---
title: 'Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=eKPM7cZORTE'
video_id: 'eKPM7cZORTE'
date: 2026-06-28
duration_sec: 0
---

# Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods

> Source: [Call of Duty: Ghosts – Power, Paranoia, and Orbital Tungsten Rods](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eKPM7cZORTE)

## Summary

The video presents a critical analysis of 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' (2013), arguing it is the worst game ever played. It examines the game's narrative, development, and political themes, linking them to broader issues in AAA game production and American cultural anxieties. The reviewer critiques the game's incoherent story, poor mechanics, and repulsive political undercurrents.

### Key Points

- **Initial Verdict** [0:21] — The reviewer states 'Call of Duty Ghost might be the worst game I've ever played,' requiring significant qualification.
- **Historical Detour on Nationalism** [0:58] — The video begins with a historical discussion on 18th-century nationalism before linking it to the game's themes, showing a pattern of tangential research.
- **Medal of Honor Revocations** [1:20] — The reviewer recounts President Wilson's review of the Medal of Honor, leading to revocations, including Buffalo Bill's and Dr. Mary Edwards Walker's, connecting to the phrase 'above and beyond the call of duty.'
- **Call of Duty Franchise Origins** [3:29] — The franchise began in 2003 as a response to EA's Medal of Honor, with a release cycle involving multiple studios (Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Sledgehammer, Raven).
- **Ghosts Plot Overview** [5:24] — Set in a near future where South America (the Federation) attacks the US using a hijacked orbital weapon (Odin). The story follows brothers Logan and Hesh Walker, part of the elite 'Ghosts' squad.
- **Ghosts Origin Story** [7:01] — Elias Walker tells a campfire story of 60 special ops soldiers defending a hospital, reduced to 14 who ambush the enemy using blood and sand—the birth of the Ghosts. The reviewer cringes at the reverence.
- **Ror as Antagonist** [9:21] — Main villain Ror, a former Ghost, betrays the team after being tortured and brainwashed by the Federation. He is described as 'Bane from The Dark Knight Rises'—a personal grudge mastermind.
- **Muddled Story Structure** [10:51] — The game's missions are a series of setpieces (sinking aircraft carrier, tank mission, space mission) poorly connected. Key plot points (like the cloned Odin weapons system 'Loki') are revealed late or ignored.
- **Level Design Flaw: The Odin Wreckage** [14:04] — In Chapter 2, the crash of Odin is visually hidden and exploration punished by radiation. The player never questions it, even though it's the inciting incident—a sign of narrative disconnection from gameplay.
- **The 'Loki' Clone System** [16:55] — The Federation builds smaller but more numerous clone rods-from-god. The reviewer notes symbolism ('theirs is smaller… but more numerous') and the need for a final space mission to hijack it.
- **Sequel Bait** [17:26] — The game ends with a post-credits scene where Ror (apparently immortal) kidnaps the player character Logan, setting up a cliffhanger that was never resolved.
- **Development Crunch and IW Exodus** [18:24] — The reviewer explains that Ghosts was made under the stress of Activision's leapfrog cycle. After the departure of West and Zampella (and 4 dozen other devs), Infinity Ward had massive technical debt, leading to a broken game.
- **Technical Issues** [20:57] — The game was rushed for PS4/Xbox One launch, leaving the PC version unstable (crashes, soft locks). Example: shooting a helicopter in Chapter 2 breaks future scripts.
- **Sluggish Gameplay** [22:04] — Movement feels like a 'waddle'. Vehicle segments (especially helicopter controls) are unintuitive and awkward. The game looks ugly—dominated by taupe/brown—representing the 'brown gay shooter' archetype.
- **Script Incoherence** [24:16] — The Oscar-winning writer Steven Gaghan (Traffic) wrote the script, but the reviewer claims cool setpieces were designed first, and the story was written later to string them together. This results in generic dialogue and non-reusable tools.
- **Lack of Internal Cohesion** [28:57] — Missions are interchangeable. For example, the order of infiltrating a lab, blowing up an oil rig, and sabotaging a factory could be rearranged without changing the story. There is zero narrative cohesion.
- **Critique of Rail-based Design** [31:33] — While linear games (like Doom 2016) can succeed, Ghosts fails because the rails are too obvious. Tools are not given to players; they are single-scene gimmicks (e.g., a blinding strobe light works only in one room).
- **Cringeworthy Lore** [34:15] — The Ghosts are portrayed as a 'sacred' unit with rituals (e.g., body placement). The reviewer finds this embarrassing, especially since the unit has existed only within the lifetime of its members.
- **Riley the Dog** [36:10] — Riley is a major marketing gimmick but mechanically appears in only two chapters. He is more like a 'specialty grenade' than a squad member. After being shot, he is quietly written out of the story.
- **Political Undercurrents: 'American Paranoia'** [39:58] — The reviewer argues the game reflects American insecurities during the War on Terror. The enemy (the Federation) is depicted as an invasive, perverting force. The wall is portrayed as a necessity, and American orbital weapons are justified while Federation ones are evil. The game taps into anxieties about America's declining global role.

### Conclusion

The video concludes that 'Call of Duty: Ghosts' is a thoughtless product that fails as both a game and a narrative. It is a perfect storm of rushed production, poor design choices, and reflexive nationalism, making it, in the reviewer's view, the worst game ever played.

