Call of Duty 4

I caught another bad cold last week, probably god's punishment for engaging in oral-oral contact with a member of the same sex. I stayed home on Friday and slept all day Saturday and now it's Sunday and I'm feeling slightly stir-crazy though feeling no better.

Luckily, I purchased a new video game last week so I've had something to keep me occupied. I've played, like, fifty hours of Call of Duty 4. It's so repetitive I've had a grand old time and I love dealing with the racism and homophobia in the multiplayer features.

I expected more from this game. Set in the present-day, I thought we'd encounter a more nuanced (if certainly not 'realistic') aspect of war--tough choices to make (a la Bioshock), confusion, moral ambiguity.

Nope.

Instead, what we got was beautiful graphics (everyone knows that shooting people is inherently 'beautiful,') and new people to shoot: namely, rough-looking Arabs in kaffiyeh with rpg's on their backs.

Same old, same old. Us versus them. Not to say it isn't fun. Although I was taken aback by the 'enhanced interrogation techniques' applied--by a Brit no less!--in one particular scene. For a game that began development after Abu Grahaib, certainly they could have applied a bit of imagination to the scene (not to spoil anything, but the 'interrogator,' after giving up on obtaining info from the captive, caps him in the face).

My favorite scene, or level, involves manning the guns of an AC-130 gunship. Below, the darkened Russian countryside is rendered in stark lime-green, blacks, and whites. Little humans crossing a field appear as bright-white dots. Voice overs advise you to 'smoke them,' which you do, almost gleefully. The board is incredibly easy to pass as you just drop ton after ton of ordnance on the town. It's fun, but also reminds me the weird symbiosis between 20th century warfare technologies and videogames.

The legacies of our current videogame technologies come directly out of World War II. Heck, the ancestors of modern computing were the machines, such as Alan Turing's machine, were invented to crack German codes. Video games and military technologies are constantly influencing each other, drawing on each other's advancements--one is always providing training for the other.