Call of Duty: Modern Literature (Schmansky)

Introduction


The w orld of literature has changed throughout time as technology has opened new pathways to deliver literature. These changes have shifted the reader, author, and text through vastly differentiable mediums for delivering stories. Literature began as a storytelling event from which the author delivers the story personally to the reader through oral communication. This method of literature then mutated into printed text, such as books, magazines, and even poetry. The mutation also transformed the way authors and readers interacted and engaged. Authors and readers, through textual literature, have become disconnected, which requires the author to rely on the reader's experiences to connect to the story being written. This disconnect also opens the door for readers to understand literature differently from other readers and in many cases differently than the author intended. Currently, the literature world is mutating again. We are shifting from printed texts to digital texts, which will revolutionize the way authors and readers will engage literature in the future.

The Internet has been the leader at driving the transformation from printed text to digital texts, but the Internet has also created avenues for readers to become authors. There are communities of people who build stories that spin out of the author's original text. Some of these stories build on the text, filling in the ambiguities the author may have left, while others are rewrites of portions of the story the reader was unhappy with. We have called this remediation, and it has become available to more and more people as the Internet has provided a digital world for any reader or community to develop any text the reader chooses. The Internet has also allowed readers to collaberate on a peice of literature in hopes of gaining understanding and connection from text centered



communities. These kinds of collaberative communities allow readers to engage a text beyond their own experience, connecting other members knowledge and experiences to instances in the story. Furthermore, these knowledge communities allow for you as a member to share your experience with the text to other, allowing you to not only experience the text but relive your experience with it. While, the Internet is enhancing and shifting text from print to the digital world, video games are also redefining what constitues as literature and the combination of a video game and the Internet is spawning a new and radical reading experience.



Video games are an art form, from their graphics to their story lines and are subject to readers to read it's "text". While printed literature, in ink or digital, are linier and follow a particular flow, the reader is required to read the words and turn the pages. Much like these motions, a video game requires the reader to read the game and learn how to turn the game's pages, Call of Duty: MW3 is no exception. The game is the third installment in the Modern Warfare series, which is designed around a World War 3 theme. The player (reader) navigates through a series of missions and objectives in this war setting which upon completion turns the page of the story. This experience has sparked massive fan discussions and even debates on fan blogs such as. There is a particular scene in Modern Warfare 3 that was called to the center of these blogs. There are even groups of fans that obsess in gather information and share information before the Call of Duty games are available. The next game that is suppose to come out is Black Ops 2 due to release on November 13, 2012 and there are blogs already with spoilers. Fans of Call of Duty have also gone beyond the gameplay and have developed their own stories based on the story for this game and shared them with others on Youtube.

Interpretative Disputes
Call of Duty has been known for including some controversial scenes in their video games and MW3 is no exception. The single most talked about scene in MW3 is of a family on vacation and a young girl being killed in a terrorist attack. One person on this Youtube page by the name of Harlow213 commented "they﻿ put it in cause shit like that happens quit being a bunch off pussies thats what is wrong with the world", while Uyeunten on the same blog says "It's not the fact that you see it or not its the fact that﻿ a little girl and her family were blown up" and there are several others that have commented about this scene for both sides. Other blogs have seen this same battle of acceptable or unacceptable unfold around this clip. On a PC World blog DROIDuser commented saying "To me, this scene is perfectly acceptable. It doesn't look like it depicts the graphic killing of children. Everything is just implied. Had the mother and child been rendered in gory detail (a la Soldier of Fortune) in the aftermath of the explosion, then I would agree that's going too far. This is a game about war and terrorism breaking out around the world and unfortunately, this scene is all too possible. If you're going to make a modern war game, it can't be sunshine and rainbows and gentlemanly combat." These three posts reveal the heart of these interpretative disputes, personal experience. Each blogger has aligned their experiences with the knowledge the author has shared to draw conclusions about what is acceptable and what is unacceptable for society. People in New York, Washington DC, and the surrounding areas or people with families in the surrounding area in 2011 experienced first hand the carelessness and impact of terrorism and war and will connect more emotionally to this scene and have strong ties to the acceptability of a scene like this. These ties can be form from this kind of first-hand experience or personal belief such as religion or parental guidance. Both experience and belief are weapons people use to validate their position on debated topics and drives emotion and tension through the roof on some of these debates. This high tension can turn users from the topic at hand to personally attacking each other and becoming disruptive to the blogging community.

