Remembering Baghdad: Videogames and the War on Terror

The early decades of the twenty-first century can be somewhat tricky to define, ideologically and historically. In the Anglosphere it is largely remembered for the triumph of the Third Way – the victories of the Democrats and New Labour cementing neoliberal capitalism as the ideology of ‘the West’ during what Fukuyama called ‘the end of history’. Meanwhile, the rest of the world reckoned with the material consequences of that political reality. Video games had developed rapidly as an industry throughout the 1990s, going from small studios to companies with hundreds of employees, and by the turn of the century they had become a dominant form of entertainment.

Video games in the early 2000s were a dynamic and emergent medium, with several genres competing for dominance. One of the prominent genres to emerge, especially on home consoles following the success of Bungie’s Halo (2001), was the First Person Shooter (FPS) Genre. This post will attempt to examine the ways that video games that portray the War on Terror from a non-Arab perspective – either directly or through allegory – and how those portrayals reflect public perceptions and memories of such a recent series of conflicts. This is a large genre, and much could be written through analysis of it. As such, this article will largely focus on two contrasting examples of depictions of ‘modern warfare’: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) and the Metal Gear Solid (1998-2018) series.

The War in Definitely-not-Iraq

21st Century warfare (which is what is meant in this article by ‘modern warfare’) was largely undepicted in popular video games in the early 2000s, excepting ‘tactical shooters’ which appealed to a niche market such as the Rainbow Six (1998-) series. Shooters generally favoured the comfortable Second World War setting, which provided relative safety from controversy and – as Eugen Pfister notes – also worked as something of a ‘brand’, working ‘similarly to franchises like the DC Comics universe or Star Wars but without any copyright fees.’¹

The controversy and protest surrounding the War on Terror – as well as a general disdain for displays of jingoistic nationalism – may have dissuaded developers from making games set in contemporary times. With the illegal invasion of Iraq generating the largest global protests since the Vietnam War – itself a topic many developers shy away from – it is somewhat understandable why this was the case for some time.² By the mid-2000s, however, the anti-war movement had largely died off – with Bush winning the US Presidency again in 2004 in a campaign largely focused on his handling of the War on Terror, and Blair winning a third general election for Labour in 2005. The first notable example of a video game taking on the War on Terror finding popular success in Western markets came with the release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007.

While Modern Warfare does not attempt to directly portray the US-led invasion of Iraq, it’s impossible to ignore the obvious visual and narrative similarities. It is also important to address the relation that these fictional conflicts have to the conflicts of the real world. While Modern Warfare does not explicitly claim real-world truth in its narrative, its marketing (as is common throughout the military-shooter genre) stressed the authenticity and ‘realism’ of the game, and contemporary articles noting the ‘realism and immediacy’ of the setting.³ It is worth understanding how the language used outside of the text influences readings of the text for those who played it. Modern Warfare did not have to call the Middle Eastern nation (curiously the only unnamed party in the game, alongside Britain, the US and Russia) Iraq for players to recognise it as an allegory for Iraq. Through understanding this allegory, it is possible to take away messages that Modern Warfare contains within its text – implicitly or not – about the Iraq War and the War on Terror.

Modern Warfare’s campaign is largely divided into two parts. The first is an off-the-books campaign against a Russian Ultranationalist cell, which read at the time of release as Modern Warfare reframing Cold War narrative tropes in a post-Soviet world. The second involves a very public invasion of an unnamed Middle Eastern nation following an armed coup d’état. Call of Duty here utilises the imagery of ‘modern warfare’ – specifically the imagery of the 2003 invasion of Iraq – to tell an original story that nonetheless contains an embedded perspective of the War on Terror.

Modern Warfare displays a fictionalised Iraq where the leader both has and uses weapons of mass destruction. There is no room in Modern Warfare for an understanding of why the forces you are fighting in the Middle East may be fighting you – even though it is unambiguously a US invasion. The streets of ‘fictional Middle Eastern nation’ are devoid of civilians. Modern Warfare displays SAS soldiers utilising torture and state-sanctioned assassinations and then it justifies their actions by displaying the results of this torture being both victory from a gameplay sense which satisfies the player, and civilian lives being saved from a nuclear weapons launch. The invasion in Modern Warfare is in direct response to the ‘unnamed Middle Eastern nation’ possessing weapons of mass destruction – the same justification used for the Iraq war.

