blood is compulsory or old blood is he is that what people want it's what we do you

Channel: Innuendo Studios

Views: 283,143

Rating: 4.8513727 out of 5

Keywords: Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Shooter Game (Media Genre), video essay, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Play), Video Game (Industry), game reviews, ethics in games journalism

Id: dbEiVrnhwlU

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 09 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/kazingaAML]

This is an old one from Innuendo Studios, but I think it's take on the Call of Duty series dovetails nicely with many of the vids that Jim Sterling has been putting out lately.

[u/mathemasexual]

this one has been on my watch later queue for a while im not disappointed. im one of those people who think gamergate was a huge game changer because it was a huge game changer for me lol so anytime i can dialectic in that context im down

[u/kazall]

I'm liking Innuendo Studios more with each subsequent video.