## Transcript

[Music]
Call of Duty Ghost might be the worst
game I've ever played. Now, that
requires a lot of qualification and
humming and hawing and generally being
annoying, but such is the cost of these
things. Ghosts occupies an odd place
within the megalithic franchise that is
Call of Duty. At this point, it sits
roughly in the middle, being the 10th
main title in a series with 21 full
banner annual releases. It begs us to
ask, what is a Call of Duty? Well, back
in the late 18th century, modern nation
states as we know them began to coalesce
within a new ideology called
nationalism, which will differentiate
with a small N to distinguish it from
the nationalist political movements that
would arise in the 20th century. Within
small N nationalism, people began to
view themselves as part of a new
national identity that encompassed or
even superseded their local ethnic
identities. This would lead to a bunch
of stuff.
As the story goes, when US soldiers
started killing and dying during the
Great War, it became necessary to start
giving medals for doing a particularly
admirable job of killing or dying.
Additionally, it was felt that the US
Medal of Honor had been handed out too
frivolously during the Civil War, and
the Medal risked being trivialized as
over 3,000 had been awarded. Okay, this
is just It turns out this was a huge
boondoggle. Actually, a double
boondoggle. Look, I had to play Call of
Duty Ghost like a dozen times to make
this. Y'all are going to sit there and
listen to my goddamn research. President
Woodrow Wilson ordered the War
Department to do a review of the system
and the committee in turn revoked 911
legacy Medals of Honor. Boondoggle one
is that apparently in the Civil War,
tons of medals of honor, being the only
award the military had at the time, were
handed out for some pretty suspect
reasons. Many had been promised
basically as a recruitment bonus. Over
500 were awarded to a unit that had
already gone home for a mission they
didn't do. And Buffalo Bill wasn't even
in the military at the time he did the
thing that got him the medal. Boondoggle
number two was that Buffalo Bill, for
better or worse an American icon, had
his Medal of Honor stripped from him the
week that he died. Battlefield surgeon
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who got her
recommendation from Sherman himself and
spent four months of the war in a
Confederate P camp, was one of nine
civilian surgeons to be awarded the
medal and the only one to have it
revoked. She was also the only woman to
have ever, even to this day, been
awarded the Medal of Honor. Just to not
leave that story hanging, she refused to
return it to Congress and wore it
proudly until she died in 1919 at the
age of 86. Congress did eventually
reinstate her award in 1977. However,
amidst the bureaucracy and sexism, a
phrase was born. Miller Oscar F. Major
361st Infantry is awarded the Medal of
Honor for conspicuous gallantry and
intrepidity above and beyond the call of
duty. And 85 years later, we've got a
video game franchise. Since its
inception in 2003, the Call of Duty
first-person military shooter brand has
produced 21 mainline titles and 22
spin-offs, originating as a cinematic
shooter in response to Electronic Arts
Medal of Honor games, which were
themselves soft adaptations and
expansions of the film Saving Private
Ryan under the supervision of Steven
Spielberg. The games are known for their
giant setpiece levels, heavily scripted
sequences, extensive voice cast,
cuttingedge visuals, and just all-around
high production value. Quickly though,
let's introduce our corporate cast of
characters. The franchise as a whole is
published by Activision, now Microsoft
Activision Blizzard King. The original
game was developed by Infinity Ward, but
after the success of the first game,
Activision brought in a second studio,
Treyarch, to begin working on a third
game, while Infinity Ward worked on the
second. The idea being that the sequel
would drop in 2005. And then Activision
would already have a sequel to that
game, ready to go for 2006, which would
give Infinity Ward 2 years to make the
game after that. And then the game of
Leaprog would continue. Eventually, they
would need to bring in two more studios,
Sledgehammer and Raven, to wrangle the
ever ballooning scope. But we're getting
ahead of ourselves. This plan for a
yearly release paid off huge when the
fourth game, subtitled Modern Warfare,
smashed sales records and catapulted
Call of Duty from being a merely
successful franchise into being the
video game franchise, a cultural
shortorthhand for the idea of a video
game. Indeed, Call of Duty was pushing
the leading edge of production value so
hard that the franchise became the
definition of AAA video games. In the
same way your grandmother could describe
all video game consoles as a Nintendo,
AAA video games could be simply a Call
of Duty. Ghost, released in 2013, is the
10th mainline title in the series, the
sixth made by developers Infinity Ward.
The game follows two brothers, Logan and
Hesh Walker, as they shoot their way
through a series of nonsense levels
strung together by a jingoistic plot
rooted deeply in American insecurity
that was bubbling up as the global war
on terror solidly entered its second
decade. It is the near future, the quote
great energy producing deserts in the
Middle East have been destroyed by war,
cutting off much of America's energy,
leading to a collapse and decline. In
the power vacuum that followed, South
America has been united or conquered
under the banner of the Federation of
the Americas, often simply referred to
as the Fed. The game opens as two
astronauts perform maintenance on the
control station for the orbital weapon
Odin, a kinetic bombardment system
utilizing tungsten rods dropped from
space, an impractical but popular pop
culture weapon often shorthanded as rods
from God. As they are performing the
finishing checks on this decidedly
military super weapon, the station is
attacked and hijacked by Fed forces who
gain entry by posing as an American
supply shuttle. The Fed successfully
target and bomb a large swath of
Southern California, Texas, and Florida
before the temporary prologue
protagonist or prologist destabilizes
its orbit and burns up in the
atmosphere. That that sounds
grammatically incorrect. So ju just to
be clear, both the prologonist and Odin
burn up in the atmosphere. Parallel to
this, Elias Walker tells his sons the
origin story of a fabled special ops
team called the Ghosts.
