In 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, SAS Captain Price and his squad are on the hunt for
a chemical weapon smuggler named Waraabe, a man who may know the location of their primary target,
Makarov. The squad breaches the room Waraabe is hiding in, guns down all of his accomplices
and shoots him in the leg. Price then kicks Waraabe to the ground and– before even asking
him a question– throws down one of the smuggled chemical weapons. Toxic green gas fills the room,
Price and the player put on gas masks, and only then does the questioning start.
“Where’s Makarov?” Price asks, dangling a gas mask in front of Warabe’s struggling fingers. Waraabe,
terrified, yells that he never met Makarov, only a secondary target named Volk. Soap, another
member of the squad, puts his boot on Waraabe’s injured leg and presses down. Waraabe screams,
gas still filling the room. “Paris,” he gasps. Volk oversaw a chemical weapons delivery in Paris.
This information is the best the squad could have hoped for. Price nods, tosses Waraabe a gas mask,
and lets him struggle with it for almost five seconds before shooting him in the head.
In 2023’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, SAS Sergeant Kyle Garrick– nicknamed Gaz– is chasing
down a man named Andrei Nolan, a member of an “ultranationalist” Russian terrorist group. Gaz
puts a couple bullets in Nolan’s body armor, but Nolan laughs and says “kill me, I won’t
help you.” Gaz knocks out Nolan with a punch and extracts him from the mission. Afterwards,
Gaz mentions that Nolan is “less conversational than he was. For almost five seconds,
the graphics on screen show us a blown out photograph of Nolan, slumped in a chair,
his eyes covered and face bloodied. Despite Nolan apparently not giving out any information, the
squad’s mission continues unimpeded– they got the information they needed from Nolan’s confiscated
phone. Nolan is never seen or mentioned again. These two examples represent just a fraction of
the Call of Duty franchise’s nearly two decade obsession with torture. Over the course of 20
mainline titles, the Call of Duty games have featured 46 discrete instances of torture. From
1942 to 2065, World War 2 to the far future, torture is a more consistent presence in the
series than characters, gameplay mechanics, or hardware generations. There are only two titles
in the entire franchise– Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4– which don’t have a sniff
of torture in their campaigns. Black Ops 4, as a matter of fact, doesn’t have a campaign at all.
Black Ops 4 does have an entry in the series’ ongoing Zombie mode, which has a separate,
interconnected lore including SIX ADDITIONAL TORTURE SCENES, but I’ve decided not to include
Zombies in this analysis. The storylines and methods of storytelling are very distinct
from the typical single-player campaigns, and also I’m just one man and I’m very tired.
When I started this endeavor, I had some specific instances in mind– the waterboarding sequence in
2019’s Modern Warfare. The russian roulette or glass-in-mouth scenes from Black Ops 1. Maybe
even some of the weird future stuff the series has backpedaled from. But I never expected the
frequency, and the casualness, of torture’s usage in this series. The task quickly started to feel
sisyphean; I would briefly think I’d found every torture scene, only to uncover another passing
mention in a mission briefing or implication in the setdressing of a level or SIX in the zombies
campaign (I’m not doing zombies). I thought I was done with the search when I started writing
this script, and since then I’ve had to update everything an additional three times as I’ve
found even more new scenes. Inevitably, one of you will point out that I’ve missed something,
and inevitably you’ll be right. Let alone the absence of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6,
which comes out later this year and will quite likely outdate this whole list. But what searching
out dozens and dozens of torture scenes has taught me is that my previous assumed framework
for torture was naively narrow, that these games invoke torture so wantonly that it ceases to even
stand out from the unending barrage of bullets, explosions, and spinning military emblems.
So, to keep track of everything, I started a spreadsheet. Because this can’t be a bout of
madness if I have a spreadsheet, right? Ordered chronologically by game, we’ve got a brief
description of the scene, and then a number of categories. Who’s doing the torturing? Who’s being
tortured? Is the torture “effective,” meaning does the torturer successfully get information
out of the subject? And as this spreadsheet grew by hundreds of cells at a time, I started to see
things in the data– patterns, trends, NUMBERS. Across twenty different games, there emerged
something like a philosophy of torture, one that has consumed my waking thoughts for months now.
