Call of Duty has been around the block a few times, and across the years it’s turned a lot of foreign countries into videogame enemies. In the first batch of games, when CoD was still a World War 2 shooter, it was simple. Fighting Nazis is extremely cathartic, and they don’t reflect modern Germany.
In contemporary or near-future games, though, it can be more problematic, as former Call of Duty director Glen Schofield realised when he was promoting the first incarnation of Modern Warfare 3.
“I was doing 30 days of press for Modern Warfare 3,” he tells us during a wide-ranging chat about his history with the series. “I’m all over the world, and the last stop is in the UK, and I’m having dinner with some journalists from the UK and I get a call. They say, ‘We need you to go to Russia tomorrow and do some more press.’ And by then, I was really tired. I’m like, ‘Do you know who the enemies are in Modern Warfare 3?’. They’re like, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have a bodyguard with you.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t feel any better.’ And so I was a little worried about that aspect. And so I didn’t go.”
That discomfort led to Schofield making a decision right there and then. “I came back to the journalists. I was sat down having dinner with them, and I said, ‘OK, you know what, my next game is not going to have a country as the enemy. Because I want to go to those countries.’ I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I had said it out loud, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do that, because I don’t want to have this problem anymore.’ And that’s how the PMC started. I started thinking about private military companies.”
So a corporate megalomaniac and PMCs became Advanced Warfare’s villains. Which is safer. Nobody really likes them.
But this decision wasn’t solely born out of a desire to visit foreign countries without the need for private security. Schofield was also reckoning with jingoism, colonialism and American interventionism—things that have been historically presented without much criticism in big American action games.
“I got an MBA, I was doing that at nights, and one of my cohort was from another country, Iraq,” he recalls. “And she and her family had to escape, and they did. Their uncle had been arrested by Saddam Hussein, and he was going to be put to death. But on Saddam Hussein’s birthday, he always let people go—if he was 58, it would be 58 people [Hussein did free prisoners on some birthdays and to mark victories, but the frequency and scope was inconsistent].
“And they asked the uncle, ‘Do you want to escape with us? We’re going to go someplace with democracy.’ And he said, ‘Democracy? I don’t need democracy. They show up and they do their thing, and then they leave, and we got a broken country. I got everything I want here. I got water, I got food, I got a car. Yeah, maybe the guy’s a little bit crazy and tough. But I got everything I need.'”
This stuck with Schofield, to the extent that he made it the basis for a speech given by Advanced Warfare’s villainous CEO Jonathan Irons. “And then I asked the president of Activision at the time, Eric Hirshberg, ‘How about you write this speech?’ Because he’s a really great writer. And so he took what I said and he wrote it in just such an eloquent way.”
That version of the speech made it into the game.
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