>> It was a different time, a different
enemy.
60 men from tier 1 teams were sent to
face down a force of 500 enemy fighters.
Their objective to force the enemy back
from a civilian hospital and keep its
occupants alive.
In this other backstory, in another
time, another war, 60 men from a joint
special ops team were tasked with
guarding a hospital and they get
obliterated over the course of a couple
nights. 60 become 15 and eventually
these remaining 15, they evacuate the
hospital and send one of their own as an
escort. Then the remaining 14 cover
themselves in blood and sand and hide
under the bodies to ambush the enemy
fighters. The pros in this story is
fluid, reverential, bordering on
spiritual ecstasy. They are baptized
with blood and anointed by the sand,
then massacre the opposition with
hit-and-run tactics that are so sick and
badass that the one remaining enemy
fighter goes crazy. He expressed
warnings to others of a force so
menacing and unbeatable, it could only
be described as supernatural.
He called them ghosts.
God damn it. It's even got the ellipsus
right there in the subtitles. I feel I
feel like I feel like this is what
folding ideas sounds like to people who
don't like folding ideas. This literal
campfire story is then interrupted by
the rods from God falling on San Diego
as the Fed uses Odin to obliterate
basically everything south of Santa
Monica. The body of the game takes place
10 years later, long after the war with
the Fed has come to a stalemate. It's
not really relevant to anything, and you
need to dig into the codeex entries to
sort it out, but basically the US
military doesn't have branches anymore.
It's all just one big blob, which is
really just the underlying justification
for the main characters, Logan and Hesh,
to run around doing whatever the
designers thought was cool. After a
tutorial mission and some walk and talk,
the boys are sent out to scout some fed
salvage operation back in San Diego.
their first big mission beyond the
massive border wall the US has built.
They are assisted on their missions by
the game spectacle feature Riley, a
trained German Shepherd and his doggy
cam sneak attack.
Despite the lengthy geopolitical setup
and hell dump of backstory, the game's
lore is extremely front-loaded and the
meat of the game revolves around a man
named Ror, a ghost and dad's former
commanding officer. Oh, spoiler. Dad's a
ghost. like that's why he knows all
their backstory and stuff, but not like
a cool ghost. He's just he's a he's an
assassin
special ops badass. I It's It's treated
as a twist. It's You're supposed to find
You're supposed to You're It's It's
treated as a twist. They play it like
it's a real twist that you didn't that
you didn't see coming.
>> But your father's not there anymore.
Dad, this whole time you you were one of
them. You a ghost.
>> Try the ghost.
>> So Ror, along with your dad was one of
the original 14 ghosts who were anointed
with sand after defending the hospital.
And his psych profile is basically that
he's Rambo, but like Rambo 3 or Rambo
for Rambo. Not really first blood Rambo.
Ror went missing in Caracus two years
before the Odin incident and was
presumed dead. When the Fed threatened
all of South America and ordered all
US-born residents killed or imprisoned,
the US preemptively invaded Venezuela
and sent the Ghost to assassinate Fed
leadership in a mission that culminates
in Federation leader General Elmagro
ordering a missile strike on a massive
dam overlooking the city. Now, this
self-destructive action here, we're
going to have to set aside the fact that
America's enemies are so insane they'll
nuke themselves, was already a recurring
plot beat in the franchise by this
point, so we can instead focus on the
silliness of the scenario. If Western
media gets accused of playing fast and
loose with its audience's lack of
knowledge of the rest of the world, few
other instances will really compete with
this game. stashing a billion gallons of
water a kilometer in the air above the
Caribbean Sea. So, the ghosts do
successfully assassinate General
Elmagro. You play as your dad, Elias,
for this mission and shoot him yourself.
But the helicopter crashes, Ror falls
into the water, and after weeks of
searching for his body, the ghosts are
pulled from Caracus, and Ror is declared
MIA. Since he's the antagonist, he
obviously survived and now he holds a
grudge against the ghosts for a
combination of not rescuing him and not
having the decency to die trying to
rescue him. He was instead captured by
the Fed and tortured in a jungle pit
where they used all the old standards,
isolation, temperature extremes, sleep
deprivation, stress positions, keeping
him wet, presumably direct physical and
verbal abuse, and they feed him
psychoactive poisons implicitly.
This process stylized for the cinematic
blows all of the white off of him as
black alien crystals burst out of his
skin. That's interesting iconography
that might come up later.
>> Broke was their ghost. Now,
the perfect weapon to use against us.