I’m going to try and explain what it is. But what’s been strange about making this
spreadsheet, other than the fact that I’ve been staring at hundreds of cells labeled
“Call of Duty Torture Spreadsheet” for a month, is that extended,
brutal “setpiece” torture sequences sit alongside bits of the game so quick and unremarked on that
many players might not even register them. For instance, let’s talk about literally the first
five minutes of Call of Duty 2, years before the series made a name for itself with morally queasy,
controversy-garnering talking points. In Call of Duty 2, we start as Private Koslov in the soviet
army. We learn how to shoot a gun, how to use our compass, and then walk into a room where Corporal
Sergei Merkulov is beating the snot out of a German POW, tied to a chair. The German begs the
corporal not to kill him, then provides a pile of tactical information, that the German army
is moving to the southeast and is supported by half-tracks and mobile artillery. Seconds later,
another soldier bursts through the door and tells us a German attack is forming to the southeast,
instantly confirming the information we just heard from the bound prisoner.
Is this a torture scene? Well, not if you take the word of “MrSp3ctre,” a YouTube channel that
uploaded a video called “Every torture scene in Call of Duty” (2 million views,
by the way). But it definitionally is torture. UN definition: severe pain or suffering–mental
or physical– inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining information, a confession,
or punishment for an act that person has (or is suspected to have) committed. Maybe MrSp3ctre
just missed it– I know firsthand how impossible it is to find everything. But I also suspect that
simple “interrogation roughhousing” might be a unclear line for players when considering what
constitutes torture. Let me just rapid fire a couple at you, to get a gut check reaction:
In Call of Duty: Vanguard, Nazi Officer Richter puts out a cigarette on Lieutenant
Kingsley’s neck while questioning him. In the same game, the same officer smashes
Lieutenant Petrova’s face into a table while questioning her.
In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, one of the protagonists and “Tier
One Operator” Ilona smashes Dr. Danois’ face into a table while questioning him.
In Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, Commander Hendricks lifts Dr. Salim and pushes him
against a wall while questioning him. In Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War,
CIA Agent Belikov can threaten prisoner Ivanov’s family in a ploy for his cooperation.
In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (the second one), Sergeant “Soap” Mactavish threatens to leave
General Shepherd to freeze to death in Siberia if he doesn’t confess in front of congress.
These are all torture, via the definition established by the UN and repeated by the US
Department of Justice. But some of them– threats that the audience knows are empty, pushing a guy
around in an interrogation room– don’t feel nearly as much like torture as, say, hooking a guy up to
a car battery. Torture has so wormed its way into how we think about criminal justice writ
large that it often just seems like a matter of process. In a 2019 paper entitled “Wait, There’s
Torture in Zootopia? Examining the Prevalence of Torture in Popular Movies,” researchers Delehanty
and Kearns coded each occurrence of torture in the top-grossing movies between 2008 and 2017
and found that the MAJORITY of popular films– including ones made for children– contain at
least one instance of torture. In Zootopia, it happens twice, for the record, both at the behest
of a Godfather-esque mole named “Mr. Big.” An analysis of Call of Duty’s torture scenes
that only included “the big ones”– the poison gas, the glass in mouth, the ones included in
MrSp3ctre’s video, basically– would be excluding vital data about what the franchise is doing with
torture. Tracking when and how torture is used casually, as much as when it’s used bombastically,
is what will help us build a framework for understanding its place in the series. A
second-long threat to Ivanov’s family is just as important to our understanding as a
waterboarding sequence that feels like it takes hours. So, finally, let’s get to the data.
