The Girl With a Sensitive Heart

[Game People]

The Girl With a Sensitive Heart

There lies a surprisingly emotional experience underneath all of the mindless violence in Call of Duty.

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[Phsx2]

It's funny as before I read this article I hadn't given this much thought, but, you're right COD's storyline is emotive and engaging. Another game that NEEDS to be mentioned is Battlefield Bad Company 2; it may take itself less seriously, but the sounds in it make you duck when shells and flak are ripping the terrain apart all around you, Also I think the storyline in BFBC2 is more engaging than COD's.

Just my 2 penneth

 

[Morty815]

You guys realise that the wars depicted in modern warfare 1 and 2 are nothing like the wars going on in iraq and afghanistan right now? many soldiers never see battle, including myself

 

[bjj hero]

You guys realise that the wars depicted in modern warfare 1 and 2 are nothing like the wars going on in iraq and afghanistan right now? many soldiers never see battle, including myself

Heres hoping no one sees the nuke from COD4. It left me speachless the first time I saw that.

 

[Woodsey]

With the MW games, they've sort of missed out on that though - yeah, the end to 4 is sad, but the first 2 had a real heart to them.

There was an article on Eurogamer a few months back that summed the series up by saying that, although MW2 is the best-selling game of all time, the series had the potential to be something greater.

 

[tzimize]

You guys realise that the wars depicted in modern warfare 1 and 2 are nothing like the wars going on in iraq and afghanistan right now? many soldiers never see battle, including myself

Heres hoping no one sees the nuke from COD4. It left me speachless the first time I saw that.

Yeah...that was mindblowing. I've felt this way about games for a long while though and it just strengthens my opinion about games not being bad, people are.

When you play a game like CoD you can walk away with an experience and thoughts about how it must have been for those poor souls (germans and americans/brits/whatever). It can give you more empathy, it can make you more opposed to war and violence.

Others will only be "inspired" by the violence. Maybe they carry too much hatred with them...and some might be inspired to inflict violence themselves. But this is not the games fault...the game offers an experience, its our past experiences and personality that decides what we take away from it.

 

[MasterSplinter]

Yeah, but the thing is most shooters o violent games go for the same emotions, tension, fear, sense of danger.
The reason most reviewers are hard on games like these is because it's been done so many times over that one would think there aren't any more emotions capaple to engage you in a game.

And the thing gets kinda overly abused and dull over 6 iterations of the same old emotion buttons being pushed. It was necesary for games to get popular, the thrill rides are among the most popular emotions people are almost always ready and eager to experiment, but it's about time we move on from the crib.

 

[MattLepore]

I remember when the Nuke first went off in Modern Warfare. The PS3 was down in the living room and a bunch of my family members were at the dinner table, when me and my cousin decided to continue the campaign. Suddenly, as we were flying away from what we had thought was a hard-earned victory, warning sirens blazed and the mushroom cloud rose.

Everyone at the table stopped talking and watched the screen, even my older relatives who couldn't stand the 'doo-hickeys of this generation'. It was a powerful moment.

Modern Warfare 2, when Washington D.C. was attacked, brought tears to my eyes. I looked around at all the destroyed monuments and was afraid something like this could happen in the real world. It gave me chills.

 

[oshin]

The strange thing about war games is, do they provide the experience that many young men who signed up during ww2 thought they would get ? Before Vietnam (any maybe afterwards) there was a great amount of machismo about signing up and doing your part and the big adventure, but nobody realised the slaughter it actually was until they were there. The games give the experience without the reality of it.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

WW2 CoD games make me wanna hug a vet.

 

[dmase]

Ummm is it just me or was she talking about COD 2 not MW2. Everyone has related this specific review to the second game... which shouldn't be allowed.

The first 3 COD games are a huge farcry from the ones that came after, WaW was still completely different and it happened in the same time period. In a battle the emotion was more prevalent in the first 3 games while after it was more in what the missions was, kinda like the overall expierence. Stopping terrorists from blowing a nuke, an attack on an airport, and the sniper missions.

