Book of Jobbed #7: Kyler Murray & Call of Duty
Like most good sports writing, this is really just an excuse to write about pop culture
This Memorial Day, I’m thinking about the troops. The ones in the Call of Duty video game franchise specifically, which Arizona Cardinals QB Kyler Murray is a notorious fan of.
It’s been statistically demonstrated that on the Sundays following the yearly release of another installment in the series and during weekends where the game rewards you with extra points, Murray underperforms relative to his usual output.
Per one “analysis,” his passer rating drops ten points. His win-loss ratio drops from 53% to 36%. Another “analysis” points out his value as a quarterback in fantasy football dips around the series’s annual releases.
Some posit this is because Murray spends his time playing the video game rather than preparing for the game he is paid millions of dollars to play.
Murray is likely spending his time playing the online multiplayer, which, for the uninitiated, consists of what are essentially a series of virtual paintball games. Except instead of pelting enemies with paint, you’re simulating their murder wardeaths tactical neutralization via assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, pistol, predator drone missile, attack helicopter machine gun, tank, AC-130 gunship, fighter jet close air support, land mines, flash grenades, poison grenade, regular grenade or a thousand and one other war crimes munitions.
It’s possible but unlikely Murray is playing the single player, which is a story-driven experience consisting of what can vary from semi-grounded to not-all-grounded military fiction. Some installments are connected to the others narratively. Most aren’t.
If I had to sum up the stories these games tell, I would say that most installments are the an ADHD rattled love child of Tom Clancy and Michael Bay, and he’s gotten into the snack pantry and stuck twelve pixie sticks up each nostril and is running around with the syringes he used to inject 60CCs of Mountain Dew directly into his bloodstream.
The storytelling has gotten progressive more insane and sugar high as time’s gone on. In 2020 it’s stuck a dogwhistle labeled “partisan right-wing fantasy” in its mouth and started blowing.
Allow me to explain what Kyler Murray’s been experiencing.
An Introduction to Call of Duty
First released in the early 2000s, Call of Duty was a first person shooter themed around the European Theater of World War Two. You played as a soldier in the allied forces, with your digital avatar representing either the Americans, the British, the Soviets, or—in the third game—the Canadians. Call of Duty 3 also has sections where you play as a member of a Polish tank crew. This sounds like the setup to a cheap joke, but I promise you it isn’t.
There are no real recurring characters to speak of, and very little plot. What story does exist borrows heavily from Band of Brothers and the war movie canon (A Bridge Too Far, The Longest Day, Saving Private Ryan). It’s all very thin, and is really just a pretext for shooting Germans, Italians, and Vichy Frenchmen in funny hats.
I think it’s unlikely that Kyler Murray was introduced to the series through any of these games (he would have been under ten years old) but they are worth mentioning for context.
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
I still don’t think that Murray was introduced to the series when this game came out in November 2007, but it’s worth examining because this is when Call of Duty became a cultural force.
The game was the highest selling game in a competitive year, eventually selling over 15 million copies. It was critically lauded for its graphics, paintball-but-make-it-war-crimes multiplayer, and its single player story.
This installment moved the series from the European theater of World War Two to mid-2000s, swapping out the generic nazis and fascists for generic Russians and Arabs.
The player alternates between playing as a British special forces operative searching for stolen nuclear material amidst a civil war in Russia and as an American marine invading an unnamed dictatorship that is definitely not Iraq.
The Brits learn that Russian rebels sold a nuclear warhead to the unnamed dictatorship that is definitely not Iraq, but are too late to stop it from going off and killing the American marine. The brits hunt down the dictator who set it off, kill him, and then track down the Russian terrorists who sold the nuke to him, narrowly managing to prevent the terrorist leader from launching a nuclear strike on the continental United States that is to avenge the (accidental) death of the leader’s son at the hands of the player character.
It is straightforward, rapidly paced, and anchored by characters who are hardened but haunted archetypes who show just enough humanity to feel real. They are given emotional stakes in their goals; they aren’t just out there because they are soldiers on a mission. The story also has an articulated worldview—war is an inevitable and inescapable cycle of revenge and counter-revenge—that gives the narrative an air of tragedy if you stop and think about it for too long.
It is not necessarily anti-war, but it avoids obnoxious jingoism. Yes, it asks the counterfactual of “what if the CIA wasn’t wildly incompetent and Saddam Hussein actually had WMDs” but the answer it gives isn’t one that will leave Haliburton contractors smiling.