In my research, I’ve found 46 separate instances of torture in the Call of Duty series. It may
surprise you to learn that the split between torture performed by “good” and “bad” guys is
fairly even– “good guys” perform the torture in 52% of cases, “bad guys” in 48%. This number is
actually even closer than it appears, given the presence of a couple edge cases. Both Salazar
in Black Ops 2 and Graves in Modern Warfare 2 (the second one) are in fact double agents–
they conduct torture with the cooperation of the “good guys” but they are, in fact…bad guys.
You might assume that the good/bad alignment of the people tortured would be the exact opposite
chart– that is, good guys only torture bad guys, bad guys only torture good guys. This is almost
true, but not entirely. On a couple different occasions, “good guys” torture other good guys–
the explicit plot of both Black Ops 1 and Cold War is that the protagonist NEEDS to be tortured
in order to remember repressed memories. On one occasion, one antagonist (Hadir in 2019’s Modern
Warfare) tortures the family of Barkov, another antagonist. In many categories of my analysis,
there were edge cases like this. But there’s one statistic in the question of “who tortures and who
gets tortured” that I find the most striking. In 46 separate instances of torture, there is only
ONE TIME in the entire series in which the person being tortured simply does not have
the information the torturer wants. ONCE, when a character named “the butcher” demands
information from someone in an embassy. Every other time, whether good or bad,
pro or antagonist, the characters of Call of Duty are perfectly able to select the
exact right person to subject to torture. Torture’s most famous hypothetical question is
referred to as the “ticking bomb,” or “ticking time bomb” scenario. It goes like this: suppose,
if you will, that some terrorist has hidden a bomb somewhere inside a major and densely populated
city. This bomb, which will claim countless lives if it explodes, is on a timer that is ticking its
way toward zero. Fortunately, you have apprehended the very terrorist who hid the bomb, and are
holding him in captivity. Would you torture this man to find the bomb and avert the explosion?
As Alex Adams writes in his book “How to Justify Torture:”
It might be framed as a question, but the conclusion that framers of the ticking bomb
scenario want respondents to reach is never really open or in doubt. It is designed,
like other rhetorical thought experiments, to guide us to a predetermined conclusion. In this
case, we are supposed to admit that, although torture is normally wrong, and should never be
done as a matter of routine, the ticking bomb emergency provides us with a special exception,
a one-of-a-kind situation in which torture might actually be good, might actually help.
One of the things this hypothetical treats as a given is the perfect information we have on
the perpetrator. There is no doubt that the person being held in captivity is the person who planted
the bomb and therefore has absolute knowledge of its whereabouts. This is always the situation
Call of Duty presents; the unquestionable guilt of the person comes before the ethical
question of the treatment they deserve. Sometimes, scenes strain to make this true.
In the first situation I described, the toxic gas-torture in Modern Warfare 3,
Price demands the location of Makarov, a piece of information Waraabe genuinely does not have.
Soap presses forward– okay, maybe not Makarov, but what about this other guy? Who is he, where is he?
Inevitably, Waraabe produces something of value. How would this scene differ if Waraabe didn’t know
the whereabouts of the other guy either? Would the moral righteousness of Price and Soap wobble
if these techniques were leveraged against someone who was incapable of giving them what
they wanted? Maybe, maybe not. We already knew Waraabe was guilty– when Price executes him,
the game never wonders if he deserved it. To state the blindingly obvious, this assuredness
in the guilt of a captive is not nearly so common in real life. A huge number of the detainees at
Guantanamo, for instance, were not “caught in the act” as in Call of Duty, but sold to the US for
massive bounties from unreliable sellers. In 2006, the US Government’s own documents revealed that
55% of Guantanamo detainees were “not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the
United States or its coalition allies,” and only 8% “were characterized as al Qaeda fighters.”
But maybe, “are they guilty” is a distraction from the time bomb question. Michael Sandel points
this out in his book “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”. Although the time bomb scenario
is theoretically designed to demonstrate a practical utilitarian benefit of torture,
it includes an inherent appeal to our sense of punitive justice as well.
