Military Violence in Video Games: Defining and Representing the Real in Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare

Abstract

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is a title from the Call of Duty franchise published by Activision in 2007 that made a significant commercial success with more than 17 million units sold across multiple gaming platforms. The game was able to capture the audience worldwide thanks to the developer’s daring attempt to deviate from the historical accuracy of World War II in their previous titles and venture to the era of post-9/11 military conflict. Additionally, the post-9/11 setting represented a potential source for new military technologies, political anxieties, and neoliberal ideologies towards threats from political adversaries such as Russia and non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda. This article examines how Modern Warfare constructs its own reality of war and how such reality convinces the player that it represents the actual discourse of modern wars.

This article uses Roland Barthes’ literary theory called Reality Effect to demonstrate how mundane details in a fictional work are capable of challenging the historical discourse upon which the fictitious plot is built. From this approach, the article analyzes how some minor and subtle details in Modern Warfare contributed to the player’s immersive conduct of military violence and hence making the fictional and the real indistinguishable.

Keywords: Barthes; reality effect; military; violence; modern warfare