If there’s any ideology at play, it’s “the military is badass” but that’s a point of view so ubiquitous in the American psyche that getting mad at the game for having it is like getting mad at a two year old for thinking Santa is real.
Modern Warfare sold so well that the powers-that-be decided that a new Call of Duty needed to come out every year. The subsequent games largely followed the same style of storytelling. There were fluctuating levels of detachment and grandiosity that made it difficult to say any particular point of view was being advanced, but the sense of tragedy and fatalism remained.
Yes, the storytelling got progressively darker, controversial, and paranoid, but not in the sense that it felt written by people who spent sixteen hours a day watching Alex Jones, just in the sense that it felt like the rotating set of writers were drinking so much Pepsi that they hadn’t slept in six weeks and were beginning to see spiders in the corner of their eyes.
Call of Duty: Ghosts
It wasn’t until Call of Duty: Ghosts that things headed in a truly messed up direction.
The 2013 iteration of the game takes place in the near future—2017—and focuses on a war between the United States and the scary sounding “Federation,” a conglomerate of South American states that banded together for no established reason and declared war on the United States for no established reason other than it’s a video game and we need somebody to shoot.
With it being the United States pitted against South America, you’d think this would be a one-sided war, but you’d be wrong. “The Federation” is a military superpower. How? Because it’s a video game and we need somebody to shoot.
Making matters worse for the Americans, when the war starts The Federation steals a weapon of mass destruction from the United States! Specifically a space station that, for all intents and purposes, can shoot laser beams. Luckily, the brave astronauts onboard sacrifice themselves to prevent The Federation from completing obliterating America’s cities (they only obliterate a few of America’s cities).
No one questions what the United States was doing with a giant space laser or the ethics of having a giant space laser, but I’m sure at least one congresswoman has questions about who made the giant space laser (paging Marjorie Greene? Marjorie? Are you a reader, Marjorie?).
The heroes of the game are a squad of American special forces soldiers—the titular Ghosts—and they go through the story opposing the invading forces of The Federation. The protagonists are mostly white, and the whole affair reeks of anxiety about America’s southern neighbors. There is zero discernable difference between the characters and their enemies other than the language they speak, and the antagonists lack of an ideological motivation other than “America bad” is a conspicuous head scratcher.
The story concludes when the Ghosts discover The Federation has built its own space laser. The player character proceeds to hijack the space laser and uses it to destroy cities under The Federation’s control, but gets captured in what is clearly a hook for a sequel (there was no sequel).
It was neither well reviewed nor widely purchased. In fact, it was derided at the time for its derivative gameplay and bizarre story. The formula was getting old. The powers that be were going to have to make a change.
Call of Duty Embraces Sci-fi
Perhaps realizing that by keeping the action to the modern era they were inevitably falling into right wing hallucinations, the franchise turned its attention to science fiction.
I think this is where Kyler Murray first started getting into the series—he would have been at the right age for it—but I hardly played any of these. I was a college student. My marxist professors were hypnotizing me and I could no longer enjoy murder simulators like a good American should!
My understanding of the plot of these installments is pretty weak. Here’s a round up straight from cultural osmosis and hazy memory:
Kevin Spacey plays the head of a private military corporation in, like, 2050 or something. He seeks world domination and literally declares war on the United Nations. You play as an ex-employee who fights back because he didn’t give you a raise and said the troops were stupid or something. I don’t know.
Another takes place in the 2030s, involves a firefight on an aircraft carrier called the USS Obama, and the bad guy is really mad about the 1989 Invasion of Panama. Oliver North appears in a flashback.
They released a Call of Duty one year that didn’t have a story mode but the multiplayer had a sci-fi bloodsport context that vaguely connected to previous installments but the consensus around this was “why did they bother doing this who cares?”
Another game is about artificial intelligence. The entirety of the plot may or may not be a simulation. Wait. No, I think that’s the plot of a different game I never played? No, no, there was definitely a Call of Duty about AI. And not the kind of AI that summarizes Google Search results and makes garbage art. The kind of AI that controls nuclear weapons and is creepy but don’t worry you can totally trust him and oh noooo he just betrayed you and is nuking everything—who could have seen it coming???
The last sci-fi Call of Duty took place in space. Humans on Mars get into a fight with Earth government over space taxes, I think. Wait. No, that’s the plot of the Star Wars prequels. I can’t remember. The actor who played Jon Snow on Game of Thrones was the bad guy. He’s like, “oi, Earth is bad, chaps,” and your character is like, “no, it’s not!”
