The Moral Grey Zone

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE GAME CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2. IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO KNOW PLOT DETAILS, PLEASE REFRAIN FROM READING.

Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) has recently broken record sales, grossing $310 million on the first day, in the US and U.K. alone. Many of my friends have already boughten the game, and are loving it. I asked my friend, who beat the 6 hour game play in the first day, to show me some of his favorite missions, and I was very surprised at what I saw.

I'm not big on video games. In fact, the latest game console I have is the N64. However, I do like to watch people play the games. So as I'm watching my friend ride a snowmobile down a ridiculous hill only to jump across a gorge to safety, and see the Whiskey Hotel (White House) blown up by terrorists, and to see the ending which I won't spoil here, I realized that the main joy to this game is in realizing that you are the good guy, who is killing the bad guy. The reward is that you are the moral person in the situation. Then my friend puts on a mission but has to leave the room for a minute, so he hands me the controller. I've only played first person shooters a couple of times, but I know the jist of it, so I see what I can do.

The scene opens. You are in an elevator with four or five other guys. All of you have machine guns. You are in a airport. You casually walk into the crowded lobby and unload your guns on the civilians. Easily a hundred people fall, dead. You cannot run or sprint. There is no music. As you slowly make your way through the mall, the death count rises. You see a man try to drag a wounded man to safety. You shoot them both. You hear screams but you do not stop. The police come to stop you, but you must take them down. As I come to the middle of the mission, my friend reenters the room. He looks at me with a grim look and says, "Creepy, isn't it?"

It was very creepy. Here I had just convinced myself that the pleasure from this game was that you were the good guy. It was easy to kill the terrorist. However, in the mission you are a spy and you must earn their trust. Being forced to do that put me in a terrible moral gray area. In the end, it was for a good cause, but at what price? After this I became slightly depressed as I wondered, do the ends really justify the means?

I posed this question to my friend, which I will now pose to you: You alone are the one who must make this choice. In order to save 1,000 lives, you must kill 100. Could you do it? If the ends justified the means, it would be an easy yes, because you would save 900 lives. But could you kill 100 people? I don't know the answer to this question. He asked me if his loved ones were in the 1,000 or if they were in the 100. Would this make it easier? Would you kill a stranger to save a loved one? Or would you kill a loved one to save hundreds of strangers? And to think, it was a video game that got me thinking.

Of all the dilemmas that were going on in my head, a good thought did occur. The same game that many people criticize for mind-numbing violence caused me to really consider the reality of murder. Even though I have no intentions of murdering someone, this game made me want to do so even less. So is this gruesome, immoral scene really a inhibitor to a higher moral state? By showing the harshness and reality of just a widespread murder, it really brings the severity into play, unlike the cartoonish violence in Grand Theft Auto IV.

The moral ambiguity of MW2 is one of the best things I like about the game. I love being forced to think after I watch a movie or read a book, and to get the same feeling from a game was a wonderful experience. Besides from this, the graphics are amazing, and the story line (from what I saw) is good as well. There are a lot of twists that keep you guessing, and the enemy AI is more advanced as well. So coming from someone who has never played/seen the first Modern Warfare, I would say this game is a must buy.

I think the most important thing to take away from this experience, though, is that every once in a while it is good to question your morals. I think it's good to push the ideas of what you would and wouldn't do every so often, so that you know where you really are.

"Changing your mind is one of the best ways of figuring out whether or not you still have one." -Taylor Mali