I'm going to fade away.

While I did write a "semi-serious" review of Call of Duty: Black Ops a few months back, I think it's important enough to write up a second article on Treyarch anti-military and masculinity-subversing FPS.

After all, they've just pull the greatest stunt in the history of video games. They've shown well over a billion people the fact that all members of the military are actually just scared children looking for an identity of their own. I can't help but love the company for it.

As I write this, Black Ops has currently pulled in more money and sales than any entertainment product ever made. While all sorts of numbers have flown aboout for that that means in terms of profits, the long tail effect of the CoD gameplay formula and brand means we're going to be be playing a whole lot of semi-realistic first person shooters which boil down to overglorified versions of tag that let you pretend to be an "all American hero".

Pushing aside my own cynicism, Treyarch have actually proven themselves the masters of a cynical disposition and created a game that active insults their userbase as much as celebrates it.

To break it down, lets look at the ad campaign and how it ties into both the single and multiplayer modes.

Starting with a rather humorous, if controversial in every single non-white nation, ad featuring z-grade comedians, some basketball players and a bunch of "omg girlzzzz", Activision positioned this hyperviolent shooter as a game for the whole family with their ad department championing the slogan "a solider in all of us" as a shadowed special ops trooper, looking slightly haggard, gazes back at us.

If there's one thing I've learned form reading about video game developers and interacting with them, it's that they do not understand complex narratives or media messages beyond whatever sci-fi or fantasy pulp they read in the supermarket last weekend.

I have no doubt Treyarch themselves signed off on the campaign and simply issued it as a "hell yeah shit blows up lets look manly" kind of advertisement, but I want to assume they actually had a subtle sense of subterfuge at work here.
See, Black Ops single player plot- which I doubt the majority of players ever thought about beyond 5 seconds after the closing credits- involves an American GI becoming a sleeper Russian agent after a brainwashing from an overly macho ex-USSR commander.

It isn't much of a leap to note the "solider inside" of our protagonist is actually a hyperviolent that secondary characters spend much of the game attempting to stop.
Of course, much like the USA's own wartime fantasies, the nuclear holocaust our hero unleashes through his own stupidity and hubris is contained through his grit, pluck and moxie.

A load of horse shit, yes, but a darker plotline than any CoD game has had the gall to toy with before.

In the past, Call of Duty always created storylines with clear good guys and bad guys. Even CoD4 with its celebrated "deep" moment where a US platoon dies in a nuclear blast still made sure to hammer home it wasn't the dumb meatheaded Marines who sealed his fade but a wily Arab complete with dark sunglasses and a golden pistol.

In CoD7, however, our hero brings the worlds problems upon himself rather than the world bringing them to him. A notion that flies in the very face of American preconceptions.

At any rate, how does this connection connection of the ad campaign relate to the "celebrate" multiplayer feature? Through the use of the Rolling Stone's generation ending "Gimmie Shelter" charttopper.

Gimmie Shelter came out in 1969, the year the hippie and peacenik movement breathed its last dying gasps. For five years follow its release, the Vietnam war dragged on with seemingly no end before the Americans cravenly pulled out to almost no fan-fare.
The end of the war, until the sterilization of war narratives reemerged in our nations dark years under Regan, signified the end of the "hero" solider narrative.
Until Regan, our soldiers were viewed in the media and public perception as tragic victims or aggressors. Though the rise of post-modern war narratives, such as "The Things They Carried", would arrive almost a decade later bearing with them a "take no sides" approach to the conflict or its history, the American understanding of its warrior caste crumbled before its very eyes. We did, after all, just send our boys and their schoolyard friends into the killing fields with no real goal or purpose as that "horrible horrible" Europe did almost 50 years prior.

Gimmie Shelter, then, became an anthem for a dying breed of innocence on both sides of the conflict. The hippies rallied around it as their "swan song" while the GIs heard it as a final warning to their previous identities.

CoD7 multiplayer becomes a post-modern narrative akin to "The Things They Carried" through its use anachronistic weapons and factions.

Battles, though some based in vaugely historical contexts, come off as fever dreams you'd expect the drunk fellow at the VFW to tell you after a few whiskeys.
Yes, sarge, I believe that you and private Jimmy rigged up his toy RC car with a bomb to stop those damn Kong. Yes, of course.
With its fictional levels and anachronistic weapons drawn from the entire spectrum of the Cold War, CoD7 is a last testament to the American soldier boy myth we all desperately want to buy into.

The game's advertising and presentation reflect a cold reality for men, where their time as domineering warriors quietly comes to an end while simultaneously embracing the rebirth of the woman as a domineering masculine force.

By placing this gender identity struggle within the context of America's greatest defeats, Treyarch has projected the ultimate escapist fantasy for the US of A. A place where we never really won but never really lost and always, always, knew who we were and what we had to do.

It's just a shame Treyarch, like most devs, are too childlike to realize it.