Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods

0:00 [explosions] [ominous music] Call of Duty Ghost

0:22 might be the worst game I've ever played.

0:25 Now, that requires a lot of qualification

0:27 and humming and hawing and generally being annoying,

0:29 but such is the cost of these things.

0:32 Ghosts occupies an odd place within

0:34 the megalithic franchise that is Call of Duty.

0:36 At this point, it sits roughly in the middle,

0:39 being the 10th main title in a series with 21 full banner annual releases.

0:43 It begs us to ask, It begs us to ask: what is a Call of Duty?

0:47 Well, back in the late 18th century, modern nation states as we know them began

0:51 to coalesce within a new ideology called nationalism,

0:54 which will differentiate with a small n to distinguish it

0:57 from the Nationalist political movements that would arise in the 20th century.

1:01 Within small-n nationalism, people began to view themselves as part of a new

1:06 national identity that encompassed or even

1:09 superseded their local ethnic identities.

1:12 This would lead to...

1:13 a bunch of stuff.

1:15 [ticking clock] As the story goes,

1:21 when US soldiers started killing and dying during the Great War,

1:24 it became necessary to start giving medals for doing

1:27 a particularly admirable job of killing or dying.

1:30 Additionally, it was felt that the US Medal of Honor

1:33 had been handed out too frivolously during the Civil War,

1:36 and the Medal risked being trivialized as over 3,000 had been awarded.

1:40 Okay, this is just It turns out this was a huge boondoggle.

1:45 Actually, a double boondoggle.

1:47 Look, I had to play Call of Duty Ghost like a dozen times to make this.

1:51 Y'all are going to sit there and listen to my goddamn research.

1:54 President Woodrow Wilson ordered the War Department to do a review

1:57 of the system and the committee in turn revoked 911 legacy Medals of Honor.

2:03 Boondoggle one is that apparently in the Civil War, tons of medals of honor,

2:07 being the only award the military had at the time,

2:11 were handed out for some pretty suspect reasons.

2:13 Many had been promised basically as a recruitment bonus,

2:16 over 500 were awarded to a unit that had

2:20 already gone home for a mission they didn't do,

2:23 and Buffalo Bill wasn't even in the military at the time

2:26 he did the thing that got him the medal.

2:29 Boondoggle number two was that Buffalo Bill,

2:31 for better or worse an American icon,

2:33 had his Medal of Honor stripped from him the week that he died.

2:37 Battlefield surgeon Dr.

2:38 Mary Edwards Walker, who got her recommendation from Sherman himself and spent

2:41 four months of the war in a Confederate POW camp,

2:45 was one of nine civilian surgeons to be awarded

2:48 the medal and the only one to have it revoked.

2:51 She was also the only woman to have ever,

2:54 even to this day, been awarded the Medal of Honor.

2:57 Just to not leave that story hanging,

2:59 she refused to return it to Congress and wore it

3:02 proudly until she died in 1919 at the age of 86.

3:06 Congress did eventually reinstate her award...

3:10 in 1977.

3:11 However, amidst the bureaucracy and sexism, a phrase was born.

3:16 Miller, Oscar F., Major,

3:18 361st Infantry is awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous

3:22 gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty.

3:26 And 85 years later, we've got a video game franchise.

3:30 Since its inception in 2003,

3:31 the Call of Duty first-person military shooter brand has produced 21

3:34 mainline titles and has produced 21 mainline titles and 22 spin-offs.

3:39 Originating as a cinematic shooter in response

3:42 to Electronic Arts' Medal of Honor games,

3:44 which were themselves soft adaptations and expansions of the film

3:48 Saving Private Ryan under the supervision of Steven Spielberg.

3:51 The games are known for their giant setpiece levels, heavily scripted sequences,

3:55 extensive voice cast, cutting edge visuals,

3:58 and just all-around high production value.

4:01 Quickly though, let's introduce our corporate cast of characters.

4:05 The franchise as a whole is published by Activision,

4:09 now Microsoft Activision Blizzard King.

4:11 The original game was developed by Infinity Ward,

4:13 but after the success of the first game,

4:16 Activision brought in a second studio, Treyarch,

4:18 to begin working on a third game, while Infinity Ward worked on the second.

4:23 The idea being that the sequel would drop in 2005,

4:26 and then Activision would already have a sequel to that game,

4:29 ready to go for 2006, which would give Infinity Ward 2 years to make the game

4:35 after that, and then the game of Leapfrog would continue.

4:38 Eventually, they would need to bring in two more studios,

4:41 Sledgehammer and Raven, to wrangle the ever ballooning scope.

4:45 But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

4:47 This plan for a yearly release paid off huge when the fourth game,

4:52 subtitled Modern Warfare,

4:53 smashed sales records and catapulted Call of Duty from being

4:57 a merely successful franchise into being the video game franchise,

5:02 a cultural shorthand for the idea of a video game.

5:07 Indeed, Call of Duty was pushing the leading edge of production value

5:10 so hard that the franchise became the definition of AAA video games.

5:15 In the same way your grandmother could

5:17 describe all video game consoles as a Nintendo,

5:21 AAA video games could be simply a Call of Duty.

5:25 Ghost, released in 2013, is the 10th mainline title in the series,

5:29 the sixth made by developers Infinity Ward.

