Earlier games in the COD series were set in WWII, but Modern Warfare’s genius was to give gamers a visceral look into modern anti-insurgency techniques and high-tech black ops.
This installment of the long-running series featured a sophisticated, action-movie-like campaign and high-fidelity graphics. In 2007, when I was a sophomore in college, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released on all major platforms. It wasn’t like other games accurately reflected my reality or included Muslim characters I could relate to. While there were plenty of racist caricatures in video games in the ‘90s, the Muslim terrorist trope began to increasingly assume central roles in a variety of shooting games. When I grew tired of seeing “how the other side saw us” (as my mother put it), I’d run to the basement and boot up my PlayStation. In the coming years, I still watched the news with my family. My classmates confidently sauntered up to me and asked if I knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding or if I was planning on blowing myself up. The effect of this on my life was almost immediate friends and strangers alike began to sample new slurs, savoring the taste of “terrorist” and “towelhead” in their mouths. The people we were fighting looked like people in my family: They shared our names and our religion. It had a name, for one - the War on Terror - which implied we were fighting an entity, rather than a country. It wasn’t actually our first one, of course - there had been the bombs in Bosnia, the Black Hawks in Somalia, the sanctions against Iran and Iraq - but the campaign in Afghanistan felt different to me. I was too young to really understand too much about why we cared what happened to people halfway around the world - people who were not even Pakistani like us - but I understood that somehow, they were our people too.Īnd so I remember very clearly when the first war came. What about the bodies, Peter? she’d ask him. When he flashed occasional images of explosions in the West Bank or Bosnia, Ammi found it lacking. We’d watch Nightly News every evening, hoping that Peter Jennings might finally use his precious half hour to highlight some crisis or suffering in the Muslim world. My parents had a habit of talking to the TV screen.
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