>> He becomes the main villain of the
entire game. And he's Bane, the Batman
villain. Specifically, the Bane from The
Dark Knight Rises, a two steps ahead
criminal mastermind with seemingly
limitless resources to pour into a plan
that uses lofty geopolitical ambitions
as a smoke screen for a personal grudge
against a couple specific dudes. There's
a series of RO focused missions,
including backstory, then an
infiltration mission to find where he's
hiding, an assault on the hideout,
capturing RO, then getting hijacked by
Ror's people and dumped in the jungle,
after which the game switches to
hardcore filler mode. There's a winter
science facility level in Chile, then an
oil rig level in Antarctica, then an
underwater level in the Atlantic, then a
factory level in Brazil somewhere north
of Rio. After blowing up the factory,
the team heads to a safe house in the
remains of Las Vegas to hang out, where
they get ambushed and captured by Ror
again. Oh, you are right, Elias. I'm not
a ghost.
I'm the man that haunts them and sends
them back to the other side.
Dad, a ghost.
>> There's a sinking aircraft carrier, then
a tank mission, and a second space
mission, and then finally you fight Ror
on a train. The thing you learn in all
of that faffing about, maybe a nugget
permission, is that the Fed has cloned
Odin. That wreckage way back in the San
Diego level where Doggy Cam was a
mechanic, that was Odin. And I guess
that information isn't exactly hidden,
but it's really downplayed.
>> This is definitely the place.
Stalker 6, we got something here. Looks
like they're taking some wreckage.
What kind of wreckage?
>> Not sure. It's guarded, but we're going
to push through.
>> It's actually kind of amazing how good a
job the game does of making this
theoretically important discovery feel
utterly beneath notice. The crash
satellite looks unremarkable in the
muddy brown gloom that pervades the
game, and all leading lines direct the
player away from it. You get a glimpse
at the top of the hill, but the shape of
the hill and the people shooting at you
from down below pull your attention
downwards and then to the left. When you
exit the cave, the shooting is again
coming from the left, pulling your view
away from the crash site. Even when you
exit the building and traverse a catwalk
that goes right next to the satellite,
the game makes sure there's people
shooting at you off to the left, pulling
your attention away from the wreckage.
In glimpses and fragments, this crash
satellite just looks like indistinct
industrial wreckage. A refinery or a
silo of some kind, not a grounded weapon
of mass destruction. That's the reason
everyone's in this mess in the first
place. The only way to really appreciate
that it's the wreckage of Odin is to sit
around and explore. But this is a game
that very much does not want you to
explore. Cinematic shooters are 90% high
gloss hallways. That's kind of the core
pitch. You trade freedom to wander for
extremely intricate scripted sequences
and spectacle. Wandering off is almost
always tightly constrained. A door that
you aren't explicitly directed to open
will almost never open. A side hallway
that isn't part of a shooting arena will
almost always deadend quickly with
nothing to see. In the case of the Odin
wreckage, poking around is explicitly
punished by falling into radioactive
kill zones, sending you back to the
previous checkpoint. Curiosity in the
genre is structurally discouraged. So,
nominally, Logan and Hash were sent to
San Diego to figure out what the Fed is
rooting around looking for. But when
they find it, they just go, I don't
know, some big busted thing looks
expensive. And are then immediately
derailed by Ror capturing a ghost named
Ajax, at which point the actual mission
is discarded in lie of meeting up with
Ghost's American Keegan and heading off
to rescue Ajax from the ruins of Dodger
Stadium. So, the fact that the
Federation is rooting around in the
wreckage of Odin is uncovered in chapter
3 and then deemed so unremarkable that
aside from a stray mention in chapter 9,
it isn't really relevant again until
chapter 13 when the team stumbles into a
factory loading up Federation Odin
clones, a project called Loki, named
after the shape-shifting infiltrator
that ends the world. Now, here's the
very important thing to remember about
Loki. It is said out loud to call your
attention to this. The important thing
to note about the clone of the orbital
penetrating rod weapon of mass
destruction built by the South Americans
is that theirs is smaller. It's less
girthy. It's not quite as potent, but it
is significantly more numerous.
>> Yeah, these are smaller, but there's a
lot more of them.
>> There might be some symbolism in there.
I don't know. There's another space
mission where Americans hijack Loki and
start raining hell down on South
America. You drive a tank. You fight Ror
on a train. You eventually shoot him and
your brother and all of the windows
crack like blow open and he drowns and
you and your brother sit on a beach
watching the world burn as the credits
start to roll before the inevitable and
tragic sequel bait when an apparently
immortal Ror kidnaps Logan. That's you.
And drags him off with a postredits clip
implying that Logan is being subjected
to the same jungle drug torture
brainwashing as Ror was. So ghost falls
apart in basically every way. Like if
we're talking about a bad game, what are
the ways in which a game can be bad?
They can be just technically bad.
Unstable as software that doesn't launch
right, crashes frequently, or breaks at
the programming level. That's one type
of bad. It can be just not particularly
fun to push the buttons like the
responsiveness of it or the feedback
that you get or the rewards that you
get, the way that it respects or
disrespects your time. Or it could be
offensive on some narrative level. The
story is full of holes. It isn't told in
a way that carries the player through.
Character motivations are vague or thin.
Actions and consequences don't really
seem to line up. And maybe it espouses
some morally reprehensible worldview.
Ghosts is all of these. So, the long
story short behind all this is twofold.
One is simply that games of this scope
take, as a rule of thumb, about three
years to make, and Activision had their
studios cranking them out in barely two.