5:32 The game follows two brothers, Logan and Hesh Walker,

5:35 as they shoot their way through a series

5:37 of nonsense levels strung together by a jingoistic plot rooted

5:40 deeply in American insecurity that was bubbling up

5:43 as the global war on terror solidly entered its second decade.

5:47 It is the near future, the quote "great energy producing deserts"

5:50 in the Middle East have been destroyed by war,

5:53 cutting off much of America's energy, leading to a collapse and decline.

5:57 In the power vacuum that followed,

5:59 South America has been united or conquered under

6:02 the banner of the Federation of the Americas,

6:04 often simply referred to as the Fed.

6:07 The game opens as two astronauts perform maintenance

6:09 on the control station for the orbital weapon ODIN,

6:12 a kinetic bombardment system utilizing tungsten rods dropped from space,

6:16 an impractical but popular pop culture

6:19 weapon often shorthanded as rods from God.

6:22 As they are performing the finishing

6:24 checks on this decidedly military super weapon,

6:26 the station is attacked and hijacked by Fed forces

6:29 who gain entry by posing as an American supply shuttle.

6:32 The Fed successfully target and bomb

6:34 a large swath of Southern California, Texas,

6:37 and Florida before the temporary prologue protagonist, or prologist,

6:41 destabilizes its orbit and burns up in the atmosphere.

6:45 That sounds grammatically incorrect.

6:46 So ju- just to be clear,

6:49 both the prologonist and ODIN burn up in the atmosphere.

6:53 Parallel to this, Elias Walker tells his sons the origin

6:56 story of a fabled special ops team called the Ghosts.

7:18 In this other backstory, in another time, another war,

7:21 60 men from a joint special ops team were tasked with guarding

7:24 a hospital and they get obliterated over the course of a couple nights.

7:28 60 become 15 and eventually these remaining 15,

7:31 they evacuate the hospital and send one of their own as an escort.

7:36 Then the remaining 14 cover themselves in blood and sand

7:39 and hide under the bodies to ambush the enemy fighters.

7:42 The prose in this story is florid, reverential, bordering on spiritual ecstasy.

7:47 They are baptized with blood and anointed by the sand,

7:51 then massacre the opposition with hit-and-run tactics that are so

7:55 sick and badass that the one remaining enemy fighter goes crazy.

8:13 Goddammit.

8:14 It's even got the ellipsis right there in the subtitles.

8:18 I feel- I feel like I feel like this is what

8:22 Folding Ideas sounds like to people who don't like Folding Ideas.

8:25 This literal campfire story is then interrupted

8:27 by the rods from God falling on San Diego as the Fed uses ODIN

8:31 to obliterate basically everything south of Santa Monica.

8:34 The body of the game takes place 10 years later,

8:37 long after the war with the Fed has come to a stalemate.

8:41 It's not really relevant to anything,

8:42 and you need to dig into the codex entries to sort it out,

8:45 but basically the US military doesn't have branches anymore.

8:48 It's all just one big blob,

8:50 which is really just the underlying justification for the main characters,

8:53 Logan and Hesh, to run around doing whatever the designers thought was cool.

8:57 After a tutorial mission and some walk-and-talk,

9:00 the boys are sent out to scout some fed salvage operation back in San Diego,

9:04 their first big mission beyond the massive border wall the US has built.

9:08 They are assisted on their missions by the game spectacle feature,

9:12 Riley, a trained German Shepherd and his doggy cam sneak attack.

9:17 [dog growling] Despite the lengthy geopolitical setup and helldump of backstory,

9:23 the game's lore is extremely front-loaded and the meat

9:26 of the game revolves around a man named Rorke,

9:29 a Ghost and dad's former commanding officer.

9:32 Oh, spoiler.

9:33 Dad's a Ghost.

9:34 Like, that's why he knows all their backstory and stuff,

9:36 but not like a cool Ghost.

9:38 He's just he's a he's an assassin special ops badass.

9:43 I- It's It's treated as a twist.

9:46 It's- You're supposed to find- You're supposed

9:48 to- You're- It's treated as a twist.

9:51 They play it like it's a real twist that you didn't that you didn't see coming.

10:09 So Rorke, along with your dad, was one of the original 14 ghosts who

10:12 were anointed with sand after defending the hospital.

10:15 And his psych profile is basically that he's Rambo,

10:18 but like Rambo III or Rambo 4 Rambo, not really First Blood Rambo.

10:25 Rorke went missing in Caracas two years

10:27 before the ODIN incident and was presumed dead.

10:30 When the Fed threatened all of South America

10:32 and ordered all US-born residents killed or imprisoned,

10:35 the US preemptively invaded Venezuela and sent

10:38 the Ghosts to assassinate Fed leadership in a mission

10:41 that culminates in Federation leader General Almagro ordering

10:44 a missile strike on a massive dam overlooking the city.

10:48 Now, this self-destructive action here,

10:50 we're going to have to set aside the fact

10:53 that America's enemies are so insane they'll nuke themselves,

10:56 was already a recurring plot beat in the franchise by this point,

11:00 so we can instead focus on the silliness of the scenario.

11:04 If Western media gets accused of playing fast and loose

11:07 with its audience's lack of knowledge of the rest of the world,

11:11 few other instances will really compete with this game stashing a billion

11:16 gallons of water a kilometer in the air above the Caribbean Sea.

