I had come to think that Modern Warfare 2 was making a comment about United States foreign policy and militarization, rather than just being shocking for shocking's sake.
Especially after years of rising mass shootings, though, "No Russian" just comes off as callous. There might be interesting underlying ideas in Modern Warfare 2, but the game either fails to commit to them, or tells its story so poorly that they don't come across. At the point you hit "No Russian," you play as PFC Joseph Allen, an Army Ranger who has been recruited for a secret mission by General Shepherd, the guy in command of your characters throughout the game.
After a couple of levels as Allen in which you fight the bad guys alongside a bunch of other Rangers, you're sent undercover to Russia to infiltrate the organization of a terrorist named Makarov. As the game notes, you take on the name Alexei Bodorin for the mission, but you're not primed for what comes next. When "No Russian" loads up, you're armed with a massive machine gun and start in an elevator with Makarov and a few other guys.
Makarov tells the group, "Remember: no Russian," reminding them to speak only English, then steps out of the elevator into a crowded airport. With no warning, Makarov and his men start firing into the crowd of unarmed civilians, who scream, run in panic, writhe in pain on the ground, and, on several occasions, try to crawl to safety, only to be executed by the terrorists at point-blank range.
Essentially, "No Russian" is a mass shooting scenario, and you're the one with the gun. You can choose not to participate, of course. No one forces you to pull the trigger, and refusing to do so relegates you to the role of watching your digital comrades commit murder after murder. At the same time, though, you're also unable to stop the carnage; you can't turn on Makarov and are forced to watch things play out.
Eventually, you do have to do some shooting, as Russian police and FSB officers arrive to stop the attack. These guys are armed and fight back, though, making them more in line with your usual Call of Duty enemies--but they're still security guards and police, not the soldiers, militia members, or terrorists you're usually fighting.
On the surface level, "No Russian" is still shocking today, if not more so than when it was released in Mass shootings in the U. A rundown of mass shooting incidents in the U. Regardless of how you feel about games depicting real-world ideas, events, and tragedies, "No Russian" is a troubling thing to play through when you think about these real events and how they affect real people. It should be noted that you don't have to play through it.
Modern Warfare 2 Remastered, like the original game, warns you about "Offensive Content" and asks you if you'd prefer to skip "No Russian. At the same time, you can attempt to read "No Russian" as Call of Duty at its most subversive and artistically expressive. The franchise markets itself on realism--usually in its visual fidelity and the attention paid to creating digital versions of real-world guns--and mostly depicts soldiers as fraught good guys, willing to put their lives on the line to protect freedom and save lives.
Dying in Modern Warfare 2 brings up a screen that usually includes a quote from a famous leader, war hero, or philosopher, either praising soldiers or decrying the horrors of war. Call of Duty usually comes off as pro-gun and pro-military at the very least, and even jingoistic. It's a level that's meant to make you recoil, evoking empathy in players by doing the thing video games do best: putting you in a role you wouldn't normally experience. The familiarity of the terrain—suburbia, fast food restaurants, even the White House—combines with the asymmetry of the level design, which has enemies coming at you from every direction in unpredictable bursts, to make every moment feel vital and frightening.
When the EMP bursts and the game rolls full-tilt, for a few minutes, into horror, it's the culmination of a sense of uncertainty that the game has been building for two hours beforehand. In the best moments of Modern Warfare 2 , you don't know who the enemies are or where they might come from.
Everyone and everything could be a threat, and you are underprepared to meet them. It's one of the only times, in any Call of Duty game since the original WWII classics, that you're authentically on the back foot. But the best play also makes, in this case, for the best propaganda. The mythology of uncertainty is essential to the engine of the War on Terror. The idea that there is an amorphous enemy that can be hidden anywhere, among any population, sheltered by any government, unaccountable to traditional structures of power is the logic behind the War on Terror's most horrific excesses.
