Call of Duty might be just a game, but its underlying message

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...-4-610x343.jpgGhosts’ storyline revolves around a doomsday weapon that America puts in space and subsequently loses control of.

There’s a uncomfortable irony in the Call of Duty series’ twin fascinations with the destruction of the United States and brainwashing. As wave after wave of faceless, under-equipped, foreign aggressors charge obligingly into range of your American-made machine gun, Predator drone or circling gunship, the action in both Black Ops and Ghosts is broken up with regular story hits that paint the brainwashing of Black Ops’ Mason and Ghosts’ Rorke as the ultimate horror – good, rational people reprogrammed to fight and kill for someone else’s ideology. Then the loading screen resolves and it’s straight back into your foxhole, ready to mow down another wave of America-hating foreigners. Ooh-rah.Call of Duty first invaded the continental US in Modern Warfare 2. A US plot to partake in a civilian airport massacre goes awry (would you believe) and sparks a retaliatory invasion by a vengeful Russian military. The end goal of this invasion isn’t ever discussed. There’s no time: one minute America is innocently minding its own business, and the next, there are Russian fighter jets over I-95 and a tank column rolling over Times Square. Who cares what they want – the White House is on fire!This is about as grounded as CoD’s repeated invasions of America get. Modern Warfare 2′s Russians have got a pretty solid grievance, what with a CIA plant strolling through a Moscow airport with a machine gun, spoiling everyone’s holiday plans. And Modern Warfare 3 makes a commendable effort to show that the invading forces aren’t representative of the Russian people as a whole – even going so far as to cast you fleetingly as a good-guy Russian secret service agent in the entourage of a Russian President on his way to Europe to negotiate a ceasefire.Then something shifted with Black Ops 2. The series abandoned its multinational perspectives and presented instead a googly-eyed piece of US-centric paranoia about a special forces team scouring the world for a terrorist leader named Raul Menendez, who attacks the US with its own fleet of military drones as part of some dastardly quest for personal revenge. Los Angeles explodes, the President is attacked in her motorcade, and only through big guns, quadcopters and American pluck can all be put right again.

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