11:20 So, the Ghosts do successfully assassinate General Almagro,

11:24 you play as your dad, Elias, for this mission and shoot him yourself.

11:27 But the helicopter crashes, Rorke falls into the water,

11:29 and after weeks of searching for his body,

11:32 the Ghosts are pulled from Caracas, and Rorke is declared MIA.

11:36 Since he's the antagonist, he obviously survived and now he holds

11:39 a grudge against the Ghosts for a combination

11:41 of not rescuing him and not having the decency to die trying to rescue him.

11:46 He was instead captured by the Fed and tortured

11:48 in a jungle pit where they used all the old standards:

11:52 isolation, temperature extremes,

11:53 sleep deprivation, stress positions, keeping him wet,

11:56 presumably direct physical and verbal abuse,

11:58 and they feed him psychoactive poisons implicitly, implicitly ayahuasca.

12:02 This process, stylized for the cinematic blows all of the white

12:06 off of him as black alien crystals burst out of his skin.

12:10 That's interesting iconography.

12:11 That might come up later.

12:21 He becomes the main villain of the entire game.

12:23 And he's Bane, the Batman villain.

12:25 Specifically, the Bane from The Dark Knight Rises,

12:28 a two steps ahead criminal mastermind with seemingly

12:30 limitless resources to pour into a plan that uses

12:33 lofty geopolitical ambitions as a smoke screen

12:36 for a personal grudge against a couple specific dudes.

12:39 There's a series of Rorke focused missions, including backstory,

12:42 then an infiltration mission to find where he's hiding,

12:45 an assault on the hideout, capturing Rorke, then getting hijacked by Rorke's

12:49 people and dumped in the jungle,

12:50 after which the game switches to hardcore filler mode.

12:53 There's a winter science facility level in Chile,

12:56 then an oil rig level in Antarctica, then an underwater level in the Atlantic,

13:00 then a factory level in Brazil somewhere north of Rio.

13:03 After blowing up the factory,

13:05 the team heads to a safe house in the remains of Las Vegas to hang out,

13:09 where they get ambushed and captured by Rorke again.

13:25 There's a sinking aircraft carrier, then a tank mission,

13:28 and a second space mission, and then finally you fight Rorke on a train.

13:32 The thing you learn in all of that faffing about,

13:34 maybe a nugget per mission, is that the Fed has cloned ODIN.

13:38 That wreckage way back in the San Diego level where Doggy Cam was a mechanic,

13:43 that was ODIN, and I guess that information isn't exactly hidden,

13:47 but it's really downplayed.

14:04 It's actually kind of amazing how good a job the game

14:07 does of making this theoretically

14:08 important discovery feel utterly beneath notice.

14:10 The crash satellite looks unremarkable in the muddy

14:14 brown gloom that pervades the game,

14:16 and all leading lines direct the player away from it.

14:19 You get a glimpse at the top of the hill,

14:21 but the shape of the hill and the people shooting at you

14:24 from down below pull your attention downwards and then to the left.

14:27 When you exit the cave, the shooting is again coming from the left,

14:31 pulling your view away from the crash site.

14:34 Even when you exit the building and traverse

14:36 a catwalk that goes right next to the satellite,

14:39 the game makes sure there's people shooting at you off to the left,

14:43 pulling your attention away from the wreckage.

14:46 In glimpses and fragments,

14:47 this crash satellite just looks like indistinct industrial wreckage.

14:51 A refinery or a silo of some kind,

14:54 not a grounded weapon of mass destruction that's

14:57 the reason everyone's in this mess in the first place.

15:00 The only way to really appreciate that it's

15:02 the wreckage of ODIN is to sit around and explore.

15:05 But this is a game that very much does not want you to explore.

15:09 Cinematic shooters are 90% high gloss hallways.

15:11 That's kind of the core pitch.

15:14 You trade freedom to wander

15:16 for extremely intricate scripted sequences and spectacle.

15:19 Wandering off is almost always tightly constrained.

15:22 A door that you aren't explicitly directed to open will almost never open.

15:27 A side hallway that isn't part of a shooting

15:30 arena will almost always deadend quickly with nothing to see.

15:34 In the case of the ODIN wreckage,

15:36 poking around is explicitly punished by falling into radioactive kill zones,

15:40 sending you back to the previous checkpoint.

15:43 Curiosity in the genre is structurally discouraged.

15:47 So, nominally, Logan and Hash were sent to San Diego

15:50 to figure out what the Fed is rooting around looking for.

15:52 But when they find it, they just go,

15:54 "I dunno some big busted thing looks expensive," and are

15:58 then immediately derailed by Rorke capturing a Ghost named Ajax,

16:02 at which point the actual mission is discarded in lieu of meeting up with Ghosts

16:07 Merrick and Keegan and heading off to rescue

16:09 Ajax from the ruins of Dodger Stadium.

16:11 So, the fact that the Federation is rooting

16:14 around in the wreckage of ODIN is uncovered

16:16 in chapter 3 and then deemed so unremarkable

16:18 that aside from a stray mention in chapter 9,

16:21 it isn't really relevant again until chapter 13 when

16:24 the team stumbles into a factory loading up Federation ODIN clones,

16:28 a project called Loki,

16:29 named after the shape-shifting infiltrator that ends the world.

