Taking Names

Now that the videogame industry has become a vibrant transnational eco-system, it's time to subject the vilest and most repulsive aspects of the industry to withering critique, in hopes of raising the bar for the entire industry. This is occasionally painful, because studios work extremely hard on even the least successful videogames. But it's ultimately good for the studios in question and good for the industry. Today's case study of reptilian degeneration: CODBLOPS2 (Call of Duty Black Ops 2). The lowlights include:

1. Glorifying African warlords. During the first levels, the player assists Jonas Savimbi, a warlord who, in real life, inflicted 30 years of blood and misery on Angola, thanks to funding and arms from the CIA and apartheid-era South Africa.

2. Idiotic racism. The villain of the story is an angry brown man from Latin America (never mind the reality that the US Empire destroyed Latin American democracies and underwrote thuggish military oligarchies for decades). He's angry because of something about a dead sister, or maybe Latin passion, or was it narcoterrorism -- there are so many racist Orientalisms, the story can't keep track of them all. Oh, and the villainous mole in a Navy SEAL unit just happens to be named Vasquez. Riiight.

3. Occupy-bashing. The transnational audience is using twitter. Horrors! And posting on social media sites. To the gulags with them! Proving, as if we needed more evidence, that the Terror War is nothing but the war of the One Percent on the rest of humanity. 

4. Tiresome game-play. Almost no innovation in basic shooter mechanics + lush visuals which are completely wasted on corridor crawls + ludicrous player "choices" which are nothing of the sort = a game not worth your hard-earned currency-units. If you love first-person shooters, stick with Far Cry 3 -- an infinitely better story with infinitely more creativity and player choice.

Fortunately, CODBLOPS2 does provide one useful service for humanity. An onscreen version of the recently-disgraced Petraeus shows up in a cut-scene late in the story, as a fictionalized Secretary of State. Given game production cycles, the cut-scene was rendered sometime in 2011, well before the scandal which sank Petraeus' career as CIA spookmeister.

We hereby proclaim the COD Curse: any real-life political figure who gets fawning in-game coverage in any COD game will find their political career collapse, similar to the Madden Curse.

Let the fawning coverage begin!