100 Time November 4, 2019
freedom fighter, the gray area in which
modern Special Forces operate and the
concept of national sovereignty.
In a step forward for the male-
dominated world of first-person shoot-
ers, one of the story’s protagonists,
Farah Karim, is the female leader of
a group of fighters seeking to protect
their homeland. While Karim lives in
the fictional country of Urzik-
stan, she evokes the all- female
Kurdish Women’s Protection
Units active in northern Syria.
In a flashback to her childhood,
we watch through her eyes as
her town suffers a chemical-
weapon attack, forcing her
family to flee. The first-person
view—with the camera low to
the ground to simulate a child’s
perspective—makes it all the more
powerful.
“You have people who never chose to
be soldiers but who are forced into the
role of soldier to fight for their homes,”
says Minkoff. “Very early on, we de-
cided that we wanted to tell the story
both from the perspective of profes-
sional soldiers and civilian soldiers—
what they fight for and the challenges
they face.”
While other Call of Duty games take
players from the invasion of Normandy
straight through Hitler’s downfall, Mod-
ern Warfare players won’t come awayquandaries posed by real conflict? Or
will they prefer to stick with cartoonish
shooters like those in Fortnite and Over-
watch, which ask only that players sit
back and have a good time lobbing digi-
tal rockets and grenades at one another?
Modern Warfare’s creators are bet-
ting that adult gamers are ready for a
more mature take. “No one who is 18
these days believes that war
is easily won,” says Jacob
Minkoff, who led the story de-
sign at Infinity Ward. “They
want a war story that repre-
sents their experience living
in a world that has been at war
their entire lives.”Activision hAs plenty rid-
ing on whether Minkoff is right.
Call of Duty has been among the world’s
best- selling video games since the origi-
nal title, set in World War II, came out
in 2003; it’s now a multibillion- dollar
franchise. The games have rarely asked
players to think too hard about the ram-
ifications of never-ending global war-
fare. They’re more like action movies:
characters inexplicably survive sniper
attacks, airplane crashes and even entire
buildings falling on top of them.
But in Modern Warfare, out Oct. 25
for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, the
story takes center stage, tackling heady
themes like the question of terrorist vs.iT’s nighTTime in London, and
you’re with a group of counter terrorism
agents advancing on a house. Intelli-
gence reports suggest there’s a cell of as-
sailants inside who carried out an attack
against the city. Your team breaks down
the door and moves from room to room,
killing anybody who poses a threat. But
it’s not just armed men you find. There
are children here too, scattering in the
cross fire. Upstairs, you open the last
door to find a woman who begs you not
to shoot. When you pause for a moment,
she lunges for a gun. It’s her or you.
This is a scenario in Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare, the latest installment
in one of video gaming’s most successful
franchises. When the game’s millions of
fans fire up this version, they’re going to
find something very different from past
games: a single- player campaign that’s
a gripping and emotionally difficult de-
piction of life on the front lines of the
global war on terrorism. It’s a major de-
parture for the franchise and, for pub-
lisher Activision and developer Infinity
Ward, a big risk too. Will players who
look to video games for escapism want
to grapple with the moral and ethical
FEATURE
A hit game
gets heavy
By Alex Fitzpatrick
TimeOff Games
ACTIVISION/INFINITY WARD
Call of Duty:
Modern
Warfare adds
a female
protagonist to
the mix