16:33 Now, here's the very important thing to remember about Loki.

16:36 It is said out loud to call your attention to this.

16:39 The important thing to note about the clone of the orbital penetrating rod

16:43 weapon of mass destruction built by the South

16:46 Americans is that theirs is smaller.

16:48 It's less girthy.

16:49 It's not quite as potent, but it is significantly more numerous.

16:58 There might be some symbolism in there.

17:01 I don't know.

17:02 There's another space mission where Americans hijack Loki

17:04 and start raining hell down on South America.

17:06 You drive a tank.

17:08 You fight Rorke on a train.

17:09 You eventually shoot him and your brother

17:11 and all of the windows crack, like blow open,

17:14 and he drowns and you and your brother sit

17:16 on a beach watching the world burn as the credits

17:19 start to roll before the inevitable and tragic

17:22 sequel bait when an apparently immortal Rorke kidnaps Logan,

17:25 that's you, and drags him off with a post-credits clip implying that Logan

17:29 is being subjected to the same jungle drug torture brainwashing as Rorke was.

17:34 So, Ghosts falls apart in basically every way.

17:38 Like, if we're talking about a bad game,

17:40 what are the ways in which a game can be bad?

17:43 They can be just technically bad, unstable as software,

17:46 that doesn’t launch right, crashes frequently,

17:49 or breaks at the programming level.

17:51 That's one type of bad.

17:54 It can be just not particularly fun to push the buttons like the responsiveness

17:58 of it or the feedback that you get or the rewards that you get,

18:02 the way that it respects or disrespects your time.

18:05 Or it could be offensive on some narrative level: the story is full of holes,

18:09 it isn't told in a way that carries the player through,

18:13 character motivations are vague or thin,

18:15 actions and consequences don't really seem to line up,

18:19 and maybe it espouses some morally reprehensible worldview.

18:22 Ghosts is all of these.

18:25 So, the long story short behind all this is twofold.

18:27 One is simply that games of this scope take, as a rule of thumb,

18:31 about three years to make,

18:33 and Activision had their studios cranking them out in barely two.

18:36 While Ghosts was not noted for its development crunch,

18:39 this is because it was still so ubiquitous and normalized across

18:42 the AAA industry in the early teens that it was deemed unremarkable.

18:46 A contemporary Guardian article about the development of Ghosts

18:49 opens by talking about crunch in an extremely matter-of-fact way,

18:52 like how you would say that being a sailor involves the risk of getting wet.

18:57 The second is that around the release of Modern Warfare 2,

19:00 Infinity Ward went through a major upheaval.

19:03 Studio co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West had wanted

19:07 to sever Modern Warfare from the Call of Duty brand,

19:10 getting Infinity Ward a bigger slice of the record-breaking pie.

19:13 When Activision caught wind of this, all hell broke loose.

19:17 The two were fired, then they sued

19:19 Activision for basically manufacturing cause for their dismissal,

19:22 then Activision counter-sued,

19:23 calling them "insubordinate and self-serving schemers who attempted to hijack

19:28 Activision's assets for their own personal gain." This got very messy.

19:32 It came out that Activision had a thing called Project Icebreaker that West

19:36 and Zampella alleged was a scheme to oust them from Infinity Ward,

19:40 while Activision insisted in their defense that Icebreaker was merely a scheme

19:44 to spy on employee emails in order to improve the relationship with the studio.

19:48 In the fallout, almost four dozen devs departed Infinity Ward in solidarity,

19:52 leaving a big old hole in Infinity Ward's dev team.

19:56 While Modern Warfare 3 would ultimately come out on time,

19:59 it was only because Activision brought in Raven

20:01 and Sledgehammer to help finish the game.

20:03 Afterwards, it was decided that the 2-year

20:06 leapfrog cycle just wasn't enough time,

20:08 and thus the third game out from that point

20:11 would be developed by Sledgehammer starting a three studio rotation.

20:14 All this required was for the folks

20:16 at Sledgehammer to be brought fully up to speed,

20:19 not just finishing assets for a game already in progress,

20:21 but working from scratch with the new engine and all

20:25 the various intricacies of making a Call of Duty.

20:28 This added workload on the remaining Infinity Ward staff,

20:31 creating a massive technical debt that would ultimately be paid by Ghosts.

20:36 None of the problems that plague Ghosts are unique to it.

20:39 Rather, Ghosts is unique for suffering from every

20:43 single problem that plagues AAA video game production.

20:46 I have taken the liberty, for the sake of pacing and shaking things up a bit,

20:51 of organizing all that into a numbered list.

20:57 The focus in development was on getting the game ready

21:00 for the launch of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One,

21:03 which left the PC version in a pretty bad state

21:06 with numerous development problems leading to frequent crashes to desktop,

21:10 broken script triggers, and numerous soft locks.

21:13 They fixed a lot of this over the years.

21:15 It is a lot more stable these days if you play it on a modern machine,

21:18 but it's still really easy to soft lock various levels because

21:22 Call of Duty games are extremely complicated on a scripting level.