“The moral force of the case for torturing [the time-bomb terrorist] depends heavily on the
assumption that he is in some way responsible for creating the danger we now seek to avert…the moral
intuitions at work in the ticking time bomb case are not only about costs and benefits, but also
about the non-utilitarian idea that terrorists are bad people who deserve to be punished.”
What if, Sandel writes, the hypothetical didn’t ask us to torture the guilty party? What if
instead we had to torture an innocent third party to find the location of the bomb– say,
the terrorist’s child, who has no knowledge or involvement in his activities?
In 2019’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the protagonist tortures a terrorist’s child who has
no knowledge or involvement in his activities. One of the most difficult aspects of the
franchise’s torture scenes for me to categorize was the question of whether the torture scene was
primarily inquisitive or punitive– that is, did the torturer mainly want to answer a question or
just cause the recipient pain. Some of these are easy to answer. In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare,
a ghoulish digidouble of Kevin Spacey shoots Major Cormack in the hip and breaks Sergeant
Mitchell’s arm without asking them a single question. In Black Ops II, Raul Menendez kneecaps
and slowly kills Agent Hudson as a punishment to the other characters present in the scene [“Your
life will be consumed by absolute loss”]. Both undoubtedly punitive. In Black Ops: Cold War,
Special Officer Adler (who is nominally an ally) tortures the protagonist as a method
of unlocking repressed memories and stopping a nuclear strike. This is undoubtedly inquisitive
torture– Adler has no other motivation to cause the protagonist pain.
But what about that Modern Warfare scene? Price and Gaz have apprehended a man named
“The Butcher” a terrorist who is responsible for countless crimes, including a previously
mentioned torture scene. The squad is looking for a chemical weapon and the target of an upcoming
attack– a pretty typical ticking time bomb scenario– but despite being repeatedly beaten,
Butcher refuses to tell them anything. THEN, Gaz goes out to a van, retrieves Butcher’s wife
and son, returns to the interrogation room, and threatens them with a loaded revolver. Finally,
Butcher spills, gives both the location of the weapon and the name of the target.
If this is purely inquisitive, then you could frame it as the ultimate expression of the
practicality of “utilitarian torture.” Sure, unlike the classic ticking time bomb scenario,
Gaz tortured three people instead of one, and two of those people were fully innocent, but hey,
three people is probably fewer than would have been harmed by a chemical weapon attack. Perhaps
Call of Duty is looking Sandel in the face and staking a claim, yes, torturing an innocent is
morally justifiable in these circumstances if it results in saving more lives. BUT. The scene then
allows the player to execute Butcher after his confession, extrajudicially murder him in front
of his family. And if you choose to do this, the purpose of the whole scene changes shape.
This is no longer a utilitarian exercise in causing the least suffering. In fact,
it seems like the inverse– the prior scene is recontextualized as an elaborate punishment,
its moral calculus deciding that torturing Butcher is in fact more important than not
torturing the civilians sitting next to him. We know that the game does, in fact, find this
punishment morally acceptable, because there’s a different line in the scene that you can’t cross.
Pull the trigger on Butcher’s wife or son and the game will cut to black, informing you that killing
innocent civilians will not be tolerated. All the rest of this, though? Tolerated with gusto.
So you see why it can be challenging to categorize the motivating factors behind
all of the game’s torture scenes. Inquisitive torture, punitive torture, they quite literally
bleed into each other. Trend-wise, the series does feature “bad guys” torturing for purely
punitive reasons at a far higher rate. But if I decided to categorize every time the “good guys”
execute their targets after torturing them as primarily punitive– because execution is,
of course, not remotely inquisitive– the graphs get significantly closer.
If we want to see some unambiguously different graphs though, we don’t have to look farther
than torture’s efficacy in the franchise. It may not seem that way at first– when viewing all 46 of
the series’ instances of torture, the efficacy is almost exactly even once again, with just a little
wiggle room from situations in which the player is given a choice to either confess or not. But
separate that graph into when torture is performed by the “good guys” vs “bad guys” and suddenly the
disparities are obvious. “Bad guys,” as told by Call of Duty, are absolutely terrible at
gaining information with torture. There are only 2 instances in the entire series (with the exception
of those player-choice scenes) in which villains manage to successfully torture info out of anyone.
