The leaked footage from Activision’s upcoming title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has prompted an Australian watchdog organization to call for a review of the game’s current MA15+ rating, according to GamePolitics.
The Australian Council on Children and the Media, which refers to itself as a “national community organization” dedicated to the well-being of the country’s children, made the demand in response to the graphic nature of the footage recorded. The videos, which GamePolitics have stated are being scoured from the web by the game’s publisher Activision, depict the player character and his four companions gunning down defenseless civilians in a crowded airport in an act of terrorism.
The only easily found site that still carries the footage is this page from Online Gaming Europe, and even then only the top video still works. The gameplay shown has the player character open fire on a line of people with an assault rifle alongside four other men, all of whom are wearing body armor over civilian clothes. The group then moves through the rest of the airport, with highlights including one of the AI companions coolly shooting through a window to his side and the player gunning down one man dragging another incapacitated man to safety.
What makes this particular story outstanding among Australia’s other anti-gaming reactions is the fact that the gaming community can see where they’re coming from this time. A significant contributing factor to the footage’s disturbing aspect is the fact that it is made up of actual gameplay as opposed to a cutscene–all of the violence perpetrated by the viewpoint character was done by the player’s input. Making the massacre part of the player’s interaction with the game undoubtedly provokes a greater (and much more deeply disturbing) emotional response to what’s playing out on screen, which has been tried before in other games. At the finale the Cold War-set Metal Gear Solid 3, for instance–a series famous for having an extremely unbalanced gameplay-to-cutscene ratio–the player character defeats his mentor, who has defected from the USA to Russia for apparently ideological reasons and is ordered by her to kill her with her own gun. Rather than have the protagonist shoot her during the course of the cutscene, the view pans out and the letterboxing recedes, at which point the player recognizes–to his extreme discomfort–that the game is going to make you pull the trigger yourself.
Of course, not all of Australia views the ACCM’s outcry in entirely black-or-white terms. As noted in the first article, Electronic Frontiers Australia lobbyist Nicholas Suzor sees the controversy surrounding the game as even more evidence that the country needs to modify their ratings system, saying that, “We may make an argument that these sorts of topics are not suitable for children, but I don’t at all accept that it is unsuitable for adults.”
