It never ceases to amaze me how many people claim to be experts on things they clearly never experienced.
Last Tuesday saw the release of the immensely popular “Call Of Duty: Black Ops”, a game where players take on secret missions during the Cold War involving assassination attempts, subterfuge, and other harrowing action-packed events in places like Vietnam, Russia, and Cuba. Being the die-hard gamer that I am, of course I was there for the midnight release of the game and let me tell you that it is spectacular.
Unlike most of the critics, I have actually played through the entire game from start to finish, and knowing what I know now, I find a lot of the criticism to be both unfounded and entirely blown out of proportion. But what else is new? Video games, especially those of a violent nature, never get fair coverage by the news media.
Before I go any further I will say that this article does contain minor spoilers about the game in question so if you were planning on playing it or don’t want to know some minor events that occur during the course of its story, stop reading.
One group to come out firmly against the game is the Cuban government. In the first mission of the game, you are placed in Cuba and tasked with assassinating Fidel Castro. Obviously since Castro is still alive today, the assassination attempt was unsuccessful, but the Cuban government’s criticism of the game is pretty asinine.
According to state-run Web site Cubadebate, the game is “perverse” because of a “glorified” assassination attempt on Castro that “stimulates sociopathic attitudes in North American children and adolescents.”
There are several things wrong with this statement. First of all, the assassination attempt is not glorified. Sure, a bullet travels in slow motion and hits a Castro double right between the eyes, and then the player is forced to gun down a female human shield that the double was using after she attempts to kill the black ops team, but this is a video game, not reality.
Is it glorified, though? After playing through the entire game, I can assure you that every event that happens does so for a reason and nothing is blown out of proportion or even sensationalized at all. The script is smart and is based off of real life events, and the United States government did try to kill Castro several times. What’s wrong with depicting it in a game?
And the claim that it is turning American kids into sociopaths is just laughable. This is the same technique used by every critic of video games, be it lawmakers or special interest groups, when there is no real evidence at all supporting the claim.
Other groups and even reviewers have also criticized the game for a torture scene which many claim to be pushing the lines of “good taste”, but after playing the scene in question I really have to scratch my head and wonder if they actually played the game. The torture scene is literally maybe a minute long and involves one act of torture which is partially obscured anyway.
So even in the video game community itself, people contribute to the overall ignorance of the public by blowing something out of proportion and making it much bigger of an issue than it needs to be.
But I guess that’s the world we live in. People will continue to criticize things they don’t understand and evidently don’t even play. Aside from a blatantly opportunistic historical revision at the very end of the game, “Call Of Duty: Black Ops” is a modern marvel of video gaming, executed beautifully and at times is better than a Hollywood movie. But be warned – according to Cuba, after playing it you, too, could turn into a sociopath, rapist, pedophile, necrophiliac, or murderer. That’s a risk I’m willing to take.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
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