Meanwhile, the “good guys,” the protagonists and their allies, have a stunning 71% success rate
when it comes to torture. A couple smacks, a vial of toxic gas, or a dangle over the side
of a building and their enemies crack like eggs, spilling anything and everything they know.
It’s possible to read this a couple ways. The first is that the good guys are simply better
at torturing. This would match their superior effectiveness at most everything else in the
series. Much as the good guys are better at aiming a gun, or chasing a terrorist, they’re
better at knowing what combination of fists, electricity, and threats to leverage in order to
get information. But often, the techniques used by good guys and bad guys are exactly the same:
a Nazi officer slams a lieutenant’s head into a table, a CIA officer smashes a detainee’s head
into a table. Soviet baddie “Kravchenko” stabs a US secret agent, US secret agents stab Kravchenko
right back. And in these matched scenarios, the bad guys talk while the good guys stay silent.
Therefore, I think focusing on technique is missing the overall philosophy of the Call
of Duty moral universe. What matters is not how the good guys or bad guys act, what matters is
the simple fact that they are either good or bad. Their name in the subtitles is written in either
green or red text. And being good comes with a strength of character, a moral righteousness,
that allows them to resist any torture. This falls in line with Call of Duty’s valorization of the
troops as almost literally superhuman, able to both make decisions and withstand torture that
would debilitate an ordinary civilian. In a case of the exception proving the rule, one of the only
two times that bad guys manage to get information out of torture was when Hadir tortured Barkov’s
family in 2019’s Modern Warfare– a situation in which the subjects of the torture were both
civilians AND somewhat connected to villainy. (As an aside, the other exception was poor Ajax
getting information tortured out of him in Call of Duty: Ghosts. I don’t have an
explanation for that one, he wasn’t morally compromised, he just seems to have drawn the
short end of the stick. The only good troop in the whole damn series who’s susceptible
to a bad guy’s torture. Sorry dude.) When bad guys crack then, it’s indicative
of their relative weakness of spirit. The good guys are so effective at torture,
not just because their methods are better, but because their opponents are lesser,
little weak men who will spill the second a boot is put to their throats. It’s another way
Call of Duty justifies the torture done by its protagonists; if the people they were torturing
weren’t ontologically evil, they wouldn’t break so easily. But they are, and so they do.
On the subject of torture techniques, my main takeaway is more simple: it all happens really
fast, doesn’t it? Out of 46 torture scenes, only a handful appear to take more than an hour. Usually,
the good guys get information out in minutes. “I won’t tell you anything,” two punches,
“okay here’s everything I know.” The games repeat this trope so relentlessly that they build their
own version of common sense– obviously this works, because we’ve seen it work so many
times. If it doesn’t work, it must be because the person being interrogated is particularly
strong. So here’s my question: does it work? No, seriously. Does it? I ask because I don’t know
of any information, any data, on this kind of accelerated, on-the-battlefield questioning. I
mean god, I don’t, I don’t even know– do you know how much data on torture is redacted, classified,
unavailable? Do you know how many governments are completely unwilling to talk about the details
of how they tortured, let alone if it resulted in anything? I mean there’s gotta be something here,
just might have to go back a little. Ahh okay, yes, here we go, this is actually
really good documentation. It’s from, uhh, the 15th century. It’s the Spanish Inquisition.
No, I’m not going to say the line. It may seem somewhat…absurd…to compare these
video games about conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries to the documented torture of the late
1400s. But, as spelled out in the book “Anatomy of Torture,” the inquisition represents perhaps
the best (and maybe only) example of hundreds of instances of torture being systematically
catalogued and assessed for their efficacy. Moreover, the Inquisition wasn’t just good at
documentation– it created the torturer’s dream. “the Inquisition’s target population was confined
within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute power
and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was
time. The Inquisition suffered none of the pressures of a combat setting or an
antiterrorism campaign. It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods,
and it could afford to dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners.”
