When I finally finished playing through the ‘controversial scene’ in Modern Warfare 2, in which the player, in the role of an undercover US operative, takes part in a terrorist attack on a Russian airport, my mind was buzzing. Here’s how my first playthrough went: I didn’t shoot any civilians; I did shoot at some of the security guards – hey, they opened fire on me first – and, yes, I did shoot at the terrorists. And this leads me to one of the things that got my mind racing: wondering how would I have played this section if I had experienced it with no knowledge of what was to ensue?
Given the stylish solemnity with which the ‘No Russian’ sequence begins – first in darkness, with the sounds of men riding an elevator; followed by them stepping out of the elevator and walking at a deliberate pace to the airport security checkpoint; then the brief, awful pause before the terrorists casually and callously open fire – I’m not even sure that I would have shot at the terrorists on my theoretical first playthrough. Partly because I would have been stunned that developer Infinity Ward was putting me in a situation this disturbing, and partly because I would not have wanted to risk a fail state by trying to gun them down. But since I already knew the general premise of this chapter, I found myself only partially creeped out by what I was playing.
Meanwhile, the rest of me was steadily trying to determine the limits of the playable space. Could I shoot the terrorists? Yep, though that quickly produced a fail state – I was gunned down by Makharov or one of his men— followed by a stern warning from the game that I needed to avoid shooting the terrorists in order to maintain my cover. That’s when I completely broke character and started shooting civilians in order to see what would happen. This, of course, did not produce a failure, and in fairly short order after that, I reached the end of the sequence… in which Makharov turned on my character and shot him dead, leaving the corpse of an American agent behind to incite World War III.
The response to this chapter was all over the map. Some praised Infinity Ward for pushing the medium forward by taking the risk of placing players in a situation such as this. Others criticised the sequence for being in bad taste and deliberately courting controversy, and yet others accused the developer of failing to set up the situation so that it would be truly plausible. But what I wondered was why Infinity Ward had so tightly circumscribed the player’s freedom with fail states given that the character was going to die at the end of the chapter?
What if, in addition to mutely witnessing the carnage or participating in it, the player had been allowed to try to kill all of the terrorists? (In my version, Makharov, for narrative purposes, would have only planned the mission rather than joined in the massacre.) Even if the player succeeded, they would still be trapped on foreign soil and surrounded by a Russian SWAT team with no inclination to do anything other than kill them. At this point, the player would fight his way to the extraction vehicle, only to be shot and killed by Makharov.
It seems like a neat solution. Infinity Ward gets to keep its twist ending and the inciting incident for World War III. Players get more agency to determine how the action plays out within the confines of the plot. The don’tshoot- the-terrorists fail state can be eliminated. It’s win-win, right? Only I’m not sure that it’s quite so simple. What Infinity Ward was trying to do was create both emotion and narrative meaning out of play. But these goals are often at odds: the more specific the emotion or plot, the more restricted the gameplay must be. And conversely, the more open the gameplay, the less likely it is that a particular emotion or plot point will be conveyed.
Sure, my proposed solution retains the doomed outcome for the player character. But allowing players to unleash their inner Jack Bauer and heroically save the day wouldn’t preserve the fatalistic mood that Infinity Ward achieves. I’m not saying No Russian is perfect. But it achieves enough that other developers can build upon its successes and learn from its failures. And for that reason, some Russian is better than no Russian at all.
N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.