War Games

Illustration by Mark Weaver 

Story By CHRIS SUELLENTROP 

Published by NY Times: September 8, 2010

Unless you regard something like “Iron Man” as a film about Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America’s contemporary wars have consistently been box-office flops. Even “The Hurt Locker” grossed only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters — during the past three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars. Last year’s best-selling game was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which opens in Afghanistan; it was a sequel to a multimillion-selling 2007 game that features an American invasion of a nameless Middle Eastern country. Modern Warfare 2 has made “Avatar”-like profits for its studio, Activision. On the day the game was published in November, it sold nearly five million copies in North America and Britain, racking up $310 million in sales in 24 hours. By January of this year, the game’s worldwide sales added up to $1 billion.

For years, earlier installments of the Call of Duty franchise and other military shooters — the video-game industry’s term for these games about warfare — were, like cable-TV miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, always about World War II. But the Modern Warfare series has demonstrated that players have an appetite for games that purport to connect them to the wars their college roommates, or their sons, might be fighting in. Both Modern Warfare games are set in a mythical near-future, but the weapons — Predator drones, AC-130 gunships, nukes — clearly conjure Afghanistan and Iraq, as do the games’ good guys (Americans, British) and bad guys (terrorists). The appeal of this quasi-fictional setting is one reason that Modern Warfare 2 now sits alongside titles from more-famous franchises like Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario on the lists of the top-selling video games ever made.

No doubt as a result, in June, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, the video-game industry’s annual trade show in Los Angeles, it sometimes seemed as if every studio was introducing a game about a war against an enemy who might conceivably be regarded as part of the Axis of Evil. In one game scheduled for release next year, the North Koreans will mount a land invasion of the United States. In another, American troops are sent into an improbably menacing Dubai.  

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