21:26 If in chapter 2 you exit the tunnel into the LA

21:29 River and immediately try and shoot down the helicopter,

21:31 you can actually sort of shoot it down,

21:33 but since it's supposed to come back later

21:36 and you've already tripped the flag saying it's destroyed,

21:38 it just never comes back for when you're actually

21:41 supposed to shoot it down and the level soft locks.

21:43 I hear more literal birds than I hear helicopters.

21:49 All right.

21:50 Well, only one option.

21:57 [explosion] The experience of the game, the game play itself is sluggish.

22:06 Even sprinting feels more like a waddle.

22:09 There is multiple vehicle segments that just do

22:11 not function the way that you'd expect them to.

22:14 The helicopter fights in particular have a very bizarre

22:17 control scheme that I still do not fully understand.

22:20 Lateral movement works more or less like you'd expect,

22:24 even if it feels terrible.

22:26 But altitude control is semi-automated within a very shallow layer.

22:31 It's very awkward if you expect the helicopter to control like a helicopter.

22:40 It's just kind of ugly.

22:41 Even at the time, Call of Duty games were

22:43 remarked on for being dominated by shades of brown,

22:46 green, brown, brown, green, gray, brown, and gray.

22:49 Online comic strips like VG Cats were already mocking this trend in 2007.

22:54 And yet, 7 years later, Ghosts somehow takes that and makes it even worse.

23:00 The brown/gray shooter has effectively become an archetype,

23:03 and Call of Duty Ghosts is its avatar.

23:06 The game's average color is taupe.

23:08 This actually brings us to our next point,

23:10 which will hand off to Folding Ideas Mexican Office.

23:14 [Mariachi music] A major marketing point was the hiring

23:24 of Oscar-winning screenwriter Stephen Gaghan to pen the script.

23:27 Now, Gaghan won an Oscar for Traffic,

23:30 a movie with its own, let's say, interesting relationship with Latin America.

23:35 Traffic can be almost single-handedly credited

23:37 with convincing audiences that Mexico looks like piss,

23:40 which in turn became the visual language of hot places that are also dangerous,

23:45 which became the visual language of war writ large,

23:48 which is in part why Call of Duty Ghosts looks the way it does.

23:52 In all fairness to Gaghan,

23:53 I just happen to have a copy of the published shooting script,

23:56 and it doesn't say anywhere, "Mexico, a land the color of piss.

23:59 Everything is a shade of piss,

24:01 even the sky." So that one's more on Soderbergh or, well,

24:05 Peter Andrews who's just Steven Soderbergh with a Carhartt beanie and a Leica.

24:10 Gaghan’s pedigree as a writer is honestly like most writers a little mixed.

24:14 He wrote Traffic and Syriana, but he also wrote Abandon and The Alamo.

24:18 And not relevant to Ghosts, but still funny.

24:21 He would eventually write and direct

24:23 the 2020 film Dolittle starring Robert Downey Jr.

24:28 Oh, good heavens!

24:29 The writing of a video game is complicated,

24:31 more so for a game like Call of Duty than most.

24:34 But there are elements that we can pretty safely put in Gaghan’s lap,

24:38 like the mission briefings with their absolutely tortured stoic prose.

24:49 This is just kind of a whirlpool of hell.

24:52 The performances aren't saving the script,

24:54 but the script isn't giving the performers material worth saving.

25:08 The bulk of the story is very stupid and is plagued with obvious

25:12 backfills that are emergent from the way that the game is made.

25:16 The cinematic shooter is so reliant on massive setpiece

25:19 events that they have become the cart leading the horse.

25:22 This aspect is basically an open secret of how

25:25 the game and an embarrassing number of modern blockbusters are made,

25:29 but it is rarely as obvious as it is with ghosts.

25:33 Cool moments were devised first.

25:35 Production was started and artists and coders and scriptors

25:38 were put to work building a sinking aircraft

25:41 carrier years before a writer would be sent

25:44 in to figure out why an aircraft carrier is sinking.

25:47 After all, enemy gunships and boats just move around on predefined paths.

25:51 The exact model of helicopter, the flags being flown,

25:55 or the uniforms on soldiers can all be swapped later.

25:58 For a big part of the process,

26:00 they're just floating cubes and other placeholders anyway.

26:04 Even the dialogue and character interactions have the hallmarks

26:08 of being as unintrusive and generic as possible.

26:12 Characters are mostly an ephemeral presence,

26:14 barking immediate orders into your ears.

26:25 The "why" of what you're doing simply needs to be kept

26:28 to a minimum presence so it can slot in easily at a later time.

26:33 This is why every mission has on average one moment that actually matters.

26:37 The character learns or accomplishes one thing,

26:40 frequently by watching a video or reading a document.

26:44 And the significance of that thing is more often than

26:47 not shuffled into the interstitial monologues that serve as loading screens.

26:51 You're sent to blow up an oil derek off the coast

26:54 of Antarctica in a bluff to lure away the Fed's navy,

26:56 but that doesn't make any sense.

26:58 Not as a plan and not as the motivation driving you through the mission.

27:02 It's simply the results that you're told afterwards,

27:05 and then later that diverted Navy just shows up

27:09 and sinks the US's last remaining aircraft carrier anyway.

27:12 The crashed ODIN in chapter 2 is so conspicuously

27:15 unremarked upon that it's entirely possible that it wasn't

27:18 even decided what rubble the Fed soldiers would be

27:21 searching through at the time the mission was started.