While Ghost was not noted for its
development crunch, this is because it
was still so ubiquitous and normalized
across the AAA industry in the early
teens that it was deemed unremarkable. A
contemporary Guardian article about the
development of Ghost opens by talking
about Crunch in an extremely
matter-of-fact way, like how you would
say that being a sailor involves the
risk of getting wet. The second is that
around the release of Modern Warfare 2,
Infinity Ward went through a major
upheaval. Studio co-founders Vince
Sampella and Jason West had wanted to
sever Modern Warfare from the Call of
Duty brand, getting Infinity Ward a
bigger slice of the record-breaking pie.
When Activision caught wind of this, all
hell broke loose. The two were fired.
Then they sued Activision for basically
manufacturing cause for their dismissal.
Then Activision counters sued, calling
them insubordinate and self-serving
schemers who attempted to hijack
Activision's assets for their own
personal gain. This got very messy. It
came out that Activision had a thing
called Project Icebreaker that West and
Zimpella alleged was a scheme to ou them
from Infinity Ward. While Activision
insisted in their defense that
Icebreaker was merely a scheme to spy on
employee emails in order to improve the
relationship with the studio, in the
fallout, almost four dozen devs departed
Infinity Ward in solidarity, leaving a
big old hole in Infinity Ward's dev
team. While Modern Warfare 3 would
ultimately come out on time, it was only
because Activision brought in Raven and
Sledgehammer to help finish the game.
Afterwards, it was decided that the
2-year leapfrog cycle just wasn't enough
time, and thus the third game out from
that point would be developed by
Sledgehammer starting a three studio
rotation. All this required was for the
folks at Sledgehammer to be brought
fully up to speed, not just finishing
assets for a game already in progress,
but working from scratch with the new
engine and all the various intricacies
of making a Call of Duty. This added
workload on the remaining Infinity Ward
staff, creating a massive technical debt
that would ultimately be paid by ghosts.
None of the problems that plague ghosts
are unique to it. Rather, Ghost is
unique for suffering from every single
problem that plagues AAA video game
production. I have taken the liberty for
the sake of pacing and shaking things up
a bit of organizing all that into a
numbered list.
The focus in development was on getting
the game ready for the launch of the
PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which left
the PC version in a pretty bad state
with numerous development problems
leading to frequent crashes to desktop,
broken script triggers, and numerous
soft locks. They fixed a lot of this
over the years. It is a lot more stable
these days if you play it on a modern
machine, but it's still really easy to
soft lock various levels because Call of
Duty games are extremely complicated on
a scripting level. If in chapter 2 you
exit the tunnel into the LA River and
immediately try and shoot down the
helicopter, you can actually sort of
shoot it down, but since it's supposed
to come back later and you've already
tripped the flag saying it's destroyed,
it just never comes back for when you're
actually supposed to shoot it down and
the level soft locks.
I hear more literal birds than I hear
helicopters.
All right. Well, only one option.
>> The experience of the game, the game
play itself is sluggish. Even sprinting
feels more like a waddle. There is
multiple vehicle segments that just do
not function the way that you'd expect
them to. The helicopter fights in
particular have a very bizarre control
scheme that I still do not fully
understand. Lateral movement works more
or less like you'd expect, even if it
feels terrible. But altitude control is
semi-automated within a very shallow
layer. It's very awkward if you expect
the helicopter to control like a
helicopter.
It's just kind of ugly. Even at the
time, Call of Duty games were remarked
on for being dominated by shades of
brown green brown brown green gray
brown, and gray. Online comic strips
like VG Cats were already mocking this
trend in 2007. And yet, 7 years later,
Ghosts somehow takes that and makes it
even worse. The brown gay shooter has
effectively become an archetype, and
Call of Duty Ghosts is its avatar. The
game's average color is taupe. This
actually brings us to our next point,
which will hand off to Folding Ideas
Mexican Office.
A major marketing point was the hiring
of Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven
Gagan to pen the script. Now, Gagean won
an Oscar for Traffic, a movie with its
own, let's say, interesting relationship
with Latin America. Traffic can be
almost single-handedly credited with
convincing audiences that Mexico looks
like piss, which in turn became the
visual language of hot places that are
also dangerous, which became the visual
language of war writ large, which is in
part why Call of Duty Ghosts looks the
way it does. In all fairness to Gagan, I
just happen to have a copy of the
published shooting script, and it
doesn't say anywhere, "Mexico, a land
the color of piss. Everything is a shade
of piss, even the sky." So that one's
more on Solderberg or well Peter Andrews
who's just Steven Solderberg with a
Carheart Beanie and a Leica. Gage's
pedigree as a writer is honestly like
most writers a little mixed. He wrote
Traffic and Serriiana, but he also wrote
Abandoned and The Alamo. And not
relevant to Ghosts, but still funny. He
would eventually write and direct the
2020 film Dittle starring Robert Downey
Jr.
>> Oh, good heavens.
>> The writing of a video game is
complicated. more so for a game like
Call of Duty than most. But there are
elements that we can pretty safely put
in GageN's lap, like the mission
briefings with their absolutely tortured
stoic pros.
>> The sand stuck to their skin like a
shroud, changing them, anointing them.
>> This is just kind of a whirlpool of
hell. The performances aren't saving the
script, but the script isn't giving the
performers material worth saving.
