Polygon: These men and women that your team is portraying are just doing their jobs. Our interview has been lightly edited for clarity. So, while Western forces - and Western audiences - get to fight the good fight with a flag on their shoulder, Middle Eastern forces and Middle Eastern players aren’t given the same luxury.Īt E3 this year I asked Jacob Minkoff, single-player design director at Infinity Ward, about why that is. But Farah’s country, the narrative center of the game, is entirely fictional. In Modern Warfare the Brits fight for Britain and the Yanks fight for the good ol’ U. And yet the narrative team opted to maintain the status quo of othering the enemy by denying them a real country.

They want players to feel something for their enemies, to see the world through their eyes. At E3 this year, the team from Infinity Ward stressed that they want to evoke empathy for combatants on both sides of the battle line. The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign trailer is violent, morally conflicted, and loudīut Modern Warfare wants to do things differently.

You’re not supposed to feel for them, so where they come from is simply obfuscated. The legacy of post-World War II action movies is full of enemy combatants transformed into unflattering caricatures, and one way to avoid accusations of insensitivity is to make sure those characters don’t come from real places on the map. Using made-up countries to avoid uncomfortable portrayals is a dodge common to films and television. It’s a make-believe place called Urzikstan. And, according to snippets of dialogue from the trailer, she shares a country with the same terrorist organization that Western powers are trying to track down.Įxcept it’s not a real country. The same woman who watched her father murdered at the hands of a Russian soldier in her own home. She’s the same woman who, in the game’s opening act, survives a chemical weapons attack on her village. What lies behind the curtain is a fraught military drama, one that sees British and American special forces partnering with Middle Eastern militants to bring down a dangerous terrorist organization.Īlong with that narrative, developer Infinity Ward also introduced a new and potentially divisive character to the Call of Duty lore.

On Tuesday, the team behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare finally revealed its campaign trailer.

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