Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

Steven Poole gives COD: D: WWII a silly nickname and a telling-off elling-off

Call Of Duty: WWII (pronounced “Whee!”, I think) is truly a videogame for our times. According to the publisher, it is “a breathtaking experience that redefines World War II for a new gaming generation”, and in a way that is true — the game ‘redefines’ World War II as a romp that existed mainly to demonstrate the moral fortitude of Americans. It is a blockbuster wargame as fake news.

Perhaps I am nitpicking when I balk at the stirring speech of the colonel who tells his troops that “We are all that separates the world from darkness” – except, you know, for the millions of heroic troops of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. But in a posttruth age like ours, it is a civic duty to be a pedant. And if you try to erase the Russians from the picture of the glorious Allied victory, they tend to be quite annoyed.

Or perhaps I am being ungenerous. What’s so wrong with using the war as a backdrop for a story that is desperately trying to be a well-known TV drama? “Experience the story of the unbreakable brotherhood of common men fighting to preserve freedom,” the publisher says, cleverly deploying the word “brotherhood” so we will think of Band Of Brothers. Unfortunately, and inevitably, this comparison does not flatter Cod Whee in terms of the writing. And you know what’s great about Band Of Brothers? You can pause a scene, or fast forward, just as you wish. But

Cod Whee is so self-important about its storytelling that the customer cannot possibly be allowed to have any control over how to consume her own media product in her own house. So the order of the day is unskippable cutscenes, which is never anything other than a designer’s hubristic show of contempt for the user.

In revenge, I very quickly adopt an attitude of contempt towards my own initial character, which is not exactly hard. Right at the beginning, my guy is writing in his diary while his landing boat is literally approaching the Normandy beaches. What an idiot! On the beach itself, he then looks around pornily at people with their legs shot off, presumably so we can understand the horrors of war. His Nazi adversaries turn out to be standard videogame bullet-sponges who can take two rounds to the chest, say “Aaah” and cringe for two seconds, and then straighten up and be absolutely fine again. And then there are the Quicktime Events, in which the player is required counter-immersively to concentrate on tiny icons jiggering about the screen, another game cliché that should have been criminalised long ago. Later in the game, too, there is that awkwardly cautious aesthetic compromise with the subject of the Holocaust, where you walk round an abandoned POW camp – far from the way

Battlefield 1 addressed the subject. None of this would matter if the game’s campaign narrative weren’t so po-faced and look-at-me-I’m-thoughtful, if the publishers weren’t selling this as a serious tribute to the millions killed during the conflict. But it is and they are. It’s not that, in itself, Cod Whee is not a good faceshooter. By now I’ve happily shot many hundreds of Nazi faces in the brief interludes between unskippable cutscenes. But it’s the contrast between the totally bogstandard nature of the faceshooting and the story’s elevated tone of self-importance that really jars with me.

The unfortunate truth is that a videogame which was really faithful to the truth of World War II would be unbearably horrific. So the closer you try to go in that direction, the more glaring the inevitable failures become – because, after all, you are still trying to make an entertainment product about killing people. It’s much less politically troubling to turn the war into knowingly silly comic-book action, like Wolfenstein II — or, in movie terms, Raiders Of The Lost Ark instead of Saving Private Ryan.

But there’s a third way, too, in which counterfactual surrealism can coexist with a fundamental seriousness. The cinematic model of this is Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and I’ve come to think that Sniper

Elite 4 is its closest videogame analogue. SE4, in which you can even assassinate the Führer himself, knows it is bombastic and silly, and yet within that knowledge it finds an intense seriousness, both in its depiction of the gravity of the overall task, and in the quality of planning and kinetic engagement it affords to the player. By contrast, Cod Whee thinks it is profound, and that’s what makes it ridiculous.

The game redefines World War II as a romp that existed mainly to demonstrate the moral fortitude of Americans