Knowledge Communities
With the invention of the Internet, readers have taken their textual engagement beyond the bindings, covers, and framework the author creates and have created communities centered around the text. These communites allow members to share information, pose topics for discussion, and feed into a reader's curiosity. These communities also have very specific rules and guidelines especially for spoilers. The communities that I have found around the Call of Duty games do the same thing. A blog entitled "Child Killing Controversy SPOILER " is one of the blogs I found that broke these spoiler rules. Maccabi is an "Expert" member of this community and he is quick to tell the poster about the infractions of his post saying "what is it with people posting the actual spoiler in the title then adding spoiler at the end..thats the second today shesh" and "but op remove your post, apart from breaking forum rules you are needlessly spoiling the game for others." His first post has a tone of being suggestive and opinionated, while his second post quickly turns to an authoritative tone though he lacks offical authority. Maccabi is just another user of the forums but his familiarity with them, along with his network of followers has given him an implied power to demand results. Another interesting spoiler issue I found within this blog is that the creator of this blog is classified as a "newbie" and almost immediately another blog member began questioning his information. In his post he demanded "proof/videos/pictures" and without those this spoiler was untrue. This need for "proof" is interesting because this user and most of society places a higher value on tangibles such as writting, videos, pictures and other types of media than they do on someone's word. What people do not consider is that these types of media are able to be fabricated just as much as someone's word. The picture to the left is a prime example this, it is two images put together, but was able to spark a lot of belief that this event really occurred. The third important concept about these forum is the collection of knowledge is it's purpose. Knowledge is key and one particular post on Call of Duty: Official Forums involves a group of five people collecting information over who has the codename "$". The post was kicked off by Zachdavis11 who writes "Okay so in Act one ; who is codename '$' ? It couldn't be Price, Soap, or Nikolia.. because they said 'Codename '$' was reported KIA, and they know that they are alive, because the US government reported them as fugitives. Throughout the campaign codename '$' has their computer and is following the storyline and ****. So who is it, if anyone knows ? My first impression was ghost...". He is met by someone else named Riptide789 who responds with "It is for sure Price. I mean... $ and Price... not really a coincidence." These two approaches to reasoning are interesting. Zachdavis11 has a logical approach, he is using other contexts in the story to build a list of characters that could and could not fit this codename. Riptide789 has made a more literal connection and determined that this codename "$" is a character with the name Price. The interesting thing is a guy named Mw2nut made the same claim that the character codenamed "$" was Price and got shot down by Zachdavis11. Over the course of an hour and a half the members on the blog built the case for this literal connection to fit both literally and logically. I think this brings up an interesting point about how information becomes fact. In order for people to accept information as fact, there must be a logical connection.

Remediation
Call of Duty fans are no strangers to fan fiction. Everything from character bios and alternate endings to some good and some bad reenactments. Fans all over have answered the "Call of Duty" to put thier own spin of this excellent video game story. One of my favorite fan fictions takes the story of a character who dies in the story mode of the game and carries the character to "The Afterlife." The new story is generated from an initial reader who took the call offered by the Internet to become an author. As the new author of the story this reader filled a gap of ambiguity left by the original author. He begins by connecting his readers to the story in which he is backfilling by describing the scene in the game where the character "Soap" is dying. Death is heavily feared among people and this author paints afterlife as a peaceful and happy place with thought, memory and comprehension. The finality of death varies from belief to belief. Some people look at death as the end of all ends, while others view life on Earth as just the beginning and still others believe that you will die and come back as something else known as reincarnation. This particular author is clearly open to the idea that life on Earth is just the beginning so he filled the ambiguity of that view.

There are other forms of fan fiction surrounding Call of Duty. Youtube has a ton of home made videos, some with special effects and others without, but almost all of these videos follow the conventions established by the authors of the game. The game is designed to allow the player to control a character in the first person to give a realistic feel to the story being presented. Special effects are used to enhance the quality of video art for other viewers. The authors of Call of Duty use these special effects to truely emmerse the player into the world of the story, from explosions that shake the screen and controller to the fire burst and recoil you get from firing a gun. These fans who recreate these scenes from the game and choose to incorperate special effects generate a more acceptable video. The popularity of these special effects in both the video game and fan made movies show that people have a desire to redefine their reality and generate even if for a short time something new and exciting that users would not be able to experience in this world.

Links and Resources
Modern Warfare 3: Makarov

Modern Warfare 3: Chapter 1

Modern Warfare 3: The Afterlife

Future First Person Shooter

Modern Warfare Real Life Movie

Spoiler: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2

PLOT SPOILER Black Ops 2

Spoiler Community Black Ops 2

Spoiler Images Black Ops 2

Disturbing Content

Call Of Duty: MW3 Official Community