As I heard the President’s speech on Sunday night, as he described the death of Bin Laden, I couldn’t help but picture the scenario in my head. It was all Call of Duty-ish, black ops stuff. I pictured the Navy Seals busting in through the windows with a variety of weapons: shotguns, umps, ak-47s, and a flash bang or two. I could imagine the firefight that took place: couches being thrown, pillow feathers flying around the room, tables being used as cover. I even pictured the last bullet, the one that killed him, being fired in slow motion, as the soldier firing it entered bullet time. Okay, this is sort of going to a dark place, by “video gameizing” a real person’s death (though a really evil person’s death), but it makes sense because we have already seen such a type of mission visualized.
That mission is The Bay of Pigs invasion in COD: Black Ops. You are sent in to kill Fidel Castro, but, to be historically accurate, you don’t succeed in the game. I wasn’t a huge fan of the latest installment of COD, but I did appreciate the fact that we were given the opportunity to play a historical mission. There are not many games (WWII games excluded) that let you do this.
Now, will we be able to play Sunday’s mission? Will the epic mission be visualized like The Bay of Pigs has? I think it would be really interesting to see America’s reaction to it- especially from groups that strongly oppose violence in video games or people that just don’t play video games at all but who are extremely patriotic.
Keep in mind that we tried to kill Castro a long time ago, so really that mission in a game didn’t come out until 50 years later. Will it be this long until we hunt down Osama in a game? Then again, video games weren’t around at the time either.
This is why I love video games. They can take us to places that no other medium can. This is a point I strongly believe in and will bring up again and again- but for now I’ll keep this post short.
I’ve learned, in my two decades of existence, that history repeats itself. So, we will definitely be seeing an Osama Bin Laden assassination mission in the future, but who knows when and where. And – dare I ask- will it be right or wrong?
P.S. I proposed the question with Modern Warfare 4 because Sledgehammer Games are already working on MW3, so they would be pressed for time to include it in that one. So MW4 seems like the next viable option. But, really, any game can come out with the mission; I only refer to MW because it is the most prominent game on the subject of “modern warfare.”
Do you people have a facebook fan page? I looked for one on twitter but could not discover one, I would really like to become a fan!