Much like dragons, here, there be spoilers. This is not a review of the game. I want to review it, but this isn’t one. It isn’t a review because, for a little while, I want to basically gush about the game. I picked it up over the weekend and have already finished the single-player campaign. I haven’t touched the multiplayer. I don’t plan on it. Here’s why (after the jump). And remember, you don’t have to agree with me.

There are two types of players of games like Modern Warfare 2. There are the fiercly competative types who aren’t happy if they don’t headshot every single enemy, finish on Veteran, get all stars in Special Ops, get all trophies or achievements and are at least visible on the leaderboard. Then there’s everybody else. I’m everybody else.

It boils down to there being two ways of feeling accomplishment: by conquering or by knowing.

Modern Warfare 2 is about relationships: personal, business, and political.  The relationships built by the campaign, when taken with the Modern Warfare 1, make the game more than just a point-and-shoot-to-kill festival of carnage. And frankly, the people who are very vocal against violent video games focus on that aspect moreso than anything else. Realistic violence makes them very, very nervous. More on that in a future post when I finally get a chance to read Kids Stuff: Marketing Sex and Violence to America’s Children. (I’m concerned about this one; one of the authors, Diane Ravitch, wrote a book I really, really liked called The Language Police but she seems to have gone into the deep end judging by this new text.) But this is not about violence. This is about the game as an experience.

There are things you can experience in the single-player campaign that can never, ever experience in multiplayer. The stealth missions are good examples. Kudos to Infinity Ward for putting a stealth mission like the snowstorm mission “Cliffhanger” at the beginning of the game. It really gives the player what they want. Er, at least, it gave me what I wanted, anyway. It’s important that you feel like, for lack of a better word, a badass when playing as Roach, especially now that Soap is your new Captain Price. (I really wanted him to take out a guy with a, ‘Oy, Nancy!’ but, alas, no luck there.)

Moving on, the snowmobile ride and cliff jump, wow. Almost a little too superhero-y, but the feeling you get after doing it is unmatched in many ways.

Yes, multiplayer will help your skills, your reaction time, your ability to out-think your opponent. But, can you get that rush as you fly over that ravine? Can you get that by-the-skin-of-your-teeth escape from the Gulag? The double-crosses? The double-double-crosses? The feeling of being an astronaut flung into space?

Not so much.

The main draw of multiplayer, I’ve been told, especially online multiplayer like on the Xbox Live and the Playstation Network, is the replay value. This, to me, doesn’t hold water. It may be fun to play with your friends, have a few beers, switch off, winner stays, loser goes, etc. But online? Against strangers who are nothing more than really good AI with usernames, if you really think about it? Especially when you consider the kind of attitudes you may run into: racial slurs, homophobic insults, gloating and taunting, just to name a few. Maybe I’m thin skinned. Who knows. This is assuming you’re not lucky enough to have a number of friends who also own the game and have time to play when you’re online.

Anyway, back to the relationships. If it were just the shooting, the blood, the violence, the killing that made the game so popular and so damn good, the story would be superfluous. It would just be a mass-murderer simulator. I know of no one who picks up a game with the production value of the Call of Duty series and thinks, ‘Yes, I finally get to shoot more people!’ It just simply doesn’t happen. (Hooray for anecdotal evidence!) Most people play it because it’s so well made. The characters are realistic, believable and their relationships develop within the player a vested interest in their safety and well being. Not to mention the number of little throwbacks to the first game and the chance to see Soap’s evolution and the obvious influences of Captain Price.

These aren’t uber-sexualized avatars or mindless drones: they’re analogs to the real men and women who fight every day.

In short, pick up the game if you like a good story. Play the “This level may offend you” level and don’t get offended (the video below). It’s useless to pretend that these  kinds of things don’t happen in the world. There are terrible people out there. In this case, art is imitating life.

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One Response to “Multiplayer, Schmultiplayer”

1. Tweets that mention Multiplayer, Schmultiplayer | Teach Video Games -- Topsy.com says:

   November 24, 2009 at 4:51 pm

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