Spoilers: Call of Duty Deliberately Courting Controversy

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Spoilers: Call of Duty Deliberately Courting Controversy Again?

 

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A leaked video sent to Kotaku shows a scene which some are referring to as Modern Warfare 3's "No Russian moment." In the clip, which appears to show a cutscene during which the player watches events unfold through a bystander's video camera, a small child, her mother and the player's point of view (presumably the child's father) are killed in an explosion in the streets of London.

 

This scene is somewhat different to No Russian in that the player isn't the one doing the killing of the innocent bystanders, but it's still a somewhat heavy-handed approach to get some shock value out of the game's story. The death of a family of innocent bystanders at the hands of terrorists is sad, to say the least, but it's highly unlikely that we will have been given time throughout the rest of the campaign to get to know them as characters. This makes them effectively "talking props" present in the narrative purely to get an immediate reaction rather than people we're supposed to care about.

 

Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft quite rightly points out that this sort of imagery is new to gaming, but something we've seen many times before in Hollywood movies, TV shows and even on the news. The death of or injury to children is a convenient shorthand for "look how evil these guys are" or "look how terrible this situation is" and at least part of the shock value of the incident is the fact that we hardly ever see children getting injured or killed in games -- in fact, in many games, we never see children at all. It's seemingly taboo to put players in a situation where their actions might cause harm to children, whether deliberately or not.

 

What's your take? Gratuitous, cheap way of tugging at the heartstrings, or an effective use of emotive imagery showing that the industry is willing to take on more mature subject matter that movies have been tackling for years?