[Disclaimer: I am boycotting Activision as a company, and so was never going to buy Modern Warfare 2. I played through and completed the first title, and enjoyed it, but was not as impressed as most were.]

. Infinity Ward is a good developer. They make well-paced war time shooters that have cool sequences marred by logical flaws. For this reason, I consider any faith in Modern Warfare 2 to be entirely unfounded.

There are two sequences that really stuck out to me in Modern Warfare. The opening sequence, where you are some guy who is being taken to die. I feel like it was a president or something, but I don't actually remember. You go through this entire sequence straight up until the gun is pointed at your head and fired. It would be a terrifying sequence if not for one thing: you are a floating camera.

Infinity Ward completely failed to make this sequence meaningful to me because you never actually see the body of your character, because there isn't one. During a good portion of this sequence, you are in a cab. You can look around, but there is nothing below you except for a gorgeously rendered leather seat. You are a floating camera in the middle of a video game, and it does not let you forget that. If your character had been given a body, this sequence could have potentially elicited some emotion. As it is, there is no connection because there is no actual character. This bullet is going into a CAMERA! Maybe it's an expensive camera, and some photographer somewhere gasped in horror, but there was no element of human danger because there was no element of the human.

Then there is the infamous nuke scene. Had I not known this sequence was coming, or what exactly I had to do in the sequence (wait and die), this would have been much more powerful than it was. Because I did know, the sequence was little more than an irritating pause in an otherwise well-paced game. Why did it, too, fail to elicit a response?

Again: there is no body.

Visually, the sequence is striking, and if you have not played the game you can watch it here. However, if you watch it, the movement of the character is absolutely unnatural. It looks like a camera is on a conveyor belt, or perhaps a snake or a slug is sliding up. The problem is that the character has no arms.

If someone were to be crawling out of a wrecked helicopter, they would be dragging themselves up by their arms. There are no arms. Add to this the fact that the movement is constant, unlike someone who is actually hurt (who would reach out, drag, pause while they reached again, drag, etc.), and the sequence is just generally ineffective at actually making the player believe this is happening to a PERSON instead of, again, a remote controlled camera. I will give IW credit in that the camera does "limp" once standing up, but it is still a camera. There is no horrifyingly wrecked body to look down upon. There is nothing there.

Maybe if I had not known the scene was coming I wouldn't have spent the entire time thinking of how horribly it failed to convey any meaningful emotion, but because I knew I just had to move around slowly for a minute or two and then die, I spent the entire time just looking at the scene. When you are just looking at something, the flaws become very apparent very quickly.

IW's brand of bodiless protagonists ruins the ability for the sequences to bring about emotion in the way they want it to. Jack from Bioshock may have no legs, but there are still always at least arms there to make you believe you are there, and looking down is not something gamers frequently are required to do. Gordon Freeman is a kind of anomaly, because you never actually care about Gordon, who is again little more than a floating camera, but you care about the other characters, and their realism paradoxically helps you to feel like you are the character of Gordon, and care about him.

Infinity Ward fails where Valve and 2K Boston succeeded. Though all three companies turn their characters into cameras with guns, two of them are still able to convince you that you are that character. The way Infinity Ward creates its sequences requires there to be a body to work. If you are a in a cab and there are no legs beneath your "head," it completely rips you out of the experience. If you are crawling up out of a helicopter, but you have no arms to crawl with, it completely rips you out of the experience.

The issue is with consistency. If everyone around is has arms, legs, bodies, etc., but you are the Invisible Man, and it is made painfully obvious that you are the Invisible Man, where is the sense of (dare I say it? I dare) immersion? It isn't there. It can't be there, because you are being punched in the face with the fact that you are not really in the game world, you are merely watching it. This is fine in the third person, but certainly not in the first person.

If Infinity Ward can fail to give these two sequences, which really should be some of the most powerful in gaming history, the consistency and realism that they deserve, why should I or anyone else assume that IW will make the terrorist sequence function the way it should?

In the words of some Activision spokesperson: “The scene establishes the depth of evil and the cold bloodedness of a rogue Russian villain and his unit. By establishing that evil, it adds to the urgency of the player’s mission to stop them.”

This statement is hampered immensely by the fact that you are not actually a Russian terrorist, but an undercover CIA operative. That entirely changes the context of it. The question will be justification.

If you are going to be one of those people killing civilians (yes, you only need to kill security guards, but they are still innocents), what makes you any better than they are? It not only establishes the evil of the Russians, but of your own character. Now, this could be handled in a very interesting way, but I do not expect that it will be. If the game explores the consequences of such actions it could be truly thought-provoking, but that kind of depth would absolutely kill the pacing of a war-time shooter. If the CIA character is instead, as I expect, considered some kind of hero by the end of the game, having made up for all of his evil by killing the head of the group or whatever, then the game has failed to be meaningful in the conversation of good vs. evil, because it justified a massacre.

If the game ends with him receiving a dishonorable discharge, and the final sequence is the character committing suicide, where you have to pull the final trigger, or does anything that truly acknowledges that the player is no better than the terrorists, I will end my boycott and buy this game.

There is an issue with the sequence itself, though, and it goes back to breaking the barrier between gamer and game, by giving you the option to play the level or not.

By prompting the player, "Hey... umm... you know, you might not actually want to play this sequence, okay?" IW once again makes sure the player is aware that this is a game and nothing more.

What is even worse, is that the fact that the sequence can be skipped implies that nothing more than the existence of the event is actually important to the story. If something truly major were to happen during this sequence, skipping it would completely mess with the following timeline. That means that the sequence exists basically to give the player cannon-fodder. There will be no major events taking place other than the massacre itself.

This represents, in my mind, a missed opportunity. Now, I may be wrong, and the sequence may really strike some thematic and narrative chords that will be lost on all of those who skip it... but I watched it, and I really don't think it will reach the thematic sort of importance it needs to in order to really be justified as part of the game.

Destructoid's own Anthrony Burch wrote a post about how Modern Warfare missed the boat with regards to its story, and that entire point can be applied here.

If the sequence was actually relevant to any current conflict. If something like this had happened recently, or if it could be extrapolated to recent events, that would be something truly awe-inspiring. Instead, they are going for something 100% fictional, and I'm not sure that's the right decision, because a lot more effort is needed to justify a false conflict than a real one.

To make a film comparison, last year's Milk was a good movie, but was made immensely more effective by the fact that it actually happened, and was interspersed with real footage.

If this sequence was of something that was currently happening and relevant, Infinity Ward would be able to tug at heartstrings by the virtue of the sequence itself. Instead, they have to work to make people feel things at this sequence, and, quite frankly, I am not expecting much.

If you are expecting some sort of narrative miracle, where this sequence vaults up this kind of game and scene into the spotlight (like a well-handled sequence could), you are very likely to be disappointed.

I would love to be wrong, and a lot of this is speculation, but I doubt this sequence will be what it could, and should, be. I also expect that, if anyone actually reads this post, I will get a hell of a lot of flak for it. I probably ruffled more than a few feathers by essentially calling IW a bunch of failures