Modern Warfare 2's Controversial Opening

 

I know that sounds terribly arrogant, but I'm not fully convinced that some people are going to understand the point of this narrative. If you understand it, that's good.

By the way, I edited my post. I didn't mean to come off so condescending.

 

I agree with that there. Most of my friends who like shooters just like to shoot things. They aren't looking for a good story, just a good shooter.

 

I agree there, anonymously. But a good shooter PLUS a good story... well that's just best of both

 

i fully understand the point but it irks me enought to know that i dont think ill play it.

 

I am definitely interested even more now of the story. I'm not going to ruin the surprise by watching the video though.

Unfortunately most are quick to judge and only view the world based on there ideals. Can blame them though. It is almost coded into our genes to fear what we don't understand.

Thanks Sol for wetting my appetite though. Now I can't wait to play.

 

My jaw just dropped, thx for posting Sol!

 

Awesome

Edit: Slaps sent me.

 

you just made my day, thanks for putting this up!

 

How is bunch of terrorists shooting up an airport full of innocent passengers considered art?

 

Le sigh.

 

Non-traditional narrative is how. Remember the violent intro sequence in Munich? It's the same deal here. It pulls the viewer (or in this case the gamer) into the story and forces the player to view the game from a non-traditional perspective.

 

I have to say that I disagree. Are you going to tell me it would be art if you could play a mission of a WW2 COD in which you shoot jewish prisoners? It's sensationalistic schlock, nothing else.

It would have been art if you were put into the shoes of one of the victims. That is what made COD4's "Aftermath"-Mission and the Intro so brillant - you were a hostage to the narrative, you could interact with your environment, but it was futile because you were already destined to die. These two examples belong the the most powerful experiences in gaming narration I've seen so far.

What the video shows reminds me too much of Postal 2, there is no context, just mind-numbing killing of defenseless targets. Neither does it put you into the mindset of a terrorist (since you could expect them to be motivated by SOME kind of agenda - but you do not experience it) nor does it achieve a cathartic moment. I think there could have been better uses of switching the perspective. I.e., how did someone end up as a  terrorist? Was his family killed? Was he a gullible young man? Was his life empty and he looked for direction in the wrong places? THAT would have been interesting, not slaughtering dozens of NPCs.

For the record, I think MW2 will be an amazing game, but don't read to much into it.

 

Context? All these posts against what this video shows saying its
downright evil and the player is just killing innocent civilians needs
to realise that this video is from PART WAY THROUGH THE GAME(watch him
as he goes through and selects an "Act" then scrolls down through the
missions to select this one, about half way down), THAT NO ONE HERE HAS
ACTUALLY PLAYED YET.


For all everyone here knows, the character, the "terrorist" may have a
damn good reason to be there in his eyes, you cannot jump to
conclusions when you do not actually know the full extent of the plot
or the facts leading up to put the player in this situation.

 

Agreed, but this goes both ways of the argument, doesn't it?

 

In this cae you are also hostage to the narrative, in a way. The cia-agent doesn't kill people out of his own free will, it is as so to not blow his cover. It is also tragic. Obviously the cia-agent/player has a lot of moral issues with his/her own actions.The character has chosen to go on ahead with it any way in the hope of preventing a greater threat. Mybe you or I would not have made a different choice, I don't know... The point is that the player assumes the role of the cia-agent after his moral contemplations have been made, and at that point can do noting else then follow through on hs horrible decision. Then at the end of the event, the character is denied the payofff of having gained the trust of the terrorists, and is punished for his ill-made decision with death. I don't see how that is the same as escorting innocent people to gas-cambers in a virtual auswitz.

 

The "Terrorist" you play as is a CIA agent who is undercover.

If you idiots would actually watch the spoiler the entire way through you would see that you get shot in the head as you and the real Terrorists are fleeing.

Pretty much the same idea as you're doomed from the start. They know you're CIA, but they want you to suffer before they kill you by forcing you to kill civilians.

YOU don't know that they know. You're trying to survive in their inner-circle while smuggling valuable information to the military.

 

Except Munich wasn't a quasi-realistic simulator that allowed the audience to kill people.

 

Games have matured and so should you. If you have a problem with a games content, then don't buy it. It's just as simple as that.