However, in this digital not-Iraq, these weapons undeniably exist even before the invasion, unlike their real-world equivalent. Modern Warfare therefore reinforces the positions taken by Western powers prior to the invasion of Iraq and gives them a post-facto justification, despite there being no firm basis for these claims. In a 2007 review for Destructoid, Anthony Burch wrote that the game ‘gives gamers a virtual representation of what George W. Bush imagines the real war in Iraq to be: the baddies are really bad, the good guys are really good, and the brown people always have weapons of mass destruction.’⁴ In this way, Modern Warfare provides a visualisation of the imagined Iraq in the minds of those who led and supported the West into this illegal invasion. The primary messages embedded in Modern Warfare are that modern warfare itself is dirty, and unsavoury actions must be undertaken by a small group of ‘operators’ who are willing to do so, but it is for the greater good. This itself is a particularly dangerous and egregious message when recently evidence has been uncovered by the BBC that an SAS unit murdered 54 people in one six-month tour in Afghanistan – including nine people ‘in their beds’ – and that investigation of this was shut down by the UK Government.⁵

Modern Warfare also features enemy combatants that are primarily coded as Islamic terrorists. Modern Warfare falls averse of the trope of many games depicting ‘modern warfare – creating a depiction of Muslims as ‘the US Empire’s enemy other and as a threat to American and Western security.’⁶ In the very first mission of the game (outside of the tutorial), players board a Russian cargo ship that is smuggling weapons of mass destruction. When these weapons are found, they are found in a box marked in Arabic and beneath a flag bearing a star and two crossed swords.

Modern Warfare, like most other Call of Duty titles, bombards the player with quotes upon death, many being anti-war. The quotes include Larry Reeves telling the player that ‘Anyone, who truly wants to go to war, has truly never been there before!’, and the game informing the player that the cost of a single Javelin Missile is (or rather, was in 2007), $80,000 – possibly coming shortly after the player heroically expends five to ten of those missiles to complete a mission. Chapman notes that it is impossible to engage with video games as a medium without understanding that the gameplay itself is a fundamental part of the text.⁷ No matter what may be written in the slight pauses between gameplay, the gameplay of Call of Duty empowers players within these warzones. It is fast, snappy, responsive, and paced almost perfectly so that players never get bored, but never get overwhelmed. In playing the campaign it is almost impossible to not feel both powerful, and simultaneously a part of a well-oiled and professional military force.

In understanding these embedded messages, it is important to address the material conditions that underpin the creation of video games, and their reception. Many of these games are developed in conditions where they are part of the military-entertainment complex, which Lenoir and Lowood describe as a Cold War military-industrial complex that ‘simply reorganised itself. In fact, it is more efficiently organised than ever before.’⁸ The involvement of the US military in the entertainment industry dates to the military collaborating with flight simulators for their training regimen, and extends to the 2002 release of America’s Army, which released as a recruiting tool for the US Army to extend their target demographic to young gamers – including a link to a recruitment website on its main menu. America’s Army goes a step further than most games in its framing of the War on Terror, where all players play as members of the US Army and are bound by rules of engagement to only engage the enemy ‘legally’. Players in America’s Army are also unable to play as anyone other than the US Army. No matter which team a player is on, they are hard coded by the game to always perceive themselves as the US Army and the opposing team as insurgents.

Virtual Battlespace in The War Economy

The link between video games’ portrayals of the War on Terror and the military-entertainment complex is perhaps at its most apparent with Bohemia Interactive. Their 2010 release Arma II: Operation Arrowhead has players partake in an anti-insurgency campaign in fictional Takistan (clearly modelled on the war in Afghanistan). Alongside this, Bohemia Interactive used the same game engine to develop Virtual Battlespace 2 – a training program utilised by the British military. The co-operation between the military-entertainment complex and big-budget video games incentivizes developers and writers to portray the militaries that they work with (almost exclusively Western military forces) in a positive light – whether that is through positively portraying individual soldiers who become representative of the uniform they wear, or through depictions of the actions of the military as heroic. It is perhaps understandable then that most mainstream games reinforce a Western, pro-military and occasionally jingoistic view on the war. Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter posit that ‘video games are a paradigmatic media of Empire – planetary, militarized hypercapitalism – and of some of the forces presently challenging it.’⁹

Popular video games as an industry are intertwined with Western capitalism and its dominance over popular culture. The games industry frequently relies on assistance from both the military, and private companies that have an interest in warfare for their own profit. Military advisors are present during development which allows for ‘accurate’ – a buzzword publishers and players are both typically keen on – military tactics and equipment. Modern Warfare developers attended an ‘educational’ field trip to a US Marine Corps base in Twenty Nine Palms, California during the development of Modern Warfare. Arms manufacturers allow games to use models of their weaponry as advertisement.¹⁰ Popular games are therefore confined to reasserting these hegemonic views of the various wars conducted by the West in the twenty-first century. Hammar and Woodcock explain this perfectly: ‘while the individuals within a studio may hold different views on war, the collective project is often bound by structural requirements and is thus beyond the control of workers within the overall labour process.’¹¹

A discussion of Metal Gear Solid that doesn’t feature the mechs that go ‘moo’.

