Perhaps what is painful about Call of Duty Black Ops (hereafter referred to as CoDBLOPS) is just how average everything about it is. The problem with everything being over the top is that over the top becomes pedestrian. CoDBLOPS is perhaps the edification of poor ideas. The game is following lines, boring and uninspired lines. It’s honestly hard to remember much of the experience, given that the rate at which bad stuff filters out of our brains continues to increase exponentially, despite our exponentially increased exposure to it.
I can’t describe the story, because it just wasn’t memorable enough, I can’t recall anything worth remembering. The game had nice effects, but no more so than any other game that tries to outdo the last competitor in a genre so saturated it’s gurgling under the weight of its own fat. The constant “hurry up everything’s stimulating oh my god here comes something exciting oh god did you see that oh shit bad stuff’s going down!” is so overwrought that doing more of it just becomes a chore. The experience is so exceptionally known, that my only reasoning behind the commercial success of the genre is that there is a certain group of people who are also gurgling under their own fat to buy these horrid games.
CoDBLOPS is market share. Simply put, that with each passing generation, each group of large developing houses has to crap out one of these, and CoDBLOPS is Activision’s offering. There’s not a whole lot of depth to it, it’s a game about shooting people with weapons, a seemingly bottomless male power fantasy that continues to be invested in perhaps more than any other current market. The only genre trend that’s come even close to competing with it, ironically enough, is MMORPGs and Social games, two equally repugnant groups on the whole, better at making money than even innovating their own genres. Thus, the problem is recapitulated on an almost yearly basis and has not yet been addressed in any real manner.
The problem is not so much the genres as the staunch refusal to address longstanding, genre-specific problems. The discovery of a working set has created paralysis and discussion about change is derided rather than encouraged. But there is probably a deeper fear about what change means to the power fantasy itself. Fear that the power fantasy may not be as empowered as it once was, that issues never addressed in war games need consideration. The dream might come to an end, where games have to address more than just their audience’s pleasure. The game might also have to address issues relating to what killing means, even in the virtual. After all, we do quite matter-of-factly state that, when our character disappears, it “dies.” When another character disappears, they “die.” The language has been in use for too long to be happenstance. CoDBLOPS has been created too many times to be happenstance.
Recommended: No
Quoth a James: “A tight-hinged situation.”
Defendin’ the World