 

The fact that it puts you, the player, into that awful position and makes you go through with it.  It's easy to be a "good guy" and shoot up a bunch of evil people.  But, what happens when you're the "bad guy" and are fighting against good people?  The scenario is designed to make you feel uncomfortable and to make you examine your basic understanding of right and wrong.  You don't have to like it, but it's definitely art.

 

my thoughts exactly, though that was defs violence porn for me

 

Take Jack Thomson's **** out of your mouth already. Grow a pair.

 

The **** you talking about? Or were you replying to someone else?

 

What on earth about that video made you examine your basic understanding of right and wrong?

 

Did you watch the video?

 

OMG. Killing civilians? Damn. This game might not get released.

 

They've had no problem releasing every GTA to date...

 

In GTA, You play the bad guy. I Like COD because I play as the good guy and murder Nazis and Terrorists. If I wanted GTA, I would play GTA... COD is not GTA

 

You aren't playing a bad guy in this case, either. You're a CIA agent who has to get his hands dirty for the greater good. This is in a setting where nuclear weapons are a real threat, and have been used.

 

OMG, do want!

 

Figures...

When I saw that kid's reflection in the Samsung, I just knew he was a terrorist.

 

You have to be kidding me. I realize there are tiresome people who will defend anything that is 'shocking', no matter how tasteless or stupid it is. But this game actually puts you in the shoes of a terrorist, shooting up an airport full of innocent people. All your pie-in-the-sky BS musings about 'what is really good and what is really evil' are childish and idiotic: there is good, there is evil, and it's generally not difficult to tell the difference. There is no justification for this, and while they certainly have the right to make such a game, I have the right to decry it and avoid it.

 

There is no good or evil.

Such concepts are contrary to the human experience, especially in the post-modern world in which we live. There is nothing childish or idiotic to muse on about such things because the contrasting definitions of what is 'right' and 'wrong' depending on our cultural perspectives are often the reasons why we (as a global community) are no closer to understanding the terrorist mindset and why are we no closer to exterminating terrorism as a problem. A terrorist might view the action of killing innocent civilians as 'right', after all.

 

Holy **** you don't think killing innocents is evil?  I can't argue with someone like you.

 

I do, but the terrorists don't. The point of the narrative sequence is to allow the player to experience this mindset, if only for a short time.

Our perceptions of morality in the world are as malleable as they are abstract.

 

You know, I was going to write an indignant reply, but in reality people like you are just sad.

You seem to think this whole "the world is gray, man, gray!" nonsense makes you seem intelligent. It doesn't. Because in the real world, there is 'evil' and there is 'good'. The fact that what is evil and good changes based on your perspective is not a new discovery on your part, nor is it meaningful. All it signifies is the importance of taking a stand. And it highlights your lack of moral courage. You don't have the moral strength to take a stand for what is good and against what is evil, so you try to argue away your cowardice with wheedling statements about how the world is gray.

Again, IW has the right to make this stuff. And we as consumers have the right to dislike and avoid it. What bothers me is the fact that this flew under the radar. If I'd pre-ordered this game, or I bought it and took it home and ended up seeing this level, I'd be very mad ... and there would be nothing I could do about it.

 

Almost everyone in this world thinks that they're the good guy; that what they're doing is right and totally justified. Many soldiers who go to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq believe that they're doing the right thing, and I personally believe that they are good people. Those who live in the aforementioned countries might not see things the way I do, and instead consider the Coalition troops as aggressors or invaders. They might regard the Mujahideen as "freedom fighters" more than anything else. Such is the world we live in. 

 

Killing A Baby is EVIL you meat head. Saving a pregnant woman from a burning building is GOOD. No gray areas, see!

Now that we have that out of the way. There's a HUGE different between playing through a game in which both sides of the coin are carrying weapons... and a game, that ALLOWS you to march through an AIRPORT and kill, UNARMED civilians! I'm not jumping to conclusions just making a basic, educated observation. until I play this game (which from what i've seen here, will be game flied before purchasing) i will with hold complete judgement. But you're failure to see the basic principles of black and white, prove your ignorance.

 

I, and I reckon most people, will agree with you that the killing of infants is undesired behaviour, and that the saving of pregnent ladies from burning buildings is desired behaviour. That's because most of those extreme examples seem to overlap in our individual moral sets of beliefs, and I'm very glad they do. But you act as if psychopaths do simply not exist. There are people with different sets of moral values, uncompatible with our own. Those people we punish and restrict as society with penintetery institutions, mental institutions and in some cases capital punishment. We oppose their sets of moral values because of the incompatibility with our own sets of moral values but it doesn't make our own more universal in any way, it just asserts a large majority for us people that do think killing babies is wrong.

