Unlike the contemporary context of Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare series, its Black Ops titles are usually set during Cold War conflicts. The first game has you attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro. You join forces with Jonas Savimbi’s Angolan rebellion in the sequel. And Russia dutifully rears its head as a perennial boogeyman throughout. In Black Ops Cold War, you even get to infiltrate the K.G.B.’s headquarters and glad-hand with Gorbachev.
This month’s Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 takes place in the early 1990s, immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Its main conflict is the 1991 gulf war, a U.S.-led bombing campaign and ground invasion of Iraq after Saddam Hussein decided to invade Kuwait over oil-drilling rights and contested debts.
You won’t learn any of that, however, from playing the game’s campaign.
Our main characters, led by the earnest if unremarkable Troy Marshall, rapidly bounce through these battlefields, never sticking around long enough to form an opinion. The historical conflicts are there only to serve as the backdrop for a floaty plotline about a shadowy cabal called Pantheon and the globe-spanning, world-ending conspiracy it has set in motion.
One mission finds our heroes chasing down a Pantheon clue by hopping in a jeep and driving it across a battle-scarred Iraqi desert, empty but for scattered missile sites and smoldering tank graveyards. The mission is structured as a quasi-open world, an unfortunate trend in recent Call of Duty titles; the attempt to give the player freedom of movement flattens the game’s usual breakneck action-movie pacing.
Later on, you can break into one of Hussein’s palaces to uncover a “weapon of mass destruction,” which, in a too-clever fakeout, doesn’t actually belong to him. It has been planted by agents of Pantheon.
The Iraqi excursion is followed immediately, and confusingly, by a mission that has you fighting off hordes of zombies while in a drug-fueled haze. The action happens in an underground science lab with impossible architecture and soaring, arched ceilings, and feels like a set piece from a ’70s sci-fi serial. In another mission, your team meticulously executes a casino heist, snugly in the mold of a film like “Ocean’s Eleven.”
It isn’t that these missions aren’t fun. Ever since it first appeared as an optional activity in the original Black Ops, shooting zombies has provided a reliable way to mindlessly churn through a couple of hours. And the casino heist mission is exciting and well paced. Your point of view snaps seamlessly between characters as you work to undermine the security of a grand gambling estate run by slimy mobsters.
The problem is that these missions don’t have much to do with the gulf war, or with any sort of actual politics or history. Black Ops 6 has less than nothing to do with America’s relationship with the broader Middle East or what the country’s involvement in Iraq would mean for regional geopolitics over the next few decades.
Call of Duty games often invent nations whole cloth and generate terrorist supervillains like Imran Zakhaev or Raul Menendez as reasons to invade foreign nations and unleash the godlike might of the American military. Black Ops 6 hasn’t even bothered to do that. Instead it uses these Iraqi men, citizens of a real nation, as cannon fodder to be shot at and killed, without lifting a finger to tell us why.
With Black Ops 6, the Call of Duty series seems to have sunken up to its neck in political pastiche, deeper than ever before. It is tone and setting signifying nothing, but still managing to tick its ideological checkboxes all the same. On the walls of its fake C.I.A., a portrait of George H.W. Bush proudly hangs. And above the roof of Hussein’s fake palace stands a massive re-creation of the dictator’s statue. As a helicopter carries you away from the mission you can watch the statue collapse under the bombardment of Western forces.
Even outside of historical context this moment is a wink at players, a clear reference to the famous video of Hussein’s statue getting pulled down during the Iraq war in 2003. You can almost hear Paul Bremer’s whoop of “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!” before we are snapped back to the game’s zany science fiction plotline.
The plot lives in the kind of conspiracy and paranoia that usually accompanies Tom Clancy-inspired fiction, which feels unseemly to toy with in light of real conspiratorial beliefs. The term “false flag” is casually dropped during the Black Ops 6 campaign, even though in real life it’s frequently employed by far-right groups to deny objective reality. Here, it’s simply used to frame some fictional terrorist’s master plan, couched in the flighty sort of storytelling that can be found in your favorite airport page-turner.
It’s a similar comfort that has players returning to Call of Duty’s multiplayer modes year after year: bombastic firefights atop quasi-historical stages. In the effort to make things even more exciting, a new kind of movement allows you to sprint in any direction, or to dive into prone position while firing. They’re the kinds of maneuvers that bring you closer to the larger-than-life presentation of an action hero.
Unfortunately, lying on the ground rarely seems like a winning strategy in the close-quarter arenas that make up the game’s 16 multiplayer maps. Instead, as has long been the case with the series, Black Ops 6’s multiplayer favors quick reaction times and smart positioning over what you might do when caught in a firefight.
The Call of Duty series has long been building its way toward a politically agnostic space. The previous Black Ops title, Cold War, spent several missions in North Vietnam, asking us to mow down waves of Vietnamese fighters in conical hats, only to reveal later that most of these encounters were the fabricated hallucinations of your character.
The history has never been less the point; it sticks around to provide the appropriate visual aesthetic, and to occasionally reaffirm a jingoistic worldview. But it isn’t meant to be studied or examined too closely. That would only get in the way of the fun.
The post When War Becomes an Aesthetic, Nobody Wins appeared first on New York Times.