The Patriot Act, extrajudicial imprisonment and torture—these were actions taken under the justification that America was facing an unprecedented, hidden evil that could appear anywhere, anytime. The mythology of uncertainty was one of the core building blocks of war that never has to end so long as those in power don't want it to.
That disturbing ideology, in the hands of Infinity Ward and Activision, becomes pure entertainment. Which is why, despite the fresh coat of paint, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Remastered still manages to feel like a relic. Because it is clearly an attempt to engage with the ideology and imagery of the era's politics and warfare.
But it does so in a way that feels, too, entirely of its era. As a work of rhetoric, the game is a failure, its attempted critiques falling flat while its most straight-faced moments sing. It wants to push back against the flow of jingoism in American culture without understanding it or being able to engage with it at the deepest level. As a work of entertainment, it's either boring or brilliant, depending on what part you're playing.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is not the sequel the original game deserved. The floodgates were open, and people were free to take the scene out of context and form their opinions on it. The reactions were messy. When No Russian leaked, some people wanted to give the level the benefit of the doubt and see the mission within the context of the rest of the game.
Others made their minds up about the level and game relatively quickly. My gut was this has a fair explanation," Adam Sessler, former video game personality and critic for G4's television show X-Play , says. I had a lot of feelings on it at the time, most of which boiled down to none of this seems necessary. The reaction to No Russian stretched far beyond the game industry and press; the world didn't seem to know what to do with this level, and a lot of feelings boiled down to it being unnecessary and confusing.
For one, No Russian's entire set-up makes no sense. Even if it was an attack orchestrated by Russian ultranationalists on their own soil to pin the attack on the United States and spark World War 3, it stands as a pretty weak "truther" set up. Instead, players are forced to suspend belief and buy that this figurehead of one of the world's most powerful nations can kill hundreds of civilians in plain sight and no one will identify him because he spoke "no Russian.
Narrative inconsistencies aside, most people simply didn't understand why the level existed in the first place. There was, of course, the same moral outrage from evangelicals and conservative groups over video game violence whenever they need a scapegoat when faced with real-world issues surrounding guns and violence. But even for intelligent and rational people, No Russian's inclusion had trouble being justified in the eyes of its critics.
The fact that the level was skippable only exacerbated that fact, as it seemed to undermine any message the game was trying to convey. More than anything, I was like, 'Who's going to do that?
Who's going to skip a thing not knowing what's in it? Like, you know going into this game it's a hardcore war shooter. According to Alavi, speaking to PC Gamer in , the decision to make the level skippable came from the game's playtesting sessions.
When an enlisted service member refused to play No Russian during playtests, Alavi said Infinity Ward added the option to skip because the developer "didn't want anyone interested in the rest of the game to be blocked by something they found morally wrong.
In Williams' opinion, including something like No Russian in the beginning of the game, yet giving players the option to skip it, makes the whole thing not necessary to the overall experience. If a developer is going to put something in a game on the level of No Russian, it has to be necessary to the experience you're creating, Williams says.
If it's not necessary, it's just shock. And if it's just shock, then you're wasting everyone's time. It's faux transgressions, where you get the appeal, and you get the press of being [like], 'Oh my God, can you believe they did that? And, you know, in a year you're still going to have your zombie expansion, you're still going to sell this game to year-old kids, because that's your real market. You have not made a mature piece of art for an adult audience.
When Modern Warfare 2 was released, we were a lot closer to September 11 than we are now; Americans were still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Centers, the War On Terrorism still fresh in our minds and on TV. But that was then. In , a level about gunning down civilians in a public space doesn't carry the same post-September 11 message it did a decade ago. No Russian doesn't so much speak to the fears Americans once had about air travel or foreign threats anymore.
Today it more feels like a mirror to the mass shootings that plague our country at unsettling regularity. I played Modern Warfare 2 for the first time in preparation for this feature.
I'd seen No Russian before, but I'd never been in control of the mission. Despite knowing it was coming, knowing what was going to happen, what I'd be asked to do, I found it incredibly difficult to play.
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