The New Call of Duty Trailer is a Monologue About the Perils of Nation Building

There’s a new entry in the massively
popular Call of Duty video game franchise coming later
this year: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Judging by the
first trailer, which was released this morning, it appears to be
about, ah, the challenges of nation-building.

Also: shooting things. Lots and lots of shooting things.

And apparently the game’s single-player story stars House of
Cards’ leading man Kevin Spacey, or a digital version of him
anyway. Today’s trailer is built around a delightfully menacing,
scenery-chewing Spacey monologue about how setting up a democracy
in a foreign country is actually really hard because of various
cultural complications…which of course leads him to argue that
what’s really needed is a strong authoritarian leader. 

It’s a little silly, a little provocative, and a lot of fun, in
part because it appears to focus more on story and character than
the last few franchise entries, which have grown increasingly stale
even as the series has remained among the most popular and
successful in the video game market. (Although sales of last year’s
installment, Ghosts, were down somewhat and generally
considered disappointing.) 

Watch the complete trailer below:

I’ve played all of the Call of Duty games since 2007’s
Modern Warfare, and what’s always struck me about the
series, as well as other military shooters, is the way they are
reflexively pro-war, or, at the very least, pro-combat. It’s built
into the essence and structure of the gameplay: As a player, you’re
there to fight, and your only real choices are about how to go
about the process of shooting and stabbing and blowing stuff up.
Playing the games basically requires you to embrace their (virtual,
fake) wars, and the blustery combat ethos of the game
world. 

There’s a kind of exuberant militarism to the series—Modern
Warfare 2 interspersed
quotes from Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld into the
gameplay—that isn’t so much political as it is adamantly cynical.
The games aren’t really trying to make an ideological point;
they’re trying to provoke people while enthusiastically embracing
the various trappings and excesses of their playable-action-movie
premises. Judging by the new trailer, the next Call of
Duty looks like more of the same. 

Be sure to
check out Reason‘s new Video Game Nation issue, which
looks at many of the interesting and unexpected ways that games are
changing our politics and culture.