The about the game. It doesn't ALLOW anything. It FORCES you. You act as if gamers'morals are a blank sheet upon which game designers can just write whatever they want. Don't you think that every gamer actually feels a great discomfort shooting innocent civillians? Couldn't that perhaps be, oh I don't know, the whole point?? The dramatic tradition of of appealing to feelings of disgust, fear etc. just as much as appeals to heroism and bravery go back all the way to the roots of drama. Read some ancient greek classics if you don't believe me, it is where all current drama stems from including your true blue american action hero flicks.

games, just like other aesthetic media texts like tv-series, movies, books and the theatre show us things through mimesis. in short they show us things that 'might have happened' in an alternate reality or something. The fact that they choose different perspectives at certain moments does not mean they 'endorse' that perspective or legitimize it in any way. I mean heck, from what I could see in the clip the player is actually killed at the end of the sequence, e.g. is punished for his deeds. Besides it is only the opening sequence, not the entire game.

 

The baby is suffering in terrible pain from an incurable disease.

The woman is a cold-hearted killer.

gray areas

 

Rushing to save the pregnant women only to perform a emergency c section on the woman save her baby and then let her burn. Gray area.

 

I believe what he was trying to say is that what is good and what is evil is only a matter of perspective. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter etc etc etc

 

Moral courage???? Yes taking a stance really takes a lot of guts man! Only something real true blue troopers do (NOT). You act like Sol denies having his own set of moral values, which is ludicrous since that what you refer to as 'moral courage' or 'taking a stand' is nothing more the judging a situation, which is something everyone that reasons automatically does the moment they think they have gathered enough data.

Recocnizing that 'the whole world is gray' as you characterize with so much wit, doensn't imply not having your own sets of moral values and/or standing for them. Also I really REALLY don't see why being forced to experience something in an aesthetic medium that goes totally against my own sets of moral beliefs is such a bad thing. And not as others imply to make me think about my ows sets of beliefs or something, for just a simple reversal of roles is too simple of a dramatic trick to entice such moral contemplations for me,  but just for the sake of experiencing anger, disgust, fear, powerlesness or whatever other experience it entices.

 

I couldn't agree with you more. Just because people have different views of good and evil doesn't mean that neither exist.

 

They don't exist. They are abstract concepts. Existence before essence.

 

All depends on how you interpret and use the terms. Frankly I think that good and evil are terms that are used most of the time in universal terms. I don't believe in universal truths and as such oppose the meanings of the words when they are used as such. What mr disgusting argued is that people like Sol, and I guess like me, lack some sort of moral courage to form and stand for our own set of moral principals. That's a bizarre statement that uses quite the hyperbolic terms like 'moral courage' to describe something all humans do, and thus takes little more effort than your avarage bodily function. Forming opinions, and communicating those opinions is inherently human and is exactly what everybody on this forum is doing right now. The assertion that people who recognize all the gray-shades in the world would not stand up to injustice as perceived in their own moral perspective is male-cow-dung.

 

no right and wrong or no good and evil is a simple-minded approach to philosophy and can be defeated in a simple scenario.

I believe it is right and correct to kill whom I please - are you going to let me?

 

Only if you also believe that it's right and correct for people to kill you when they please.

 

If someone lets YOU something depends on THEIR own morals. The fact that someone wouldn't let you kill whomever you please, even though that might be allright within YOUR moral reasoning is no proof for a universal good and/or evil. In fact, the mere pluriformity of approaches to morality that your example suggest would point to the opposite.

Btw this was to emanon, I'm not sure if quoting works. I cant see it in the messege-make-window-thingie

 

Of course there is good and evil.

Killing innocents is evil. A progressive mentality doesn't require an abandonment of simple, apparent truths. Regardless of the motivation, killing innocents is evil.

Didn't care for that. I could take solace in the fact that the murderer (yourself) takes one to the dome at the end, but I don't want to pull the trigger on travelers with there hands in the air. I consider that as artful as watching Jesus get beaten for two hours in "The Passion of the Christ". That wasn't art and neither was the opening of this game. I honestly hope I can skip this mission.

 

What if those "innocents" aren't actually innocent? Muslim radicals believe that all Americans are evil.