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Modern Warfare 2: Examining the Airport Level

• By Tae Kim
• November 11, 2009 11:21 AM PST
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We take a closer look at Infinity Ward's now infamous airport level to try and make sense of the carnage and the chaos.

By now, most gamers have heard about or seen the grainy leaked footage of Modern Warfare 2's airport level and read the subsequent media coverage. This is a shame, because as a result they no doubt have an assortment of preconceived notions and expectations. I'm actually in a very small group of people who experienced this whole scene with a clean slate when I was invited to Infinity Ward's offices for a two-day review session (you can read my review of MW2 here) about a week before the footage leaked; in short, I experienced the level the way it was meant to be experienced.

It's interesting to be in that position and watch the ensuing melodrama. What's most unfortunate about the whole thing is that much of the commentary is a response to something taken completely out of context: the brutal carnage makes sense within the narrative of the game but when it's stripped out and presented in a vacuum, the only thing you can take away from it is "terrorists kill people in an airport." What's missing is the culprit's twisted rationale behind it, something Activision tried very hard to reiterate in their prepared statements, and the ramifications that it has on the game's plot--the plan to leave behind a dead American spy as the lone culprit of a massacre that involves Russian citizens is as evil as it is deviously inspired and helps frame the "American invasion" subplot that follows. But the leak's worst offense is that it's muddied the real conversation that should be taking place: what is the "point" of the level and is it ultimately successful?

The answer is far more complicated than the brutal footage would lead anyone to believe. It's a bold narrative maneuver, a calculated gamble done for the sake of not only shocking those who witness it firsthand but also to raise the stakes of the subsequent missions. It's one that Infinity Ward didn't have to take and you could easily argue that they shouldn't have taken it at all--Modern Warfare 2 is, with apologies to Assassin's Creed II, the highest profile release of the upcoming holiday season and putting in something this controversial is like giving your worst enemy a loaded handgun and your home address; as I write this, there are already talks of having it banned in Australia, a knee jerk reaction borne, as these things almost always are, out of ignorance and hysteria. But Infinity Ward took the risk anyway and you have to extend kudos to them for having the temerity to try something that bold.

Click here for more screens of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

But you also have to stop short with your praise because the level doesn't go far enough, not in terms of brutality or violence but in terms of storytelling: it's a progressive step forward but it could have been a great leap with just a few minor tweaks. As my murderous cohorts advanced through the airport, casually spraying bullets the way we might throw away a gum wrapper on the street, I brought up the rear as a passive observer. I had a gun in my hands but I had been so completely and utterly shaken from my tree by the initial shock of it all that I didn't even think to pull the trigger.

Then I began to wonder whether or not I should become an active participant; I was, after all, an undercover agent--would it look suspicious to the others if I didn't take part? Would my commitment to the "cause" come into question? Would that blow my cover and compromise my mission? That ultimately brought me around to the most important question: what was worth more, the actual lives of several hundred innocents or the potential lives of several billion?

I'm guessing that was Infinity Ward's intent all along and it's fairly effective--at first. I decided to stick to my morals and not fire a single-shot in the airport itself but once we got outside and the airport SWAT team arrived, I decided on another ploy: I would shoot but I would purposefully miss. This would allow me to maintain cover without spilling any blood. Unfortunately, I hit a design flaw that wouldn't let me stick to this strategy: at a certain point, it became painfully obvious that the mission couldn't proceed until we had cleared the area of enemies, something the AI couldn't seem to handle on its own. After waiting behind cover, I finally broke down and cleared the area myself, simply to move things along; it was a disappointing break of the scene's tension to say the least.

I later confirmed with my Activision contact that you could indeed play through the entire level without once firing your gun, but that raised yet another red flag: without any consequences, why bother even challenging the player's morals? The lack of pressure to act decisively one way or the other ultimately renders the tension meaningless; it would have been even more interesting if, at a critical moment, one of the terrorists had turned in my direction and gestured with his head towards a cornered civilian, as if to say, "You kill this one."

It's a cliched device used by countless movies and TV shows but it, or some other alternative, would have worked to literally put me in a life-and-death situation: do I pull the trigger or do I refuse? However, there is no moment of reckoning: the members of the terrorist cell you've infiltrated barely even look at you during the course of the rampage. The level slowly progresses and comes to climactic and logical conclusion but there was so much potential for more missions of this type later on that it's a shame it wasn't fully mined for all its worth. The tension of having to walk the tightrope between staying true to your mission versus your own morality was there but it wasn't touched upon in the level itself, nor was it carried through to the rest of the game.

The airport level still stuck with me long after my time with Modern Warfare 2 had ended and it affected me in ways that few video games have before and yet, I can't help but wonder "what could have been." Infinity Ward opened up a Pandora's Box of possibilities but just as the wonders trapped inside were about to leap out, they slammed the lid shut. And yet, it remains a fascinating piece of video game narrative, one that will hopefully still reverberate with the community long after the controversy it sparked has died down. I can only hope that game designers will pick up the loose threads that it created and find a way to tie them all together into something that builds upon Infinity Ward's brazen shot across our collective bows.
--Tae K. Kim (Follow him on Twitter here)

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