Through the eyes of a killer

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer • E-mail

SPOILER WARNING: This column talks about some specific story moments within “Modern Warfare 2,” though it does not reveal major plot points.

There’s a scene in “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” that has stuck with me more than any other scene in the new game from Infinity Ward. And it’s not the scene you think it is.

In this one, my military buddy and I are desperate to stop a war-mongering madman. As I approach his hideout in the caves of Afghanistan, I silently rappel down the side of a cliff and hover for a moment above two armed guards protecting the entrance. Then I quickly grab the guard below me, cover his mouth with my hand so he won’t scream, and sink my knife into his belly.

As the guard bleeds to death, he looks directly into my eyes for a long moment ... until, at last, the life fades out of his own eyes.

It’s a brief moment in an epic, action-packed game, but it’s an intimate, affective one made even more so because “Modern Warfare 2” is a game you play from the first-person perspective. I see everything on the screen as though I were actually doing the killing myself, as though I was a soldier and there was a man breathing his last breaths in my arms.

One of the most powerful things about modern video games is the way they tell stories by making the player feel like they are right there in the thick of the plot, living a life they would otherwise never live and doing things they would otherwise never do. And first-person games in particular — those games you play as though you’re looking directly through the eyes of the protagonist — offer an especially potent form of narrative.

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Infinity Ward is today’s champion of that perspective. With its award-winning “Call of Duty” franchise, the development company has been telling war stories by putting gamers into the boots of battle-hardened soldiers for six years now.

From the first “Call of Duty” to the first “Modern Warfare,” players have dodged bullets on historic World War II battlefields, and they’ve jumped into the heat of today’s conflict zones from the Middle East to the former Soviet Union. And throughout these games, Infinity Ward has shown that in both the big bombastic battlefield moments it designs as well as in the small, personal moments, it knows how to leverage that first-person perspective in an exceptionally gripping manner.

With their latest game, Infinity Ward reminds us once again that the first-person perspective can be a powerful storytelling tool in a smart game developer’s hands, one that can pluck at players’ emotions like no other. But while “Modern Warfare 2” is an example of a game that uses this most-intimate of perspectives extremely well ... it’s also an example of a game that does it very poorly.

I see what you see
“Modern Warfare 2” takes players from the slums of Rio to the caverns of Afghanistan as it weaves a tale of a world falling into war. This action-filled yarn has you trying to stop a bloodthirsty terrorist, trying to defend American soil and, ultimately, trying to stop the entire globe from tearing itself apart at the seams.

As in previous “Call of Duty” games, the single-player campaign lets players live out this adventure from the perspective of several characters, each involved in a different aspect of the conflict.

Activision/Infinity Ward In one of the great moments of "Modern Warfare 2," players watch the conflict below from the seemingly safe distance of outer space.

As war stories go, it’s not the subtlest thing I’ve seen. As msnbc.com reporter Todd Kenreck says in his video review , “Modern Warfare 2” “has all the pacing of a six-hour movie trailer.” And yet, this tale is filled with plenty of intrigue, surprises and even a thoughtful exploration of what the extremists found in all quarters of a conflict can cost humanity.

It certainly delivers the immersive wartime experience that many players are seeking with its big scenes — especially the battle scenes that take place on American soil. Seeing a suburban Virginia neighborhood under siege and filled with gunfire is exceptionally gripping.

But where “Modern Warfare 2” succeeds most — and where Infinity Ward deserves the most praise — is in its smaller moments. The scene I mentioned at the beginning of this column stuck with me because of the intimacy of it. Like all first-person war games, “Modern Warfare 2” spends a lot of time asking me to gun down waves of faceless enemies. But the game had the most impact when it slowed down for a moment and showed me the result of my actions up close and personal: A man’s death. At my hands.

In another scene, I found myself suddenly floating in outer space, literally watching the world go by through the eyes of a member of the International Space Station. For a few moments I was weightless, everything peaceful with Earth’s problems at a safe distance below. But as things go horribly awry on the ground, I was quickly and violently reminded that there really is no escape from the problems that plague our planet.

And then there’s one of the most elegantly heart-wrenching scenes of the game: You suddenly find yourself in an underground bunker, confused, not sure where you’re at, the sounds of panic echoing from a distant radio. As you wander the grim tunnels, you discover some of your fellow soldiers scattered about — injured, miserable, dying. Body bags line the floor.

I didn’t know what I was supposed to do in this moment. And then I stumbled out of the bunker, to the surface, to discover Washington, D.C., a hellish landscape, lain to waste.

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