This is by no means to suggest that it is inevitable that video games with large-scale productions reinforce Western global hegemony. A good point of comparison for the Call of Duty series is the Metal Gear series. Metal Gear offers something of a counterpoint to Call of Duty in several ways. Firstly, it is a Japanese-developed series, largely guided by the vision of its oft-dubbed ‘auteur’ creator Hideo Kojima. Like Modern Warfare, Metal Gear addresses the War on Terror through allegory – although Kojima is a writer not particularly known for his subtlety.

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008) was a flagship title for the PlayStation 3 and found time to insert both a heavy critique of the military industrial complex and Western nations reliance on private military companies in the War on Terror. The game introduced players into a nameless Middle Eastern warzone – much like Modern Warfare. The conflict is between a Middle Eastern militia, wielding AK platform weaponry and wearing keffiyeh and robes, and a technologically superior, Western-coded private militia, wielding M4 platform weapons and speaking with American accents. Where Metal Gear Solid differentiates itself is through both its sympathetic portrayal of the militia, and the fact that Snake – the player character – can befriend and aid the militia through the gameplay.

There is a sympathetic undertone to ‘enemy’ combatants throughout the Metal Gear Solid series, as well as an accompanying cast of non-combatants to remind players that these conflicts do not feature clear-cut frontlines devoid of civilians. The plot of Metal Gear Solid 4 revolves around a destructive ‘war economy’ – what the game essentially calls the military industrial complex – that encourages conflicts around the globe as a means for making profit. There are also differences with the ludology of the games that further help frame them as anti-war. Firstly, they are stealth games. Players are incentivised to stay hidden, and not to kill. Aside from the first game in the series, it is entirely possible to play through every other Metal Gear Solid entry without directly killing an enemy combatant. Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes – although set in the 1970s – is set in Guantanamo Bay and features prisoners being abused by the US military garbed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods – a clear visual reminder to players of Guantanamo Bay’s use since the War on Terror began. Metal Gear Solid V fills itself with visuals which evoke the War on Terror, from these jumpsuits to the deliberate posing of characters being tortured by the US military to an infamous photo of US prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

In the second release of the Metal Gear Solid V duology,¹² The Phantom Pain, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan features less as a direct criticism of that specific conflict – although that is certainly present – and more as a criticism of major powers intervening in wars around the world. The choice of Afghanistan is one Kojima must have known players would enter with the more current Western occupation of Afghanistan in their minds, and the game itself mentions Operation Cyclone – the CIA funding and arming of Mujahideen groups in Afghanistan. The operation favoured arming Islamic extremist elements of the Mujahideen, including groups led by Osama Bin Laden and the Hezb-i Islami Khalis or Harakat-i Inqilab-e Islami groups who would, following Soviet withdrawal, go on to make up much of the membership of the Taliban. Including Afghanistan in this way allows The Phantom Pain to include commentaries on the cyclical and continual nature of war, especially war that is incentivised by a profit motive.

Metal Gear Solid offers an alternative to the Western-centric viewpoint of the majority of modern military shooters, although it is important to note that Japan still very much sits within the sphere of Western global hegemony. The context of this being a Japanese series cannot be understated – Kojima is passionately anti-war and these games serve as something of an argument against the re-militarisation of Japan. Metal Gear Solid 4 began development following the deployment of 9,600 soldiers of the Japanese Self Defense Force to Iraq in 2004. The games also muse over the cyclical and continual nature of warfare. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is one of the primary settings of The Phantom Pain, yet is used by Kojima not necessarily as a criticism of that specific conflict (although that is present) but more as a criticism of military interventionism in colonialised nations across the world. Where Call of Duty presents explosive but ultimately sanitized visions of allegorical conflicts, the Metal Gear Solid series offers aesthetically quiet, but thematically harsher views of twentieth and twenty-first century wars.

Conclusion

These depictions of the War on Terror from a Western-perspective demonstrate what Šisler pointed out, that depictions of the Middle East in these games present it ‘in a contemporary and decidedly conflictual framework, schematizing Arabs and Muslims as enemies’.¹³ Even where these depictions lean if not sympathetic, then at least critical of the West, as in the Metal Gear Solid series, they typify the Middle East as a conflict zone and fail to capture the diversity of human life and experience within the region. While the War on Terror and ‘modern warfare’ as a whole fell out of favour within popular video games in the early 2010s, the setting appears to be making a return lately – with Activision-Blizzard rebooting the Modern Warfare series and courting controversy through replicating scenarios such as the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack or the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani. The first reboot includes reference to the Highway of Death – an infamous US war crime from the Gulf War – but reframes it as being perpetuated by Russian forces.¹⁴

