When COD chased the Industry before Their Own Brand

A Personal Case Study of my time spent with the Call of Duty franchise!

For a long time, the readers, thinkers, and players who are interested in video games often know what form of media video games often emulate. Movies, television, and Cinema. Those three ingredients make up the modern video game. It’s the age old difference of acedemia and popular fiction. Which is following which. Video games are purely a visual and interactive media. It’s not a movie, most of the times. Cut scenes are in video games to help players understand more context inside the game play.

A story that unfolds is not the same as a scenario. If the audience knows where the story is going to go in the first ten or twenty minutes, that’s not the same as a story unfolding. As Quentin Tarantino once said on a Charlie Rose interview. As in terms of COD’s narrative, World at War represents a situation unfolding, and that situation is the Pacific and the Soviets campaign unfolding, where every little act became its own war crime the player had to involve themselves in. And no video game was forcing you to participate in a war crime. Even “No Russian” in 2009’s Modern Warfare 2, where the villain’s son, Vladimir Makarov, walks through an entire airport, shooting anyone who wasn’t Russian. But you experience that narrative unfolding through Joseph Allen’s eyes, unfolding before the player, serving as the catalyst for the entire game.

Call of Duty, the video game franchise, that has been active under various studios including Treyarch (2005-Present), Infinity Ward (2003-Present), Sledgehammer Games (2011-Present), and Raven Software (2015-Present), bought under one umbrella by Activision studios, have had their ups and downs in the COD franchise.