Game Week 1: Call of Duty

Ok, obviously I have given up on Radio Week. It was a bust. It got me few comments and honestly was a pain. It's a cool concept I think, but obviously too strenuous to keep up for an entire week. I may make it a monthly thing.

In the meantime, it's been ages since I posted anything on the blog that I was determined would be updated every single weekday...which is just sad.

I could offer excuses galore, but essentially what happened is, I got sick, started to write again when my brain returned to functioning levels, and was so exhausted by the idea of doing another lyric analysis that I shoved it to the back of my brain. I felt like a jerk, because I really wanted to do one for my Grandma Jill, who took the time to actually mail me a mix CD and a package of lyrics. I was going to make her the finishing piece to my radio week with fanfare to thank her for her devotion. Instead, I entered a guilt/avoidance spiral that resulted in me disappearing from the face of the earth.

So radio week is tabled. The radio post I do will feature the inimitable Grandma Jill. Until that time, however, you get game week...much less stressful.

I'm going to ease myself back into posting with an easy one today: very little literary analysis and mostly observational humor. (Oh no.)

Let me start this by saying I am in no universe a video gamer. I lack the coordination to handle that first person shooter business. I can not get behind the mechanics of one joystick to control where you're going and one to control where you're looking and shooting. I end up putting bullets in the intangible clouds before I run off a cliff as the enemy soldiers just stare at me in bafflement.

My video gaming ability is securely in the 80s and 90s. I like Galaga, Super Mario Bros. 3, fighting games where button mashing results in hilarious over-blown deaths, Zelda games where I happily devote my time to fetch-quests and finding all of the empty bottles. My favorite bit of modern games are, often, the cut scenes. I like the story. (Shocker, I know)


The only shooting mechanism I'm comfortable with.

We will devote another day this week, probably tomorrow, to the only modern video game I not only enjoy, but have beaten and am breathlessly awaiting the sequel to.

In the meantime, I want to talk about something I've noticed by my bemused observations of my (not-so) little brother's gaming. Specifically, the villains in them.

Red Dead Redemption, the outlaw Western game for the Xbox 360, is hilarious. I am not going to try to make myself seem like a good person here: I will freely admit that I laughed like a lunatic when I found out he got an "achievement" by lassoing a Mexican hooker and tying her to the train rails and waiting for her to get splattered all over the desert. (Before any of you gamers correct me, I know that it didn't have to be a Mexican hooker you tied to the rails - but I think it proves that my brother has the same sense of humor I do by insisting that this was the proper way to get the achievement)

This is the same kind of dark humor that made me willingly spend money on a movie ticket to see Inglorious Basterds in theaters a second time. I enjoy it, frankly, when any form of media fully acknowledges that beyond political correctness, most people will still find that kind of thing funny. In fact, that movie was very aware of itself. The main point of the movie, as I understood it, is that however heroic we like to paint ourselves, Americans like violence...and then it proved it by making us laugh like loons as American soldiers shot so many bullets into Hitler that his face was reduced to bloody confetti.

So we return to the hog-tie-to-a-rail achievement. Would I think it funny if it happened in real life? Of course not. Would I be equally horrified if, in real life, this happened to an American banker as if it happened to a Mexican prostitute? Yes.

However, as a cowboy outlaw in the west, in a game that attempts to push all of the western cliche buttons down to hunting bears, robbing banks, getting wasted in saloons complete with swinging doors, and hog-tying people, I appreciate that you have the opportunity to grab a wench from a corner in Mexico and tie her to the rails like an old school villain. It tickles me in the way that it tickles me when super-hero stories go back to their roots and blame everything on the communists.

(Someday, I will post here the panel in the original Fantastic Four origin story where Ben Grimm's reasonable objection that they know nothing of the effects of gamma radiation is completely trumped by the counter argument that if they don't immediately go into space in their home-made space shuttle now the COMMUNISTS might get there first.)

So, yes, I enjoy the horribly politically-incorrect Red Dead Redemption. It suits its environment to the ground and has a kind of self-aware humor that makes me laugh.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have the most politically "ok" killing spree in the history of ever in the game "Call of Duty".

The game series itself, as far as I can tell, just pits you against whichever nations the war in question involves. WWII you get Japanese, German, American etc. Vietnam you get Vietnamese, American and hilarious peace-sign spray paint on every bullet sprayed wall. Each nationality has a hilariously, and obviously American-produced, cliche accent and set of ten stereotypical phrases. The Brits all sound like Imperialists with Pith helmets and talk about tea. The Russians talk about the motherland and sound like Boris and Natasha.

This, in its own way, is hilarious and could say any number of things about our standards as a nation but mostly just speaks to the geniuses in the video game industry and how well they know their target audience of foul-mouthed thirteen year olds.

The most interesting portion of the games, however, is the side game my brother simply calls "nazi zombies".

In this game, the conglomerate of international stereotypes put aside their otherwise insurmountable differences to obliterate the one villain nobody could possibly regret killing.

Nazis have been the politically correct villains since Nuremberg. It is one of the few times in warfare where the "other" side did something so heinously evil that we can attack them without much objection from our fellow man. However, the problem with nazi soldiers as 100% approved bad guy is that they are, in fact, humans. It doesn't take more than a few seconds of logic to realize that not all nazis were involved with the concentration camps. Particularly enlightened individuals may even notice that it wouldn't be completely outside the realm of possibility for some soldiers to simply be enlisted men, with no more xenophobia than your average guy, who just want to defend their country.

Zombies, similarly, are the equivalent villain of the supernatural world. While teenage girls happily slip into the murky waters of necrophilia and bestiality by lusting after vampires and werewolves, respectively...zombies are just mindless killing machines that nobody will object to you mowing down with a chainsaw, machine gun, flame thrower, cricket bat or whatever your weapon of choice is. We are willing, as a fantasy-consuming populace, to attribute moral grey area and sympathetic backstory to any number of classic horror monsters. We haven't done so with zombies since Frankenstein fell to the mob.

So when you take nazi soldiers, resurrect them through whatever scientific or dark magic means necessary, and make them into undead, you remove any regret you could have had from killing either a living creature or a horribly misunderstood product of mad science.

A nazi is still a human being. If you unload a machine gun in one, you are directly responsible for the death of a fellow man.

A resurrected man may still contain remnants of its previous life in his reanimated heart. Shaun of the Dead chained his best undead friend in the shed and played video games with him.

A zombie nazi is an undead threat to your existence: in life it was part of the group that committed mass genocide, in death it is a flesh-eating shambling monster.

So thank you, Call of Duty. Unsatisfied with the moral ambiguity of killing zombies, (in case a Zombie-rights activist group protests,) or upsetting any neo-nazis (by claiming that the holocaust happened and that it was bad), you created the perfect villain.


A face not even a mother could love - she'd ok you shooting it too.


(Morality aside, if one of those zombies attacks you, you will shoot on reflex. The zombies in this game are fast. You barely have time to register that it is, in fact, trying to kill you before you are hitting that "shoot" button as many times as you can in blind panic.)