Playing 9/11: or how video games redeem American history in the twenty-first century

Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

            It is September 11^th, 2012, and I have just led a select team of American Special Forces through Wall Street and into the New York Stock Exchange in an attempt to disable a Russian jamming tower that keeps the city’s skies under foreign control. The conflict? The Russo-American War of 2016. The battlefield? A Sony Playstation 3 console holding one of the most successful video game franchises in recent history on its disc drive, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011).

            Whether we like it or not, the struggle between history, myth, and remembrance has now acquired a new front of discursive contention, video games. Jeremy K. Saucier, in his article Playing the Past: The Video Game Simulation as Recent American History, speaks to this by stating the following:

Driven by new research, new technologies, and new markets at the end of the twentieth century, video games, with their ever-growing narrative and visual sophistication, stand posed to rival the art forms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like other cultural products, such as film, literature, or music, video games express cultural tensions and anxieties. Their subjects and narratives speak to a particular society’s place and time and are thus important sources for historical work. Video games are potentially the most powerful storytelling medium of the twenty-first century.

The narrative power of video games stems from an already established popular culture that accepts the consuming of history in uncontroversial packets of memory as filtered through myth. In other words, we like our reality mythically cooked. And what better way to cook reality than with a simulated work of fiction whose control rests in the actual daily consumer of history, video gamers. This contention makes sense once we realize that 9/11 quite simply exposed mainstreamed conceptions of the world we live in as being governed by the politics of film and its representation. What was the fall of the Twin Towers if not a real life repeat of Independence Day or countless other end-of-the-world scenarios put in celluloid form. This is not to reduce the September 11^th terrorist attacks to an event solely popular in visual culture. But one can argue that Americans, movie-goers par excellence, were subjected to imagery not unfamiliar to them when the towers collapsed. In effect, September 11^th proved we live in a movie-made world. A quick glance at video games after the event contributes to the understanding of such an idea.

            According to Tom Engelhardt, in his book The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire, Americans “were already imagining versions of September 11 soon after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.” With the advent of Hollywood through the newly popularized genre of the war film, post-1945 America became enthralled in a visual culture that gave sense to an event that only a select part of their society experienced. Values and morals in wartime became universal because film mass produced images accepted as war truths. Consequently, war as we know it today had to be re-experienced through film first in order for its meanings to be fully encrusted into the official national narrative. It can be argued that war is a movie experience first when it comes to the common knowledge of it for people that didn’t experience the conflict first-hand. Which brings us to twenty-first century gaming.

            Experiencing war outside of itself remains an endeavor of imagination mediated by popular culture. Now, what is interesting about imagination today is that it has become resoundingly dangerous in representing the past and its present tensions, and repercussions, given the expansion of mediums that play out fiction. And within those mediums, video game consoles are amongst the more powerful.

            Popular culture finds enduring meaning in analogies that employ simple metaphors that mirror reality in an effort to make fiction easily recognizable. Take, for instance, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. As explained above, this video game pits players against a Russian invasion of the Western World. The plot is intricately interwoven with ideas such as home grown terrorism, foreign invasion concepts mediated by Cold War history, and destruction imagery specific to a post-9/11 world (meaning city warfare, a heavy emphasis on building destruction by large scale objects like missiles or planes, and dust covered streets littered with civilian casualties). Players get lost in the detail of faithfully recreated weaponry and military lingo, weapons have their official real-world name and technical designation and they are modeled after their newest incarnations.

While this type of information is an interesting phenomenon in itself, it is the conscious attempt at an uncontroversial plot line that stands out as dangerous. Creating a global state of war (the main marketing line for the game was that Modern Warfare 3 waged World War III on consoles) meant for the game’s developers (Infinity Ward) creating an enemy that was both easily recognizable and safe enough to shoot without disrupting socio-political sensibilities. In doing so, they reverted to Cold War enemy stereotypes that actually rescue the Soviet enemy from the recent past and dresses them up in combat fatigues that shy away from Communist red in favor of a more complex shade of gray that projects a sort of historical vendetta, a return to unfinished business that requires an American foreign policy of constant military awareness so as not to repeat new Pearl Harbors.

In essence, Modern Warfare 3’s most dangerous discursive component rests in the fact that they relive historical discourses by fighting specific Cold War battles and situations that remember Soviet enemies and old antagonisms. What is interesting here is that those ideas are still grounded on the 20^th century mindset of war being a stable sphere of American identity. It is here that Tom Engelhardt’s American war story argument comes into play.

The American war story (as explained in Engelhardt’s book The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation) posits itself, in the 21^st century, as a reminder of moral clarity and responsibility inherent in American identity (catering to a sense of military duty after the Second World War). According to Engelhardt, the American war story propels the idea of national innocence in times of war. America is always standing guard at the watchtowers of freedom, seeking out international injustices to squash so long as war never answers to the politics of a first-strike policy (meaning that the United States should never take the offensive initiative). In other words, American war is always a defensive reaction to foreign, and thus evil, aggression suffered on American soil or threatening United States’ national security (see Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the September 11^th 2001 Terrorist Attacks).

            In Modern Warfare 3, the American war story is upheld through the idea that the enemy struck first, as seen in the very first chapter of the video game when Russians invade New York City, pushing American forces to take to the streets and take out Russian signal jammers that keep the American air cavalry blind. September 11^th is converted into the appropriate setting for the American war story to manifest itself through given recent memory’s pull to the terrorist attacks. In other words, the war story becomes more potent because it fuses twentieth century history discourses with the aesthetic of the post-9/11 world. In fact, it makes the war story more powerful given that the enemy’s first strike is quite literally on American soil, as opposed to Pearl Harbor when one contemplates the meanings of geographic and cultural distances within codes of identity in American politics. When the Pearl Harbor attack occurred certain sectors of the American public did not know what Pearl Harbor was or where it was located (see John Dower’s War Without Mercy). Modern Warfare 3 skips the possibility of confusion or ignorance by making the warzone easily recognizable. 

What is interesting, and dangerous, is that in making it recognizable, the game’s developer dipped fiction into the ink of trauma. New York becomes a symbol of continued defense with the possibility of redemption given the Americans effectively repel the Russian invasion, a responsibility entrusted to the player. Consequently, American gamers are bestowed with the opportunity to redeem 9/11 by the dictum of ‘Never again’, a call of duty for the twenty-first century. And so, upon completing the game by achieving military victory over the Russians, America ushers the age of the virtual veteran, a veteran untouched by the trauma of killing.