This whole time you you were one of
them. You ghost.
>> Try the ghost.
>> The bulk of the story is very stupid and
is plagued with obvious backfills that
are emergent from the way that the game
is made. The cinematic shooter is so
reliant on massive setpiece events that
they have become the cart leading the
horse. This aspect is basically an open
secret of how the game and an
embarrassing number of modern
blockbusters are made, but it is rarely
as obvious as it is with ghosts. Cool
moments were devised first. Production
was started and artists and coders and
scriptors were put to work building a
sinking aircraft carrier years before a
writer would be sent in to figure out
why an aircraft carrier is sinking.
After all, enemy gunships and boats just
move around on predefined paths. The
exact model of helicopter, the flags
being flown, or the uniforms on soldiers
can all be swapped later. For a big part
of the process, they're just floating
cubes and other placeholders. Anyway,
even the dialogue and character
interactions have the hallmarks of being
as unintrusive and generic as possible.
Characters are mostly an ephemeral
presence, barking immediate orders into
your ears.
>> Siggon Riley, move to the next floor.
>> The door's down. Flash now. Keep an eye
on your death gauge.
>> Clear.
>> Clear your charges. Moving. Pick up.
>> The why of what you're doing simply
needs to be kept to a minimum presence
so it can slot in easily at a later
time. This is why every mission has on
average one moment that actually
matters. The character learns or
accomplishes one thing frequently by
watching a video or reading a document.
And the significance of that thing is
more often than not shuffled into the
interstitial monologues that serve as
loading screens. You're sent to blow up
an oil derek off the coast of Antarctica
in a bluff to lure away the Fed's navy,
but that doesn't make any sense. Not as
a plan and not as the motivation driving
you through the mission. It's simply the
results that you're told afterwards. And
then later that diverted Navy just shows
up and sinks the US's last remaining
aircraft carrier. Anyway, the crashed
Odin in chapter 2 is so conspicuously
unremarked upon that it's entirely
possible that it wasn't even decided
what rubble the fed soldiers would be
searching through at the time the
mission was started. Like, not to get
repetitive here, but this is the full
exchange.
>> This is definitely the place.
>> Stalker 6, we got something here. Looks
like they're building some wreckage.
>> What kind of wreckage?
>> Not sure. It's guarded, but we're going
to push through.
>> You don't interact with it. It's
surrounded by killer radiation, so you
can't try and do anything with it.
Merrick and Keegan don't ask about it.
And despite the fact that you were sent
out explicitly to figure out what the
Fed were doing in San Diego, this
information is seemingly never relayed.
The thought that the Fed is trying to
salvage Odin in order to make their own
isn't floated as a possibility, even as
the characters are watching the Fed
launch mystery ballistic missiles that
NORAD loses track of after launch.
>> NORAD was able to say conclusively, the
missile launched in the Yucatan did not
hit the USA.
>> There isn't even a beat where a
character puts two and two together the
moment that they walk into the room and
see Loki being loaded up. Even the bit
with Loki is like, okay, they walk into
the room, they see something, there's a
bunch of radio chatter about it, and
then they move on. This level could be
95% completed without the artists even
knowing what's going to go in that slot.
These events, these thoughts are all
siloed from one another, interacting
only through the narrow tunnels between
missions. There is simply zero internal
cohesion to the story. It's so obviously
and shoddily a series of set pieces that
were hastily strung together. It's
actually difficult to keep them in order
in the memory simply because there's so
little logical connection between them.
In the game, you infiltrate the lab to
get files on the missile program, blow
up the oil derek to lure away the navy,
then sink the last destroyer guarding
Brazil so you can sabotage the factory.
But we could just as easily make it that
during the factory sabotage mission, we
uncover Loki. Then we blow up the
destroyers so we can get access to the
oil Derek, which as a one-two punch will
lure the Navy in the Pacific towards the
Atlantic so we can infiltrate the lab
and steal the access codes needed to
subvert Loki. All it would need to
replace is a few lines of dialogue and
the interstitial monologues. Other
missions are less egregious, but never
properly escape this artifact of their
creation. missions are in the order that
makes a reasonable amount of narrative
sense while breaking up the mechanics.
Many of these set pieces are extremely
obvious in their influences. Again, it's
basically an open secret that Call of
Duty level designers just look for
moments from movies and go, "Wouldn't it
be cool if you could play that?" But, I
don't know. It just feels so hack when
the inspiration is so obvious. Ror
allows himself to be captured for no
particular reason except that it allows
the game to recreate the opening of The
Dark Knight Rises. One level is lifted
in pretty equal measure from The Dark
Knight and Transformers: Dark of the
Moon.
The game doesn't really have mechanics.
It has the simulation of mechanics. In a
typical game, hell, let's get saucy and
say in a real game, the player is given
a suite of interactions that they can
perform, and it is then given to the
player the freedom to figure out how to
best string together these interactions
to accomplish their goals. Ghosts
instead gives you a gun and a context
prompt. Things like night vision
goggles, thermal optics, the dog Riley,
a blinding strobe light, a motion
tracker, and gas grenades aren't tools
that you are given, tutorialized on, and
then expected to deploy at your
discretion. They are gimmicks that pop
up at predetermined moments and persist
in your toolkit for only as long as
deemed necessary.