In other words, this is the ideal scenario for effective torture: unlimited time,
unlimited money, unlimited political control, and zero reason to put “ethics” above effective
methods. And what were the results of this slam dunk torture campaign? Information that was slow,
fragmented, and absolutely needed to be corroborated. “Anatomy of Torture” does not
claim that torture never works– in fact, it’s rare among academic literature for focusing on
documented cases of torture that were effective. And yet even then, even in the motherfucking
Spanish Inquisition, torture never functioned as a quick and easy way to get hidden information.
“Even the Inquisition, in an extraordinary setting in which it was able to perfect
a vast torture machinery, was able, at best, to extract nuggets of corroborative
information from torture victims. Often, that information was false,
misleading, or incomplete.” As the pressure to swiftly get actionable intel
increases, torture’s efficacy plummets. Virtually all literature on interrogations concludes that
lengthy engagements are far more effective at getting quality intelligence from a prisoner,
whether through rapport building or torture techniques. In other words, the high-pressure
situations of Call of Duty present a worst-case scenario for interrogation, immensely vulnerable
to resistant subjects and/or false information. “Anatomy of Torture” couldn’t be more blunt with
this. “Torture is least effective where torture proponents advocate its use most enthusiastically:
when responses to urgent crises call for novel and comprehensive information…No torture has,
or will ever, defuse a ‘ticking bomb.’” This has played out too in the most high-profile
cases of torture in recent history; the US’s sweeping torture campaign as part of its war on
terror. At once frenzied and inexorable, CIA torture techniques in the years and decades
following 9/11 provided mountains of confessions and intel so comprehensively compromised by
torture that the truth may never be untangled. The six-thousand page torture report delivered by
the senate in 2012 concluded that CIA torture was: not an effective means of acquiring intelligence,
impeded the national security missions of other government agencies, and justified its torture
with inaccurate claims of its effectiveness, while never adequately evaluating its actual
effectiveness.” In many specific instances, FBI interrogators claimed that their non-coercive
means were completely undercut by CIA torture, which caused countless prisoners to clam up or
produce false information. That is, if they didn’t receive literal brain damage from the
torture itself, a well-documented psychological process in which trauma causes significant memory
loss and false recollections. Shortly after 9/11, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi provided information under
torture that suggested Iraq possessed WMDs. This was, if it needs to be said,
false information nevertheless gleefully leveraged by the US government to justify
their ensuing invasion. CIA handlers with firsthand knowledge of al-Libi’s torture
dispute the idea that he was intentionally lying– they say he just wanted to please his captors.
In the book “Torture and Democracy,” a book so massive Price could use it to bludgeon an enemy
captive, Darius Rejali systematically dismantles the idea that torture has ever been a reliable
way to save lives in modern conflicts. The book’s main claim though is that it has been democracies,
not dictatorships or autocracies, that have pioneered the dominant methods of torture
throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. These democracies have mainstreamed countless methods
of “clean torture,” named as such because they don’t cause physical scarring– electrocution,
for example. Waterboarding, forced standing or kneeling, sweatboxes, sleep deprivation,
deafening noises. These “clean torture” methods allow so-called “civilized” democracies to
constantly subvert human rights while keeping up the veneer, the shield, of morality.
And what’s interesting to me is how often Call of Duty does not use these methods. There are
some “clean” tortures– threatening the butcher’s family, for example. In the first Modern Warfare
2, Soap and Ghost electro-torture a guy which may be quote-unquote “clean,” though in the remake it
was changed to a blowtorch for some reason. But far more often, the torture itself is undeniably
dirty, the brutality made part of the point. When the bad guys do this, it’s because they’re sadists
who enjoy watching people suffer. But when the good guys do it, they’re given a different role.