The first CoD put you in impossible situations that seemed grittier... because in most people's opinion WW2 was a lot more "grity" and "real"(because a lot of it actually happened minus taking a german installments in less then five minutes).

I'm assuming most of the people up their haven't played the first few games which is sad and the style for the most part seems unrelatable to me; besides the fact that infinity ward took the genre in a new direction when they realized they where falling into mediocrity.

 

[Velvo]

I feel much the same about most of the "gritty and realistic" games I've played. At least until I became disconnected enough to play it mindlessly. I cringed every time I shot someone in GTA IV until about 20 hours in. The physics of it still kinda sicken me. Fallout 3 and Half-Life 2 had me making sure my followers were alright before continuing, prompting me to load previous games if they had been killed (still do). The whole Call of Duty series seems to me to be anti-war games far more than "war is fun" games. Many people, sadly, do not see it the same way.

 

[Pendragon9]

I just don't like war games too much for this exact reason.

The realism is nice, but it almost feels like we're mocking the wars considering some of these games are based on true stories.

Also, i'm just not a guy who can kill left and right.

 

[SomeUnregPunk]

This is the reason why the Fallujah game will never be released.

 

[irrelevantnugget]

The Girl With a Sensitive Heart

There lies a surprisingly emotional experience underneath all of the mindless violence in Call of Duty.

Read Full Article

Play any Brothers in Arms game. Now THAT can be emotionally draining. Especially in Hell's Highway, when Baker hallucinates about his fallen squadmembers.

 

[Wrds]

I have always had a hard time playing the call of duty(and most war games for that matter) series simply because of all my grandpa's stories of WWII.

I've always been very in tune and empathetic with people's emotions, so a lot of the realism of it really weighed heavily on my mind. I just strait out avoid war games, and a lot of FPS games for that matter.

 

[Tom Phoenix]

This is the reason why the Fallujah game will never be released.

I certainly hope it does get released, though, precisely for that reason! Games cannot become a serious medium if they cannot engage in serious issues.

Anyway, I can understand the author completely. One of the most emotional experiences for me also comes from the Call of Duty series, specifically the original Call of Duty.
I was playing the Pegasus Bridge mission on Veteran and I had very little health remaining with no med packs available. So my character (Evans, I believe he was) was lying on the ground, avoiding grenades as best as possible and carefully shooting with a Lee-Einfeld, since a missed shot meant instant death.

As I played this, I thought how the soldiers must have felt in such a situation. Cold and scared, hugging the ground for dear life, attacked from all sides and with seemingly no hope of ever seeing their home and loved ones ever again. The music that was playing during this part only further enforced such an atmosphere. It was the only time that I recall that a game brought tears into my eyes and I replayed the original Call of Duty at least dozens of times.

Another moment that will always be burned into my skull was the infamous post-nuke scene from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, where Jackson dragged himself out of the crashed helicopter into the nuclear wasteland outside. You watched through his eyes as you pondered whether there is any hope for him to survive. Then, he helplessly falls on the ground and passes away, unmourned and unloved, thousands of miles away from home. What makes his death even more ironic is that he died trying to save a fellow soldier, who ended up dying in the nuclear explosion along with him anyway. A thouroughly shocking scene in general that will always be remembered in gaming history.

Overall, a game does not have to be storyline oriented to invoke an emotional response. However, in the case of the Call of Duty, a realistic setting helps a lot in immersing the player and thus making it easier to invoke such a response.

 

[Gunner 51]

The Girl With a Sensitive Heart

There lies a surprisingly emotional experience underneath all of the mindless violence in Call of Duty.

Read Full Article

Play any Brothers in Arms game. Now THAT can be emotionally draining. Especially in Hell's Highway, when Baker hallucinates about his fallen squadmembers.

Darn it, it appears that you have ninja'd what I was going to say. Though I always thought that Cpl/Sgt Joe Hartsock

Spoiler

getting crippled

and poor Sgt Baker had to tell him the bad news.

This scene really packed a punch for me especially as I had the good fortune to have played BiB: Earned in Blood which really focused Joe's side of the story.