>> Logan, sync up with Riley.
>> Here we go.
Now, there are a lot of compromises that
are made in the service of the cinematic
in cinematic shooter. The player is
ultimately on rather tight rails with
little freedom in how they approach the
world. This is not inherently bad.
Roller coasters are literally on rails
and roller coasters are really, really
fun. And at a certain level of
abstraction, this is true about
basically every game with a linear
story. Using Doom 2016 as an example,
while the player can backtrack through
large areas of the game for a
substantial chunk of the play time, this
is ultimately little more than the
freedom to hunt for collectibles as the
actual bang bang pew pew rip and tear
gameplay remains constrained to a
predetermined shoot you must climb into
if you want to rip kacadmon eyeballs
out.
[Music]
The argument in favor of rails is that
they are needed to provide a kind of
tightly crafted experience that a freer
sort of sandbox environment just can't
deliver. But with that comes an unspoken
contract that I as a player am seeding
an amount of control in exchange for
something impactful and the expectations
that the rails will be reasonably well
disguised. I shouldn't feel the rails
because the path forward should simply
be the one that I most want to go down.
this way for khaka demons and their
eyeballs. Call of Duty Ghost is littered
with so many friction points, the poorly
laidout levels, the obnoxious
characters, the incoherent story that
the illusion, the buy in just falls
apart. You begin to notice that you're
thrust into situations where tools you
were given earlier would be useful, but
you don't have them because they weren't
actually tools in the first place. They
were single scene gimmicks. There is a
veneer of realism here in the sense that
your commandos aren't going to be
showing up with the same ever ballooning
kit of toys to every single mission. But
that realism shreds like tissue paper
when a very useful tool like the strobe
light is only functional within a single
specific room. The fake commitment to
realism results in frankly boring
gunplay. Well, you will occasionally
stumble across a shotgun or machine gun.
By and large, you will spend the
campaign cycling through a series of
indistinct assault rifles. Step after
boring step of the game is saturated
with barked orders from your commanding
officers, who perpetually sound pissed
off that they even need to deal with
you, giving the distinct impression that
the game not only feels obliged to hold
your hand, but resents doing it, too.
>> You can stick with us, but you do what I
say when I say it. Understood? Put all
in a package, Ghost is a great
simulation of what an escort quest must
feel like from the perspective of the
NPC.
Help! I'm trapped in a numbered list
factory. The bosses stole my passport.
If you're reading this, tell my wife I'm
still alive. Please send rescue.
Ghosts are cringe. The amount of
worshipful religious pros that is poured
out talking about the ghosts is weird
and embarrassing, especially given that
the source of most of that is Elias
talking about himself.
>> And this really happened. So, the legend
goes,
>> but it really reaches the next level
after Elias is killed. In the story, the
ghosts are a quasi official interdep
departmental unit consisting entirely of
14 people. There were 15 soldiers left
at the hospital. One of them was sent to
escort evacuees. 14 stayed behind to be
anointed by sand. That event in and of
itself is within the lifetime of all of
the games characters. Merrick, Ror,
Elias, Ajax, and Keegan were all there.
They are first generation ghosts. Logan
and Hash are implied to be the first
initiated ghosts ever. From the events
of the game, the ghosts are depicted as
both quite new, very exclusive, and
badass to the point that prior to Ror
killing Ajax, the unit has suffered zero
confirmed casualties. So, with all of
this framing, it's all just so deeply
cringe when Hesh spends a loading screen
detailing all the ghosterary rights and
customs like they're a deeply rooted
tradition with generations of practice.
In the event a ghost is killed, his
remains are placed face down with his
head pointed in the direction of his
home, his weapon next to him. We do it
this way so that when our fallen are
taken to the other side, they can watch
over us and keep an eye on our enemy.
Let's talk about the dog. Ghost had two
big elements that became the backbone of
the marketing campaign for the game. The
lesser of these is the affforementioned
hiring of Oscar-winning screenwriter
Steven Gagan to pen the script. The big
one was Riley the dog.
>> This is someone you care about. This is
a squad member. He does everything from
sniffing out explosives to protecting
the team.
>> Riley is only mechanically available to
the player in two chapters. He's less
like a squad member and more like a
specialty grenade that you have access
to for three specific gunfights. He's
barely in the game. There's a whole
thing in chapter 14. That's the one
where your dad dies and Riley kind of
appears out of nowhere and then gets
shot and you need to carry him through
the rest of the level. After that, they
show him at the start of the aircraft
carrier mission, the one where the
carrier sinks. But since there's a 3
days later fade in between, Riley is
just sort of quietly ushered out of
existence in the uncertainty of that
transition.