They become a “sin eater,” a self-appointed martyr who will take on the necessary immorality of the
world in order to preserve everyone else. This is Price’s iconic line in the new Modern Warfare;
“we get dirty, and the world stays clean.” Because the series is so relentless in its
deployment of torture, so consistently gives its protagonists the superhuman ability to beat
accurate information out of an enemy in minutes, it constructs a universe where these “sin eaters”
are absolutely necessary to the continued functioning of our world. But gradually,
time after time, game after game, we forget that they’re taking on sins at all.
Remember, the ticking time bomb hypothetical is written to be so extreme because it assumes that
we’d all prefer not to torture. But at this point, 20 games and 46 torture scenes in,
Call of Duty barely bothers to even set up the stakes of its time bombs anymore. In Call of Duty:
Cold War, Mason and Adler catch Qasim, a terrorist somehow related to the Iranian
hostage crisis. Adler throws his buddy off a roof, Mason threatens to do the same, and Qasim talks,
giving you the information of another terrorist named Kadivar. But Kadivar has nothing to do with
the hostage crisis, nor do the protagonists even try to learn anything about it. He’s
just another in the endless sequence of guys to kill that lead to another guy to kill. If
there is some notion of a time bomb here, it’s abstracted to the point of meaninglessness.
In 1964, the seminal philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote “those who choose the lesser evil forget
very quickly that they chose evil.” Has Call of Duty ever grappled with the fact that its heroes,
again and again, choose evil? I don’t think it has. The only times it villainizes characters for
their torture is when the pre-determined morality of those characters already swings villainous.
And so even though the games might delight in the squeamishness their torture scenes
prompt in players, torture itself is ultimately framed as a morally neutral act. It’s something
good guys and bad guys do in equal measure, the good guys simply better at it because
their opponents are inherently lesser. Call of Duty, it must be said, is effectively
a fantasy series. Despite its aspirations of legitimacy, despite its use of real guns and
real countries, there’s little in the campaigns of any of these games that resembles real-life
military combat. The temptation, therefore, is to just shrug off the whole thing. So
there are 46 torture scenes in the Call of Duty games. You also shoot about a billion people,
get your arm ripped off by a robot, and kick a guy in zero-gravity. Who cares?
Me. I care, and not just because for months, my dreams have been filled with infinite spreadsheets
of beatings and waterboardings and electrocutions. Let me tell you about one thing that Call of Duty
nails in its depiction of torture; a phenomenon Darius Rejali refers to as “deskilling:”
“Why do fingerprinting when you’ve got a bat? It is simply easier to turn to torture
than to do the hard, time-consuming work of surveillance, interviewing,
verification, and intelligence analysis. He cites cases, in India, in Japan, in the US,
of agencies noticing that as reliance on torture grows, everything else falls by the
wayside. It “precludes the development of other investigative skills.” Far from a last resort,
the more regularly torture is used, the more its use becomes common sense, until it cements itself
as first, best, and– in Call of Duty’s case, seeming only strategy to gaining information.
“Torture,” Rejali writes, “is a shortcut that soon becomes a well-traveled road.”
There’s a sort of sadistic laziness that echoes throughout the 46 instances of torture in Call of
Duty, reverberating out of its individual campaigns to encompass the franchise as a
whole. Yes, the heroes of the games live in a fantasy land where pubescent ideas of torture
are immediately effective at getting a villainous captive to spill everything they know. They live
in this fantasy land because that is where Call of Duty’s writers have chosen to place them year
after year, war after war. Time and again we see characters brutalize their enemies in a way that
sniffs at moral grayness before re-confirming that there’s no need for true critical thought, the
good guys stay good and the bad guys stay bad. The worst thing that you can imagine is when
your rights are being violated, and when you are tortured and abused and brutalized by someone who
is regarded as someone who respects human rights, as someone who doesn't believe in torture.
So when you are tortured by someone who doesn't believe in torture, it's really, really scary…
Because you're shocked. How can this guy who believes in human rights doing this to me?
