As David Leonard argued in his 2004 article "Unsettling the Military Entertainment Complex: Video Games and a Pedagogy of Peace," video games are not just games- they are "sophisticated vehicles inhabiting and disseminating specific ideologies." This project explores how 2019's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare expresses these ideologies though morally-coded violence wielded by the player (who consistently represents a Western perspective) compared with immorally-coded violence of Arab terrorists and the Russian military. The game's setting in the fictional country of Urzikstan, a stand-in for real conflicts in Syria and parts of Afghanistan, as well as playable moments that are highly evocative of American collective traumas such as the 2012 Benghazi attacks, allow for players to effectively re-remember highly publicized moments of violence. These re-rememberings highlight the justness of Western (read: U.S./U.K.) military-industrial and political ideals through the strategic use of narrative, character development, ludonarrative design, and interactive game mechanics, even while the game advertises itself as one that explores the "dirty" aspects of modern conflicts. I will put this game into conversations with the work of memory scholars such as Carol Gluck, Paul Ricoeur, and Viet Thahn Nguyen as well as games studies analysts such as Vit Sisler and Holger Potzsch in order to explore how specific signifiers are being wielded in this mnemonic text. I am particularly interested in how presentations of Russians and pan-Middle Eastern conflicts in the game explicitly draw upon previous, real-world trauma reaching as far back as the Cold War in order to generate affect and ascribe additional context and meaning to Modern Warfare's narrative. This process of weaving together disparate memories and traumas muddles ethnic, national, and religious identities in order to craft a text overtly palatable for American consumers.