At any rate, I wasn’t the only one who skipped these. Sales continued to dip. I would not be surprised if Call of Duty superfan Kyler Murray also skipped some combination of them.
Call of Duty Rebooted
In 2017, with sales sagging and few other profitable properties to turn to so taking a year off was out of the question, the powers that be decided to return the series to its roots and released a game set in World War Two that hardly had any plot and what little story there was existed as a pretext to shoot Nazis, Italians, and Vichy Frenchmen in funny hats.
But, for some reason, at the end of the game the player character must take a tour through an empty concentration camp. It is generally agreed upon that this sequence is weird and does not adequately illustrate how awful the holocaust was.
I’ve seen a couple of points of view on while the sequence doesn’t work, but I would argue it’s mostly because a video game designed to get your brain to release dopamine when you kill people is not the proper vehicle for seriously investigating the darkest recesses of human depravity.
Anyway, the game made a billion dollars! So it was time for more reboots!
The next release rebooted Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, keeping the characters but swapping out the simple plot for a ludicrously complicated one I will not attempt to summarize here. It’s worth noting, though, that a central plot point in the game takes place during a surreal recreation of the Benghazi embassy debacle that, as far as I can tell, is the first time the series openly drew attention to a right-wing partisan fixation.
The Break from Reality
But the moment the franchise fully embraced partisan right-wing fantasy came in its 2020 installment. The title is so long that it should really have two colons—Call of Duty: Cold War Black Ops.
It’s set during the Cold War, naturally, and focuses on a literal war between US and Soviet intelligence operatives that, somehow, doesn’t escalate into a nuclear exchange. Hundreds of people were murdered and dozens of things are exploded during this war, parts of which take place in the United States, but somehow no civilians ever notice.
The specific moment where it’s clear things have gone completely off the rocker for the franchise occurs during a scene where Ronald Reagan walks into a room full of CIA analysts and operatives and knows way, way, way too much about the plot.
It is an incredibly bizarre scene with any amount of context. Essentially, four CIA agents are demanding permission to track down a Soviet intelligence operative but their commanders are skeptical the operative actually exists. Reagan bursts in. Everybody stands up and salutes and he’s like please guys, c’mon, I should really be saluting you. He then gives a big speech about protecting the free world, tells the skeptical commanders to stop being wusses, and sets the rest of the game into motion by ordering the agents to go find the Soviet operative.
That paragraph doesn’t do it justice. There are a thousand fascinating details. I don’t really know how to summarize it. You have to see this shit!
Click here to view this scene on YouTube
Do you see what I mean?!?!
I have thought about this scene at least once a month since I first encountered it.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but it made me realize inserting a real political figure into any non-comedic story that isn’t specifically about politics or government or a true story is a really, really odd choice.
Imagine a scene in Stranger Things where Reagan shows up and is like, “I’ve been briefed on The Upside Down and the Wheeler girl’s relationship status. She should not, under any circumstances, date a guy with a bowl cut.”
Imagine a scene in The Bourne Ultimatum where George W. Bush is like, “Jason Bourne, I like the cut of his gib—ah-heh-heh.”
Imagine a scene in The Avengers where Obama gives a press conference and says, “now, uhhhh, let me be clear, Iron Man is a cool dude.”
These are WILD ideas. There is only so far audiences are willing to go with suspension of disbelief.
To be clear, I’m not mad or offended by this scene. I think it reflects a vision of the world I don’t share at all and I feel it was an ill advised creative choice, but I’m mostly just fascinated by it.
It’s just really weird. It’s like one of those scenes from the mid-2000s where a tech support character hacks the mainframe by putting a Creed CD in the disc tray upside down. Inexplicable.
No matter how I look at it, I have to admit that It’s the product of a fascinating mind. I want to talk to whoever wrote it and get to know them Marc Maron style. Where’d you go to high school? What’d your parents do for a living? Who’re your guys?
Anyway. To sum it up, the writing in the Call of Duty series has gotten lost in a meringue of partisan dog-whistling. I think there’s a way to tell a military-themed action-adventure story without doing this (see Top Gun 2), but Call of Duty is headed in the opposite direction.
Kyler Murray should stop playing it and spend his free time on a more apolitical murder simulator.
Or, Kyler, if you’re reading, can I suggest you check out some narrative-focused games with a murder mystery at their center? Look up The Forgotten City, Pentiment, or Disco Elysium. Solving simulated murder is a way more rewarding experience than carrying them out, and it’s less of a time suck. Trust me, man. Arizona Cardinals fans will thank you for it.