COD or Call of Duty, yes the original, was made all the way back in October of 2003. This was surprising to me, as I’d never really heard anything about it until my later years of primary school. As a 20 year old I have never and probably will never play this game, even though it seems to still be fairly popular with new releases coming out each year.
Although COD is not necessarily a forgotten game in the grand scheme of things, it definitely is for me considering I didn’t even know it existed until recently, and certainly didn’t know just how long ago it was first developed.
So how could we look at this violent video game? Well it is based around history, so we can look at analysing it historically. We could also psychoanalyse it and try to uncover why the game is so incredibly violent and how this affects its audience. The third way we can analyse COD is through genre and narrative.
The original COD game was developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision for Microsoft on October 29th 2003 as a first person shooter game. Interestingly enough, the game is based around a very significant historical event, one that everyone is taught in school and one that destroyed many many lives…. World War II. Personally, I can’t decide if the idea of basing a violent shooting game off the events of a real war is clever or incredibly insensitive. Is it romanticising the idea of war? Hard to tell. For me, it just feels wrong.
In previous years there have been studies produced that look into whether playing violent video games contributes to whether a person is more violent in real life situations. In some circumstances this was found to be true. Although there are no specific studies on COD in relation to this topic, I think it would be incredibly interesting to do a psychoanalysis on the minds of players before and after having played the game and how they react to certain stimuli or situations. In addition I would love to assess the age of players when playing and whether the game impacts them more especially in terms of violence. It would also be interesting to assess whether or not playing a video game based on a real life war would contribute to the players willingness to be involved in an actual war and not just a virtual one. Does playing the game make war seem easy or fun to its viewers? Is it overlooking the terrifying nature of it and erasing the reality of just how hard it is to be constantly on edge fearing for your life while taking others?
To tie in both the historical analysis and the psychoanalysis, I think it would be important to analyse genre and narrative. The genre of COD is ‘first person shooter’ and the narrative follows you as the character, who plays as three different Allied Nations: the Amercians, The British and the Russians during the period of 1944-1945. Ultimately the aim of this game is to defeat the Germans.
As someone who hasn’t played before, I found this video below incredibly helpful in finding out what it was all about.
When historically analysing and psychoanalysing Call of Duty, a common question popped up for me: if this video game is indeed romanticising the idea of war and changing people’s psyche, does this mean that more people who have played first-person shooter video games have enlisted in the army or wars? That is a question I would love to know the answer to.
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