The political undercurrents of the story
are repulsive and reflect the madness of
an America trapped in a quagmire of its
own making and desperate for a new
villain. Diagetically, America is on the
backfoot, is in decline following the
collapse of the quote energy producing
deserts and is embroiled in a defensive
war against a superior foe. At least
that's what we're told. Since so much of
the story is really about Ror's personal
grudge, the geopolitics sink into the
distant background. America being in
some nebulous decline is simply the
prerequisite to justify the conflict to
make it a fair fight. America built an
orbital weapon of mass destruction when
they were in decline. So, you know, take
that for what it's worth. So, let's
actually look at how ROR fits into all
of this thematically. We have this soup
of action set pieces strung together by
a plot written around them. What emerges
from that soup? The theme that comes
through loud and clear is that Ror gives
the Fed their potency. The plan to
hijack Odin is cooked up by Ror. The
attack on Santa Monica is Ror and Loki
is Ror's doing. All the various filler
tasks ultimately revolve around getting
ahead of Ror. Ror is an attempt at
dracializing an inherently racialized
conflict. You simply cannot have a
conflict between the United States and
Venezuela without invoking the spectre
of US interventionism in South America.
>> What do you mean by political?
>> That doesn't mean anything, right? The
question is this a political game
doesn't actually mean anything because
it it's what does the word political
mean to you? Do we touch topics that
bear a resemblance to the geopolitics of
the world we live in today? Hell yeah.
Cuz this is the the that is the subject
matter of modern warfare.
>> Despite the developers insistence their
games are simply good sugary fun that
happens to resemble something in the
shape of geopolitics, kind of like a
candy cigarette. They do remain aware of
the implications of the things they make
and in the early teens were visibly
sensitive to the push back. They
received criticism for how the Arab
factions in Call of Duty 4 were depicted
with a nuclear suicide bombing. So,
Modern Warfare 2 instead revolves around
the threat of a duplicitous US general.
And then in Modern Warfare 3, it was
revealed that the nuke had actually been
the machinations not of al-Assad, but of
that game's antagonist, Vladimir
Macarov. Ror is, in one sense, a safe
antagonist. It makes the game about
Americans fighting Americans, white
people fighting a white person whose
most vocal motivation is simple revenge.
However, in the same way that the levels
are generic vessels for McGuffins to be
placed into at a later date, the natural
end point of a production pipeline that
demands endless crunch, ROR is the end
point of corporate cowardice. There is a
potentially insightful conclusion down
the path of the greatest threat to
America is America itself, but this is
not that. The message here isn't civil.
It's not suggesting that America has
invested so much in outward strength
that it has become internally brittle
that the contradictions of American
existence threaten the concept of
America itself. The vulnerability isn't
American hubris. The vulnerability is
American subversion. The game plays to
the sensibilities of an America in
tension with the war on terror, the war
in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan. As
these wars were solidly entering their
second decade, the narrative of a
righteous war, always suspect in the
first place was decidedly faltering.
America's presence was clearly not a
stabilizing force and they had become an
intractable quagmire. So in Ghosts, the
Middle East is simply written out of the
picture in passive voice. The
destruction of the oil producing
deserts. No one's fault, just a thing
that happened. The Fed, which is to say
South America, is described as invasive,
creeping, consuming, uninexurable force
moving northwards to take over America
for no reason but conquest. In the
cutscenes, they are an organic oily mass
crawling across the map and staining it.
They are a perverting force, a
subverting enemy that will invade
American space, take America's things,
and turn them against America. The enemy
is both impossibly strong and utterly
impotent. Their power is not strength in
their own right, but their ability to
pervert. Ror does not become
disillusioned with America. That's not
why he switches sides. While he
definitely harbors a grudge against
specific individuals, his heel turn is
fully explained as brainwashing. He is
tortured and drugged and converted into
their ghost. And you know, there's that
imagery. As the Federation torturers go
to work on his soul, the whiteness is
literally blasted off him and black
crystals rupture out of his body as he
becomes their operative. In an attempt
at telling an underdog story, Ghost
creates a world where American paranoia
is fully justified, where American
orbital weapons are good and right, but
Federation orbital weapons are an
abomination and also decidedly less
potent, but more numerous. It is a world
where the Fed is wrong to see America as
an existential threat and behave
accordingly. But it is simply pragmatic
for America to assassinate Federation
leadership. The hordes are coming.
They're sending their murderers, their
drug dealers, and their rapists to
corrupt America. The wall is simply a
necessity.
[Applause]
I don't think much if any of this is
intentional. Rather, it is my belief
that Call of Duty Ghosts is a
thoughtless product. These are the
consequences of a bad, albeit
Oscar-winning writer simply trying to
paint a broadstroke scene to efficiently
communicate a stupid plot to an
inattentive audience after he was handed
a pile of half-built set pieces and a
vague corporate mandate for the overall
shape and tone. But in that
thoughtlessness, in the reliance on
stereotype and trope, Ghost tapped into
an anxiety of the moment it was created
in a desperate need for America to be
righteous and justified, for its
paranoia to be a foresight of something
real. Given that we are now living in
the consequences of that paranoia, the
odious results of that anxiety, I find
Call of Duty Ghosts repulsive. The worst
game I have ever played.
Wow, that sure was an episode, wasn't
it? And to think he didn't even get
around to mentioning the fish AI, the
role of NORAD as the US military's head
command, seemingly implying that Canada
has been annexed, the controversy of the
developers reusing motion capture data
from Modern Warfare 2, the reality of
American energy production, or the fact
that Eminem song Survival was released
as a pre-order bonus. Well, anyway, it's
a long way back to Canada from here in
Mexico where I most certainly am because
I am in Mexico and most definitely not
in southern Alberta. So, I'm going to
get right on mossying. Until next time,
keep your tango frosty and your LZ
cleared.