In reality, there are people who are paid to torture. But even among
them, there exists no “torture expert” who can instantly tell truth from lie or know just the
amount of pain to exert. That the Call of Duty franchise so endlessly reproduces this trope,
through cruelty or laziness or some mix of the two, speaks to its staggering lack of
imagination. The games are only able to imagine heroes whose superficial complexity stems from
their eagerness to do violence to those they hold captive. It is the same lack of imagination
that leads countries with a purported value in human rights to turn to torture again and again,
despite its consistently documented failure to result in anything except
broken men and useless information. Four years ago, a user posted an unusual
topic on Call of Duty’s r/ModernWarfare subreddit, a community of– at the time– nearly
a million people. “I need help with skipping torture scenes in the campaign” they wrote,
a topic that immediately prompted a discussion of what people should be sensitive about and
why. But over the months I’ve been working on this essay, I just keep thinking about
this one comment, sneering at the idea of a Call of Duty without torture scenes.
“...The entire point of MW’s campaign is to be a more realistic depiction of war with moments
that are meant to make you uncomfortable. Getting rid of that from MW’s campaign
would be like removing Jesus from the Bible.” Call of Duty has so thoroughly interwoven its own
legacy with the philosophy and aesthetics of torture that it may just be too late to turn
back. Is the franchise even capable of giving us a hero who opposed torture now? Or would
the acknowledgement that there is a choice in these matters retroactively cast Price, Soap,
Mason, and so many others as monsters? Men who didn’t simply “pick the lesser of two evils” but
actively chose to consistently violate human rights as a matter of principle. Torture is
in the series’ DNA now. It’s the bedrock on which the games have staked decades of claims about war
and humanity. They get dirty, and gradually we forget that we ever valued being clean.
– Look man,
Usually I like to do the thing where I’m like “there’s so much more on this topic
I haven’t talked about, go check out this exclusive video on Nebula, this amazing
streaming service I’m a part of!” I’ve got a ton of videos in that category. But I’m so tired of
talking about torture. I’m tired of reading about it and tired of making my loved ones listen to me
talk about it. So you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to pick blackberries and make a pie!
In my previous Nebula cooking videos, there’s been some tangential connection– Wanted Dead’s lasagna
recipe, Impressionist paintings of baked goods. Here, now, it’s blackberry season and I wanted to
do something fun. So come into my kitchen, in this Nebula exclusive video, to hang out and talk about
pies and video games and all sorts of things that aren’t torture. [“the color and the smell
really imply that they are ripe.” “Many times I’ve come up to you and been like “guess what
I’m doing” and you’re like “what” and I’m like “I’m playing a metal gear solid game.” “This pie
might be a total disaster.”] You can, of course, join Nebula and enjoy this cooking video and
many many other exclusives of mine, by going to standard.tv/jacobgeller, where you’ll get a full
40% of an annual subscription, a whole year for only 30 bucks. You probably already knew that.
BUT I have something new to tell you too! Nebula does gift cards now! And yes,
every other gift card might be a boring gift but hear me out: I just know you have people in your
life that you want to talk about Nebula stuff with, but they’ve stubbornly refused to sign
up. Well now they have NO EXCUSE! “Hello my dear friend, I just got you the gift of watching Jacob
Geller make a blueberry pie,” that’s what you can say to them as you present them with a YEAR of
Nebula via gift card. You get my discount on that as well, only $30 for a whole year.
And THEN they can check out, I dunno, Jessie Gender’s upcoming movie, or The Getaway,
the new Nebula Exclusive show by the Jet Lag team, or just my crazy backlog of Nebula-exclusive
videos. Honestly, I have no idea how long this video will last on YouTube– making an essay on
torture scenes is an absurd thing to do when my job is partially reliant on currying favor with
advertisers and algorithms. Fortunately, Nebula means I don’t have to limit my topics to appease
those things. By signing up, you are directly helping me make more videos like this one.
So, get yourself a subscription or get a gift card for someone else in your life– either way, the
best way to do that is to get a big ol’ discount by following the link in the description.