27:23 Like, not to get repetitive here, but this is the full exchange.

27:41 You don't interact with it, it's surrounded by killer radiation,

27:44 so you can't try and do anything with it, Merrick and Keegan don't ask about it,

27:49 and despite the fact that you were sent out explicitly

27:51 to figure out what the Fed were doing in San Diego,

27:55 this information is seemingly never relayed.

27:58 The thought that the Fed is trying to salvage ODIN

28:00 in order to make their own isn't floated as a possibility,

28:04 even as the characters are watching the Fed launch

28:08 mystery ballistic missiles that NORAD loses track of after launch.

28:20 There isn't even a beat where a character puts two and two together

28:23 the moment that they walk into the room and see Loki being loaded up.

28:27 Even the bit with Loki is like, okay, they walk into the room,

28:31 they see something, there's a bunch of radio chatter about it,

28:35 and then they move on.

28:37 This level could be 95% completed without the artists

28:42 even knowing what's going to go in that slot.

28:46 These events, these thoughts are all siloed from one another,

28:50 interacting only through the narrow tunnels between missions.

28:53 There is simply zero internal cohesion to the story.

28:57 It's so obviously and shoddily a series

29:00 of set pieces that were hastily strung together.

29:03 It's actually difficult to keep them in order in the memory

29:06 simply because there's so little logical connection between them.

29:09 In the game, you infiltrate the lab to get files on the missile program,

29:14 blow up the oil derrick to lure away the navy,

29:17 then sink the last destroyer guarding Brazil so you can sabotage the factory.

29:20 But we could just as easily make it

29:22 that during the factory sabotage mission, we uncover Loki.

29:25 Then we blow up the destroyers so we can get access to the oil derrick,

29:29 which as a one-two punch will lure the Navy in the Pacific towards the Atlantic

29:32 so we can infiltrate the lab and steal the access codes needed to subvert Loki.

29:37 All it would need to replace is

29:39 a few lines of dialogue and the interstitial monologues.

29:41 Other missions are less egregious,

29:43 but never properly escape this artifact of their creation:

29:47 missions are in the order that makes a reasonable

29:50 amount of narrative sense while breaking up the mechanics.

29:56 Many of these set pieces are extremely obvious in their influences.

30:01 Again, it's basically an open secret that Call of Duty

30:04 level designers just look for moments from movies and go,

30:06 "Wouldn't it be cool if you could play that?" But, I don't know.

30:10 It just feels so hack when the inspiration is so obvious.

30:14 Rorke allows himself to be captured for no particular reason except that it

30:18 allows the game to recreate the opening of The Dark Knight Rises.

30:21 One level is lifted in pretty equal measure

30:24 from The Dark Knight and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

30:30 The game doesn't really have mechanics.

30:33 It has the simulation of mechanics.

30:35 In a typical game, hell, let's get saucy and say in a real game,

30:41 the player is given a suite of interactions that they can perform,

30:43 and it is then given to the player the freedom to figure

30:46 out how to best string together these interactions to accomplish their goals.

30:51 Ghosts instead gives you a gun and a context prompt.

30:54 Things like night vision goggles, thermal optics,

30:57 the dog Riley, a blinding strobe light,

30:59 a motion tracker, and gas grenades aren't tools that you are given,

31:03 tutorialized on, and then expected to deploy at your discretion,

31:07 they are gimmicks that pop up at predetermined moments and persist

31:10 in your toolkit for only as long as deemed necessary.

31:19 Now, there are a lot of compromises that are

31:21 made in the service of the "cinematic" in "cinematic

31:25 shooter." The player is ultimately on rather tight rails

31:28 with little freedom in how they approach the world.

31:31 This is not inherently bad.

31:33 Roller coasters are literally on rails

31:35 and roller coasters are really, really fun.

31:37 And at a certain level of abstraction,

31:40 this is true about basically every game with a linear story.

31:43 Using Doom 2016 as an example,

31:46 while the player can backtrack through large areas

31:48 of the game for a substantial chunk of the play time,

31:52 this is ultimately little more than the freedom to hunt for collectibles,

31:56 as the actual bang bang pew pew rip and tear gameplay remains constrained

32:00 to a predetermined chute you must climb

32:02 into if you want to rip cacodemon eyeballs out.

32:04 [Music] The argument in favor of rails is that they

32:05 are needed [monster screams] The argument in favor of rails is

32:10 that they are needed to provide a kind of tightly crafted

32:13 experience that a freer sort of sandbox environment just can't deliver.

32:17 But with that comes an unspoken contract,

32:19 that I as a player am seeding an amount of control in exchange

32:22 for something impactful and the expectations

32:25 that the rails will be reasonably well disguised.

32:29 I shouldn't feel the rails because the path forward should

32:32 simply be the one that I most want to go down.

32:36 This way for cacodemons and their eyeballs.

32:39 Call of Duty Ghost is littered with so many friction points,

32:42 the poorly laid out levels, the obnoxious characters, the incoherent story,

32:47 that the illusion, the buy-in just falls apart.

32:51 You begin to notice that you're thrust into situations

32:53 where tools you were given earlier would be useful,

32:56 but you don't have them because they weren't actually tools in the first place.

