Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

It's been almost ten years since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare turned the shooter space upside down. At the time, it was praised not just for its big action set-pieces, the rushing pace of its campaign, and its introduction of RPG-like progression and unlocks to its multiplayer, it was also regarded as advancing the thematics of military shooters. For a lot of people, the supposed realism of CoD 4's campaign was like a cold slap in the face. It gave the impression of being a new breed of military FPS not just because of its work in gameplay and story delivery but also because it replaced the endless WWII flashbacks of nineties shooters with images of terrorism and instability from the Middle East that Brits and Americans associated with then-current warfare. Some took its portrayal of a radical Middle-Eastern terror cell as bleeding-edge, something you could have seen on the evening news, but in retrospect, Modern Warfare's warfare wasn't that modern. The single-player took less inspiration from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, and more from older Cold War fears.

Sure, Modern Warfare had Khaled Al-Asad and the unnamed Middle-Eastern nation, but they were only tinder for a panic about Soviet Russia and nuclear strikes that swelled through the back half of the game. Al-Asad sets off a nuclear warhead but no such thing happened during the real Middle-Eastern conflicts, and so the image of a mushroom cloud over a civilian town comes off as a product of Cold War nightmares more than post-9/11 invasion. As it turns out, the bomb was Russian anyway, given to Al-Asad by Russian "ultranationalist" Imran Zakhaev. The hunt for Al-Asad was a red herring, and his terrorist group does not exist as an end or primary antagonising force for the story, their main purpose is to set up the real bad guys who are the Russians trying to restore the glory days of the Soviet era to their country. To pursue Zakhaev, you visit Pripyat: the town wiped bare by the Chernobyl disaster. That accident happened in 1984, and again, reflects twentieth-century discomforts about nuclear technology, not anything from the twenty-first-century.

The game ends in the ultimate Cold War terror: The Russians launching nuclear ICBMs at the United States and the sequel soldiers onwards with this theme of old-school Russians threatening American livelihoods. I know a lot of people saw Modern Warfare 2 as a departure from the original game and it was in that the "ultranationalists" carved out a larger space for themselves in the plot and that the politics involved were more fantastical than before. However, its fear of Soviet Russians as a player in global warfare was nothing new. There are probably two reasons why Modern Warfare retreats from its contemporary images of Middle-Eastern violence into this Cold War stupor.

The first is that the Islamic terrorist groups which Modern Warfare bases its secondary antagonists off of didn't pose an existential threat to the United States. After September 11th there were a handful of attempted terrorist acts over the following decade, but nobody woke up in a cold sweat because they thought a man could press a button in Baghdad and wipe a whole coast off the map, the threat posed by Islamic terrorists was smaller than that. Modern Warfare wanted a big action movie finish; it wanted you to stop something that could cripple the United States as a country, and the only threat in living memory for which that was true was the threat of nuclear war from the Soviet Union.

The second and more ironic reason is that the images of Middle-Eastern terrorism were probably so contemporary that they were not yet part of a highly developed symbolism of global warfare. When we see nukes and Soviet Russians in media, we have a clear grasp of the symbolism at play and quickly understand the tropes and suggestions involved. Not that there weren't shared concepts of Middle-Eastern terrorism in the public consciousness at the time, but the ideas about Cold War threats to the first world had had more time to percolate, and there had been more time for a shared cinematic language describing Soviet Russian nuclear threats to develop. An angry Russian with a nuke was a codified cultural concept in the United States for which there was yet no substitute. Not that Modern Warfare couldn't have taken a different direction, but as a game made by and aimed at Americans that was trying to give its audience a sense of fear for their country, Russian nationalists launching nukes at them was an easy concept to fall back on.

This isn't meant to be a scathing critique of Modern Warfare as much as a clarification about the nature of its story, but there you go. Modern Warfare is mostly only modern in the context that the Cold War could be considered modern and there are unique advantages to going for a less modernised view of war in your war story. Thanks for reading.

Interesting point! It's not that the "Russian Baddies" sailed over my head, but I'd never thought about it in context with the label "Modern Warfare." Black Ops may be more explicitly Cold War related, but the Modern Warfare games were definitely playing off those same anxieties. Thanks for sharing!

Yup! It’s why I think they could do something fresh and interesting in the modern setting. Something a little more modern, set during the very early days of the hunt for Bin Laden, covering how much brass missed the ball on that and a few of the major operations that occurred there, or maybe some SF stuff with the tribes in Afghanistan.

I’d like to see a genuinely more grounded CoD campaign that doesn’t need to be “end of the world” desperate but still hard hitting. Could be cool to do something with more intrigue or depth to it all.

Neat read; I hadn't really thought of it like that. Something to recall is that in 2007, the Iraq War was forefront in the minds of many, with the troop surge having just happened earlier in the year. I think Activision intentionally sidestepped a "Middle-Eastern" conflict because we were smack dab in the middle of one in reality, and just recycled Cold War fears as you mentioned instead. There were still anti-Middle-Eastern sentiments from much of the post-9/11 America hanging around as well, so it's probably best that those flames weren't fanned.

I think its a fair critique of the setting and themes, I guess what was definitely 'modern', was unique mechanics and use of characterization, and I think that the crux for me, (as a completely non military person) showing the relationship between that unit, the crazy journey and GRR Martin levels of rug pulling across the three games seemed so fresh to me.

Interesting take, but I disagree with the premise - or not entirely.

