The Onion spoofs new “Call of Duty” video game

    November 20, 2009


    Launched on the eve of Veteran’s Day last week, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” the latest in “first-person shooter” video games, raked in an unbelievable $310 million in its first day on the market.

    The game – already the subject of controversy over a scene where the player indiscriminately mows down innocent civilians in an airport that looks like LAX in Los Angeles – is supposed to be one of the most realistic war games yet. As Peter W. Singer describes it:

    As part of a US special operations team, the player roams everywhere from Afghanistan to the Caucasus, winning hearts and minds with a mix of machine pistols and Predator drone strikes. The players also fight out in range of potential new conflict zones, from the rough urban favelas of Brazil to a simulated Russian invasion of Washington, D.C., and the Virginia suburbs (This is actually a major flaw in the game; any invasion force would clearly get stuck in traffic at the Interstate 95 Mixing Bowl).
    While we would normally critique these violent video games for desensitizing kids to killing or for not making killing realistic enough, The Onion has put out this hilarious video (above) with a very original critique on how unrealistic these games really are of real modern warfare. Hope you enjoy!

    Eric Stoner is a co-founding editor at Waging Nonviolence and an adjunct professor at Saint Joseph's University, New York. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, Salon, The Nation, Sojourners and In These Times.

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    • Here’s an interesting bit from the Times‘s Idea of the Day: Can melancholy sell a violent video game?

      In the art magazine Frieze, Christopher Bedford and Jennifer Wulffson write that the commercial for the wildly popular and violent 2006 video game Gears of War used a counterintuitive, Freudian “model of melancholia” to appeal to its intended audience, men around 30 years old. What makes the ad is the soundtrack: no explosions or rattles of gunfire but rather a cover version of the downbeat 1982 Tears for Fears’ tune “Mad World,” with lines like: “No tomorrow, no tomorrow” and “Going nowhere, going nowhere.”

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