No Russian

In the newly released game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, there is a mission creating much disturbance in the gaming community. In essence, the level has your character acting as a double agent for the CIA but being forced to witness a terrorist massacre of hundreds of civilians in an airport so that you don't blow your cover. Now, the game does not reward you for killing anyone and it even allows you to skip the mission altogether if you wish to not engage in unnecessary violence.

However, my opinion, having played through the level myself and even killing one or two people in the level, I'm not going to take either road that this ought vilianize the developers at Infinity Ward or that there is an excuse for someone to take some twisted pleasure in killing innocents. Now playing through the campaign again, I skipped the level because I felt one time was enough. I know what happens and experiencing it again isn't something I seriously wanted to engage in.

In the end, I want to just take a step back and see what exactly was created in this gaming experience put together over one of the most impersonal genres in gaming, the FPS. In this game, your character is either shot point blank or stabbed to where the person you control visibly dies. This is also the series that had you fight a mission and then witness the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a city with you still in it. The next scene allows you to walk or crawl around until you bleed out and the level ends. These sorts of experiential media are what constitute the future of the gaming genre. At some point there will always be the games that allow you to step into the shoes of some fantasy life or individual but I believe that the games that fully immerse you into its story and characters is that which will be remembered and thought about for years to come.