In 2023, controversial shooter Six Days in Fallujah was released in Early Access, purporting to be a ‘highly realistic first-person tactical shooter’ which ‘drops you and your team into real-world scenarios’.¹⁵ The developers of the game have simultaneously claimed they are ‘not trying to make a political statement’,¹⁶ and released a game set during an illegal war, and in a battle within which an OHCHR stated ‘it is almost impossible to list all the crimes that the American forces had committed in Fallujah’. ¹⁷

Video games are a medium that enables players to engage directly with the text in a way that is unprecedented. As such, the messages they portray have the potential to be powerful and potent. While indie projects such as Path Out – developed by a Syrian refugee – do provide an important contrast, the major games portraying this part of history have a very specific cultural memory informing them. In turn, this viewpoint creates a narrative that can inform collective memories of the War on Terror in the West. It is important for us as historians to recognise video games as having a cultural importance that is worth analysing, and understanding how these games can both reinforce the militaristic imperialism of Western nations but can also challenge it. While the War on Terror’s direct portrayal in video games is somewhat limited, its portrayal continues, and so do the narratives they craft.

Rob King is a political researcher and History MA Graduate from Cardiff University. Their research interests are primarily in the ways histories are interpreted and portrayed through popular culture and how this informs contemporary political beliefs and collective memories. Their MA thesis at Cardiff University explored depictions of fascism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in popular video games.

1. Eugen Pfister, ‘”Man Spielt Nicht Mit Hakenkreuzen!”: Imaginations of the Holocaust and Crimes Against Humanity During World War II in Digital Games’ in Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian, ed. by Alexander von Lünen, Katherine J. Lewis, Benjamin Litherland and Pat Cullum (London: Routledge, 2019), p.272. ↩︎
2. BBC News, ‘Anti-war rally makes its mark’, February 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2767761.stm ↩︎
3. Hillary Goldstein, ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Review’, IGN, 6 November 2007, https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/11/06/call-of-duty-4-modern-warfare-review ↩︎
4. Anthony Burch, ‘Narrative Brilliance and Social Irrelevance in Call of Duty 4’, Destructoid, 3 December 2007, https://www.destructoid.com/narrative-brilliance-and-social-irrelevance-in-call-of-duty-4/ ↩︎
5. BBC News, ‘SAS unit repeatedly killed Afghan detainees, BBC finds’, July 2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62083196; BBC News, ‘Afghanistan: UK special forces “killed 9 people in their beds’’’, October 2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67054702 ↩︎
6. Tanner Mirrlees and Taha Ibaid, ‘The Virtual Killing of Muslims: Digital War Games, Islamophobia, and the Global War on Terror’, Islamophobia Studies Journal, 6:1 (Spring 2021), pp.33-51, p.45. ↩︎
7. Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History (Routledge, 2016) ↩︎
8. Timothy Lenoir and Henry Lowood, ‘Theatres of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex’ in Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte and Jan Lazardzig, eds., Volume 1 Collection – Laboratory – Theatre (De Gruyter, 2005), pp.427-456. ↩︎
9. Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p.xv. ↩︎
10. Matthew Thomas Payne, ‘Marketing Military Realism in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’, Games and Culture, 7:4 (2012). ↩︎
11. Emil Lundedal Hammar and Jamie Woodcock, ‘The Political Economy of Wargames: The Production of History and Memory in Military Video Games’ in Phillip Hammond and Holger Pötzsch, eds., War Games: Memory, Militarism and the Subject of Play (Bloomsbury, 2020), p.54. ↩︎
12. Metal Gear Solid V was released as two separate products, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (a smaller game set in Guantanamo Bay Naval Base) and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (a larger game set in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border region). Collectively they are here referred to as simply Metal Gear Solid V. ↩︎
13. Vít Šisler, ‘Digital Arabs: Representation in video games’, Games and Culture, 11:2 (2008), p.214. ↩︎
14. ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Highway of Death Controversy, explained’, Polygon, 30 October 2019, https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/30/20938550/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-highway-of-death-controversy ↩︎
15. Steam store page for Six Days in Fallujah, https://store.steampowered.com/app/1548850/Six_Days_in_Fallujah/ ↩︎
16. James Troughton, ‘Six Days in Fallujah Loading Screens Tell You How Sad War Crimes Are’, The Gamer, 23 June 2023, < https://www.thegamer.com/six-days-in-fallujah-early-access-loading-screens/ ↩︎
17. OHCHR, Human Rights Violations of the American troops in Fallujah: Report to the Ninth Session of the Universal Periodic Review – The United Nations Human Rights Council USA (Geneva, 2010), p.1. ↩︎