33:00 They were single scene gimmicks.

33:02 There is a veneer of realism here in the sense that your commandos aren't going

33:06 to be showing up with the same ever

33:09 ballooning kit of toys to every single mission.

33:12 But that realism shreds like tissue paper when a very useful tool

33:17 like the strobe light is only functional within a single specific room.

33:23 The fake commitment to realism results in frankly boring gunplay.

33:27 While you will occasionally stumble across a shotgun or machine gun,

33:30 by and large you will spend the campaign

33:33 cycling through a series of indistinct assault rifles.

33:36 Step after boring step of the game is

33:38 saturated with barked orders from your commanding officers,

33:41 who perpetually sound pissed off that they even need to deal with you,

33:44 giving the distinct impression that the game

33:46 not only feels obliged to hold your hand, but resents doing it, too.

33:54 Put all in a package, Ghosts is a great simulation of what an escort

33:58 quest must feel like from the perspective of the NPC.

34:04 Help, I'm trapped in a numbered list factory, the bosses stole my passport,

34:08 if you're reading this, tell my wife I'm still alive,

34:11 please send rescue Ghosts are cringe.

34:17 The amount of worshipful religious prose that is poured

34:19 out talking about the ghosts is weird and embarrassing,

34:22 especially given that the source of most of that is Elias talking about himself.

34:30 But it really reaches the next level after Elias is killed.

34:34 In the story, the ghosts are a quasi-official

34:36 inter-departmental unit consisting entirely of 14 people.

34:40 There were 15 soldiers left at the hospital,

34:42 one of them was sent to escort evacuees,

34:45 14 stayed behind to be anointed by sand.

34:48 That event in and of itself is within

34:51 the lifetime of all of the games characters.

34:53 Merrick, Rorke, Elias, Ajax, and Keegan were all there,

34:57 they are first generation Ghosts,

34:59 Logan and Hesh are implied to be the first initiated Ghosts ever.

35:04 From the events of the game,

35:05 the Ghosts are depicted as both quite new, very exclusive,

35:08 and badass to the point that prior to Rorke killing Ajax,

35:11 the unit has suffered zero confirmed casualties.

35:15 So, with all of this framing,

35:16 it's all just so deeply cringe when Hesh spends a loading screen detailing all

35:22 the Ghost funerary rites and customs like they're

35:25 a deeply rooted tradition with generations of practice.

35:48 Let's talk about the dog.

35:50 Ghost had two big elements that became

35:52 the backbone of the marketing campaign for the game.

35:54 The lesser of these is the aforementioned hiring

35:57 of Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Gaghan to pen the script.

36:01 The big one was Riley the dog.

36:03 [Mark Rubin] This is someone you care about.

36:05 This is a squad member.

36:06 He does everything from sniffing out explosives to protecting the team.

36:10 Riley is only mechanically available to the player in two chapters.

36:14 He's less like a squad member and more like a specialty

36:17 grenade that you have access to for three specific gunfights.

36:21 He's barely in the game.

36:23 There's a whole thing in chapter 14, that's the one where your dad dies,

36:27 and Riley kind of appears out of nowhere and then gets shot

36:29 and you need to carry him through the rest of the level.

36:32 After that, they show him at the start of the aircraft carrier mission,

36:35 the one where the carrier sinks.

36:37 But since there's a 3 days later fade in between,

36:40 Riley is just sort of quietly ushered out

36:43 of existence in the uncertainty of that transition.

36:49 The political undercurrents of the story are

36:52 repulsive and reflect the madness of an America

36:54 trapped in a quagmire of its own making and desperate for a new villain.

36:58 Diagetically, America is on the backfoot,

37:00 is in decline following the collapse of the quote "energy producing

37:04 deserts" and is embroiled in a defensive war against a superior foe.

37:09 At least that's what we're told.

37:11 Since so much of the story is really about Rorke's personal grudge,

37:14 the geopolitics sink into the distant background.

37:16 America being in some nebulous decline is

37:18 simply the prerequisite to justify the conflict, to make it a fair fight.

37:23 America built an orbital weapon of mass destruction when they were in decline.

37:27 So, you know, take that for what it's worth.

37:30 So, let's actually look at how Rorke fits into all of this thematically.

37:35 We have this soup of action set pieces

37:37 strung together by a plot written around them, what emerges from that soup.

37:42 The theme that comes through loud and clear

37:45 is that Rorke gives the Fed their potency.

37:48 The plan to hijack ODIN is cooked up by Rorke,

37:51 the attack on Santa Monica is Rorke, and Loki is Rorke's doing.

37:55 All the various filler tasks ultimately revolve around getting ahead of Rorke.

38:00 Rorke is an attempt at de-racializing an inherently racialized conflict.

38:05 You simply cannot have a conflict between the United States

38:10 and Venezuela without invoking the spectre

38:13 of US interventionism in South America.

38:16 What do you mean by political?

38:18 That doesn't mean anything, right?

38:20 The question is this a political game doesn't actually mean anything

38:24 because it- it's what does the word political mean to you?

38:29 Do we touch topics that bear a resemblance

38:32 to the geopolitics of the world we live in today?

38:36 Hell yeah.

38:36 'Cause this is the- that is the subject matter of Modern Warfare.

