“We the Soldiers: Player Complicity and Ethical Gameplay in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” by Miguel Sicart

In this chapter of the edited volume Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (2016) philosopher of technology Miguel Sicart looks at the incitement of player complicity in the context of a famous scene of perpetration in video games; the “No Russian” mission from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007). In the context of violent games with challenging subject matter, the production of player complicity is taken by Sicart as a prerequisite for a game to offer a “serious”, “nuanced” and “thoughtful” representation of violent acts (309). Taking inspiration from philosophers of technology such as Philip Brey and Peter-Paul Verbeek, player complicity is framed as a state of moral mediation that is a product of various game design techniques: “a type of interpretational opening, a challenge to subvert our expectations and to experience the game using our own moral sense” (314).

One such technique of game design, which Sicart calls “authored agency”, is the moment in a video game when, for narrative purposes, a player’s control of their avatar is somewhat reduced without being removed altogether. In the “No Russian” mission, players have their movement speed reduced and are unable to shoot their NPC (non playable character) teammates while they are “forced to witness, or participate in, the slaughter of innocent civilians in an airport” (309). Sicart notes that, like many instances of authored agency, the scene takes place at the beginning of the game; a point before “the world in which we play becomes devoid of its meaning and we are just shooting ‘enemies’” (311). Of note in the “No Russian” example is that players are required to opt-in to the mission, the game offers the player the ability to skip it on the grounds of taste, thus for those players who do opt to play the mission their inaugural voluntary act implies incorporates into the game world the “constellation of values that we … live by” (315).

The notions of “authored agency” and “player complicity” make this article particularly productive as a starting point for building critical tools to critique the subdiscipline of game design known as narrative design; the use of an otherwise determined set of core game mechanics for storytelling in video games. One might compare such a criticism of narrative design to that of formal film criticism; in the same manner that a critic might dissect the relationship between cuts between shot in a film for their impact on audience immersion, the constellations of narrative design give access to the degree of complicity (or, perhaps inversely, alienation) a player might feel; even and especially while occupying the abhorrent role of a perpetrator.

Author of this entry: Alie Tacq

Sicart, Miguel.“We the Soldiers: Player Complicity and Ethical Gameplay in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare” In Harrigan, Pat, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, and James F. Dunnigan. Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming. Cambridge, UNITED STATES: MIT Press, 2016. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uunl/detail.action?docID=4509808.