Is it real or a game?

I vowed not to crack open my copy of Modern Warfare 2 until I beat Demon’s Souls, but seeing as every suka bliad (that’s Russian transliteration, peeps) podcast I listen to can’t help but smirkingly spoil parts of the single player campaign for me,  I really didn’t have a choice.  I decided to break it open and start grinding through it.

As I started playing through the first half of the game, I realized the level of reality has jumped exponentially from my days on my Atari 2600.  But is there a point where video games get too real…er?

Big SPOILER ALERT comes for after the jump.

I was in the Army.  I was a Ranger.  So within two minutes of the opening scene, when I saw the Ranger logo pop up on the screen and the game talking about the 75th Ranger Regiment, I had a little party in my pants.

Then the “game” started.

You start up the training mission in Afghanistan; not the original Modern Warfare “unnamed Middle Eastern country that looks a heck of a lot like Iraq”- straight up Afghanistan.   The training mission has you training the Afghan National Army in basic marksmanship- which I also took part in (in Iraq with the Iraqis, but same diff).  As your battalion comes under fire, the soldiers running around in authentic looking  “full-battle-rattle” (uniform), from the Camelbacks to ammo pouches to body armor.  As explosions and gunfire opens up around me, barely intelligible radio chatter batters my ears with fully realistic military jargon.

Of course, the three star general dancing around the field of battle with no armor or weapon and wearing his beret on totally brought me snickering back to reality.   But when I turned off the system to take a breather, I realized that the game was still banging around in my brain.  I couldn’t help but think of my overseas time.  The game must have had a bang-on military advisor: everything from the soldiers shooting hoops at “Firebase Phoenix” to the Stryker vehicles I used to use for cover were all pretty damn good.

And of course, the coup de grace, the “No Russian” level which Lono wrote about.  I hung back and followed Markov as his fireteam of death mowed down dozens of people in the airport in their act of terrorism to stir up the Russian public.  Gutshot people crawling across trails of blood desperately looking for safety.  A passenger fireman-carrying his injured friend is ruthlessly cut down by the unrelenting shooters.

Where in the hell are we going to be at twenty years from now as far as game realism?

Think of the leaps forward games like Super Mario Brothers made compared with the soon-to-launch New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii in 20 years (+10 points if you get the joke)?  Okay, better example:  do you remember playing Metal Gear Solid for the first time and being blown away by it’s crazy paramilitary storyline?  If you go back and play that now, it is fairly laughable; the game hasn’t held up well over time.

Laughing at Metal Gear Solid makes me wonder what we’re going to say about Modern Warfare 2 in the future.   And what will gaming look like then?  With the Wii’s dipstick heart rate monitor and all the consoles racing to include motion controls, are we scaling up to a “fully immersive experience”?   And at what point does a “fully immersive experience” start giving combat vets post-traumatic stress when Modern Warfare 8 launches, complete with pseduo-real sights and sounds of war?

Remember when we all had a good laugh at Jack Thompson when he called the Grand Theft Auto series a “murder simulator”?  Are we getting to a point where Jack Thompson will actually be able to make legitimate arguments against realistic video games?

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