38:40 Despite the developers insistence their games are simply good sugary

38:44 fun that happens to resemble something in the shape of geopolitics,

38:49 kind of like a candy cigarette,

38:51 they do remain aware of the implications of the things they make

38:55 and in the early teens were visibly sensitive to the push back.

38:59 They received criticism for how the Arab factions in Call

39:03 of Duty 4 were depicted with a nuclear suicide bombing,

39:06 so Modern Warfare 2 instead revolves around

39:09 the threat of a duplicitous US general, and then in Modern Warfare 3,

39:14 it was revealed that the nuke had actually been the machinations not of Al-Asad,

39:20 but of that game's antagonist, Vladimir Makarov.

39:23 Rorke is, in one sense, a safe antagonist.

39:27 It makes the game about Americans fighting Americans,

39:30 white people fighting a white person

39:32 whose most vocal motivation is simple revenge.

39:36 However, in the same way that the levels are generic

39:38 vessels for McGuffins to be placed into at a later date,

39:42 the natural end point of a production pipeline that demands endless crunch,

39:46 Rorke is the end point of corporate cowardice.

39:50 There is a potentially insightful conclusion down the path of "the greatest

39:55 threat to America is America itself," but this is not that.

39:59 The message here isn't civil,

40:01 it's not suggesting that America has invested so much

40:04 in outward strength that it has become internally brittle,

40:07 that the contradictions of American existence

40:10 threaten the concept of America itself.

40:12 The vulnerability isn't American hubris,

40:15 the vulnerability is American subversion.

40:18 The game plays to the sensibilities of an America

40:21 in tension with the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan.

40:25 As these wars were solidly entering their second decade,

40:28 the narrative of a righteous war,

40:30 always suspect in the first place, was decidedly faltering.

40:34 America's presence was clearly not a stabilizing

40:37 force and they had become an intractable quagmire.

40:40 So in Ghosts, the Middle East is simply

40:42 written out of the picture in passive voice.

40:45 The destruction of the oil producing deserts.

40:47 No one's fault, just a thing that happened.

40:50 The Fed, which is to say South America,

40:52 is described as invasive, creeping, consuming,

40:54 an inexorable force moving northwards to take over America

40:57 for no reason but for no reason but conquest.

41:00 In the cutscenes, they are an organic oily

41:03 mass crawling across the map and staining it.

41:05 They are a perverting force, a subverting enemy that will invade American space,

41:09 take America's things, and turn them against America.

41:13 The enemy is both impossibly strong and utterly impotent.

41:16 Their power is not strength in their own right, but their ability to pervert.

41:21 Rorke does not become disillusioned with America,

41:24 that's not why he switches sides.

41:26 While he definitely harbors a grudge against specific individuals,

41:29 his heel turn is fully explained as brainwashing:

41:32 he is tortured and drugged and converted into "their Ghost." And, you know,

41:38 there's that imagery.

41:39 As the Federation torturers "go to work

41:41 on his soul," the whiteness is literally blasted

41:44 off him and black crystals rupture out

41:46 of his body as he becomes "their" operative.

41:49 In an attempt at telling an underdog story,

41:51 Ghosts creates a world where American paranoia is fully justified,

41:55 where American orbital weapons are good and right,

41:58 but Federation orbital weapons are an abomination

42:00 and also decidedly less potent, but more numerous.

42:04 It is a world where the Fed is wrong

42:05 to see America as an existential threat and behave accordingly,

42:09 but it is simply pragmatic for America to assassinate Federation leadership.

42:13 The hordes are coming.

42:14 They're sending their murderers, their drug dealers,

42:17 and their rapists to corrupt America.

42:19 The wall is simply a necessity.

42:21 [Applause, chants of "build that wall!"] I don't think much,

42:39 if any of this is intentional,

42:41 rather, it is my belief that Call of Duty: Ghosts is a thoughtless product.

42:46 These are the consequences of a bad,

42:49 albeit Oscar-winning writer simply trying to paint a broad-strokes scene

42:53 to efficiently communicate a stupid plot to an inattentive audience

42:56 after he was handed a pile of half-built set pieces

43:00 and a vague corporate mandate for the overall shape and tone.

43:04 But in that thoughtlessness, in the reliance on stereotype and trope,

43:09 Ghosts tapped into an anxiety of the moment it was created

43:12 in, a desperate need for America to be righteous and justified,

43:17 for its paranoia to be a foresight of something real.

43:21 Given that we are now living in the consequences of that paranoia,

43:25 the odious results of that anxiety, I find Call of Duty Ghosts repulsive.

43:31 The worst game I have ever played.

43:37 Wow, that sure was an episode, wasn't it?

43:40 And to think he didn't even get around to mentioning the fish AI,

43:44 the role of NORAD as the US military's head command,

43:47 seemingly implying that Canada has been annexed,

43:50 the controversy of the developers reusing

43:52 motion capture data from Modern Warfare 2,

43:55 the reality of American energy production,

43:58 or the fact that Eminem song Survival was released as a pre-order bonus.

44:03 Well, anyway, it's a long way back to Canada from here in Mexico where I

44:07 most certainly am because I am in Mexico

44:10 and most definitely not in southern Alberta.

44:12 So, I'm going to get right on moseying.

44:14 Until next time, keep your tango frosty and your LZ cleared.