The Russian faction from the games is a group of Ultranationalists. In the years since the game came out Russian nationalism has become an increasingly large concern for people in the west. Likewise nuclear fears which have been very in the news recently, but I think were always a part of the fear of middle eastern terrorism (cf 24, the "10 minutes to torture the location of a nuke from a terrorist" conversations).

The idea of an ultranationalist Russian faction who are intervening in the Middle East in ways which go against US/Western interests seems pretty up to date, given the sort of narratives (I say narratives mostly because I don't want to start a whole political conversation) we have around Syria and Russia now.

EDIT: With the obvious caveat that a lot of the tension between east & west that pervades our current culture could itself be seen as a resurfacing of cold war sentiments and rivalries that never fully went away.

@thebrainninja said:

Totally agree.

I think a game like that could be fantastic and is the kind of thing that is very unlikely to be developed with the way that modern military games are. To some extent modern military is considered a little played out now, what with CoD having brought out these huge games every year and eventually deciding itself that modern military was old hat. The other problem is that if you're releasing a modern military game, you're going up against the likes of CoD and Battlefield and a company is unlikely to fund any competitor to them that isn't going to sell gangbusters. Those games sell the numbers they do in no small part because they are empowerment fantasies, not critical explorations of western military intervention.

I think there is a way to write a story about conflict between western powers and the Middle-East that isn't just straight-up racist or justifying backwards foreign policy, and the older CoD games seem to have a fairly respectful look at both sides of WWII, but modern CoD was never going to be the super conscious on-point reflection on wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. To some extent I think it did reinforce images of scary Middle-Eastern terrorists fighting brave westerners, it just didn't go all the way with it and that was for the best.

I think to some extent the good that the earlier CoDs did with story has been forgotten and I still don't think it was quite the cutting edge for games storytelling in video games at the time. For example, it came out the same year as Mass Effect and in my opinion didn't get close to that in terms of narrative and ways the player could engage the narrative. However, it did have a pacing and tightness to its story that was way ahead of the curve and those are two of the most important aspects to making a story work in a AAA game. It also had these elaborate sections that were just for theme and tone like the lead-in for Pripyat or Death From Above. Ultimately, the name "Modern Warfare" must have been a marketing decision to signal that this was a new kind of shooter game, although I don't think that invalidates the criticism that it's a little out of step with the story.

Well, I was mainly talking about the game as a reaction to what modern warfare looked like at the time. After all, CoD couldn't react to events that hadn't happened yet. Even taking into account current events, I don't think CoD 4 bears much resemblance to the modern world. There are lingering tensions with Russia but not in a way where America still fears them as a Communism power and certainly not in a way where it seems like them launching nukes at the U.S. will happen any time soon. Russia has been involved in Syria but in a way that is combating the terrorists rather than aiding them.

Thanks for all the comments.

Great article/statement/forum post(?). CoD4 is a very good game to analyze, which is weird considering how blockbuster and bombastic the game is; usually one would analyze a quaint and feminine piece where the image is black-and-white and no one talks ever (aka, anything that tries too hard to be artsy-fartsy). But this game, man. When Halo3 came out on the same year, we didn't expect anything to top its influence and success, and this goddamn game did. The effect of CoD4 isn't going to make people like us shut up about it. It's that powerful.

People always tend to connect post-WW2 Call of Duties to Michael Bay, but they never consider CoD4 and how much it stuck to its franchise's qualms about war. In fact, I do consider CoD4's black-and-white portrayal of Western-Eastern conflict to be more on the teeth of Tom Clancy than Michael Bay. It did make the Russian and Middle-Eastern dudes straight up bad guys, but they also depicted the Brits and Americans as deeply flawed. The US Marines were chiseled, hardened heroes that saw external conflict irrelevant to their country as relevant, going in and sacrificing their lives for a greater good of not just their country, but for the world. This, and their inability to see sacrifice as necessary, gets them killed. And don't get me started with the SAS, who inhumanely torture people just to get answers. This depiction of modern war isn't romanticized as critics say - it's gritty and terrible as war should be and as a CoD game should be.

But to be on topic with what you said, I think the use of Cold War fears to create a familiar antagonist for western audiences does stem from the game's drawing of Tom Clancy in someway. The author was writing books around the time of that war, and a lot of his books do deal with nuclear threats and world saving within the realm of the modern military. Developers aplenty do this a freaking lot, borrowing ques and themes from pop culture or what is big around the time: Doom with horror movies, DND, and metal; Medal of Honor and Call of Duty with Saving Private Ryan; and The Elder Scrolls series always adopting traits of the biggest fantasy film/TV show (TESIV with Lord of the Rings, TESV with Game of Thrones). Infinity Ward doesn't fall far from the tree; they always adopt things from pop culture, but in this case, it's war.

@tru3_blu3 said:

I don't think the comparison to Bay is entirely wrong. There are a lot of parallels in how those games and Bay's work rely on huge explosive setpieces and high-stakes stories of well-armed action heroes. While I think you're right that there are also serious parallels to draw with Clancy, I think Clancy was more likely to use quiet, stealthy tensions which is something that CoD shies away from and I don't think MW's exploration of Cold War tensions is necessarily derived directly from Clancy's work. Clancy is just one of many writers at the end of the 20th century who played on those themes and I also don't think Modern Warfare is all that critical of its protagonists. The soldiers are righteous action heroes whose downfall almost always comes as the result of some external enemy rather than big personal misconceptions about what they should be doing. In some situations they may execute on a plan less than 100% effectively, but they're almost always implied to be on the right track with a well-justified mission.