Russia Recalls Modern Warfare 2

eldavojohn writes "You may recall much ado over some questionable footage in the latest Call of Duty game. Well, that footage has led to a recall of Modern Warfare 2 in Russia. Seems the Russian government was none too happy about the portrayal of Russia in the game and decided to yank it from stores. Infinity Ward has responded with a patch that removes the 'No Russian' mission (the content in question) from the storyline. Before you overly criticize the Russian government, there may be some truth to the claim that the game's story line overly demonizes Russians as just terrorists as the Russian site GotPS3.ru alleges. Is cultural sensitivity becoming an overly played card in the gaming world? Not too long ago, Wolfenstein was recalled in Germany for containing Nazi symbols."

Comments

Censorship is BAD, m'kay?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Before you overly criticize the Russian government, there may be some truth to the claim that the game's story line overly demonizes Russians

Oh, I guess that makes it okay, then. The Russian government has every right to make up your mind for you.

Re:Censorship is BAD, m'kay?

[Dmala]

Just turn it around. Try to even think about the uproar if some game developer released a game where Americans are associated with terrorism and the famous "No Russian" level would take part in lets say New York Airport, instead of Moscow.

Uproar *from the people* is fine. The problem here is that, as I understand it, the ban is coming from the Russian government. There is no way the US government could get a game banned over content that portrayed Americans negatively. Any attempt would rightly be overturned as unconstitutional.

Re:Censorship is BAD, m'kay?

[plague3106]

I wouldn't care, and would still buy the game.

Its just a fucking game.

CoD6: Vietnam

[number17]

When are the Vietnam missions coming out where a villiage gate opens and you have to pillage and rape all the civilians? That's right, nobody is stupid enough to do it for the same reason.

Re:CoD6: Vietnam

[Anonymous Coward]

The appropriate question is not that some company has/hasn't made such a game but if said game existed, would you be able to play it in the USA?

The answer would likely be "yes", you could probably still buy said game but it would likely be pulled from many store shelves due to public pressure. Places like Walmart that have pulled music and magazines because of "objectionable" nature.

* SPOILERS * Of course, the scene in question isn't all about Russia. You're playing an "undercover" American who also willingly slaughters thousands of civilians. Not all of whom where likely Russian. I thought the rest of the game was far more "anti-Russian" than that one scene, I think. Given Russia invades America and proceeds to destroy everything standing in their way. Basically saying, a terrorist act carried out by suspected American terrorists would warrant an entire invasion of one major super power into another.

Of course, it's really Infinity Ward's way of making you think about 9/11 and the response of America with the Afghanistan and Iraq invasion, from a different view point. It's just Russia got the scapegoat title instead of some made up countries name. And that's primarily trying to connect this game to the first game where some story of the Cold War was involved.

Of course, the second games story was much weaker but some of the level designs where cooler. It was nice to see what it the developer envisioned of fighting a modern war on American soil.

Not so fast..

[tjstork]

Oh boo hoo. Russia has a bad history, it should expect criticism

While we Americans were sitting on our rears eating bon-bons, more Russians died than in all of America's wars combined fighting Adolph Hitler. Love them or hate them, forced by circumstances or not, the Russians did more to save Western Europe from Nazism than anyone else.

Re:Not so fast..

[MightyMartian]

Of course, the Russians have to take a lot of responsibility for that, because right up until the morning of the Nazi invasion they were shipping steel to Nazi Germany. In fact, Operation Barbarossa was specifically delayed until after those final steel shipments. It's one of the great ironies of the War that a lot of equipment thrown into the invasion of Russia was made using Russian steel.

Beyond that, one of the chief reasons that Germany was initially so successful was because of Stalin's purges of the Army in the 1930s had eliminated a good deal of talent in the Red Army. While Hitler was content to overlook some of the opinions of his most important officers in the Navy, Army and Luftwaffe, Stalin's paranoia and megalomania drove him to wipe out a good portion of the very people that would have been key in organizing military defense.

So Russia was by no means innocent of its own woes, as Churchill reminded Stalin at times when Stalin would freak out about not enough armament shipments were getting through or when he felt the US and Britain weren't doing enough to relieve pressure in the Eastern Theater.

Re:Not so fast..

[Shakrai]

While we Americans were sitting on our rears eating bon-bons

Why shouldn't we have been sitting on our rears eating bon-bons? You think it's the job of the United States to intervene in foreign wars? We did that in WW1 and got nothing out of it -- our supposed Allies ignored Wilson's plan for a just and fair peace and imposed draconian terms on Germany that set the stage for WW2. Then they defaulted on their wartime debts to the US. With that bit of history in mind perhaps it's easier to understand why the US had a strong isolationist sentiment in the 30s?

Love them or hate them, forced by circumstances or not, the Russians did more to save Western Europe from Nazism than anyone else.

The Russians made their own bed when they cut a deal with Hitler to slice up Eastern Europe. Had they joined forces with the Allies in 1939 it's probable that Germany would have been crushed and the Great Patriotic War would never have happened. The French had long sought an alliance with the Soviet Union to counter the threat of Germany but Stalin wasn't interested. He wanted the European powers to beat the stuffing out of each other to strengthen his own position. He even supplied Germany with the raw materials (ranging from grain to steel) required to keep her war machine running.

The West owes Russia no debt for her actions in WW2.

Re:Not so fast..

[Shakrai]

but we should always be grateful for how much blood the Russians shed fighting our common enemy (far, FAR more than we did).

You mean the common enemy that they cut a deal with and allowed to conquer Western Europe without so much as firing a shot? Heck, it's worse than that -- they invaded several innocent and neutral countries (Finland, the Baltic States) while Hitler was enjoying his free hand in the West.

If the Russians had allied with the Western Allies in 1939 Germany would have been crushed and the Great Patriotic War would never have happened. Let's try not to forget that.....

Have they played the mission?

[cosm]

In 'No Russian', you play as an American CIA agent, and you, as an AMERICAN agent, lay round after round into the innocent populace, alongside the Russian antagonist. I think the even larger message Infinity Ward sends with this mission is the atrocious things the American government is willing to do for the sake of 'National Security'.

Does anyone else see the hilarity in this? Not to mention their foreshadowing of American soldiers torturing an informant via electrocution! Each side of the geopolitical spectrum gets demonized in their own right.

But hey, lets just hate on the game that shows the gritty reality of the world.

Re:Have they played the mission?

[H0p313ss]

Question - do you find it a moral quandary to run over people in the GTA games? Or play a thief stealing from people in any number of games?

Nowhere near as much as the massacre scene. It's very deliberately quite disturbing.

Re:Sad

[MightyMartian]

You'd get bitchy people, but an attempt to ban it would probably lead to the ACLU taking whatever level of government that tried it to court..

There is a difference between disliking something and having a system that actually allows you to outright ban it.

Thin skins are not the problem; terrorism is

[tetromino]

The problem Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs had with the mission is not with how the Russian villain is portrayed (although that probably didn't help the game get a positive reception), but with the fact that the mission is about killing innocent Russian civilians. It does not matter whether the villain is Russian or French or American or Martian - killing civilians at an airport is, according, to a Ministry spokesman, "propaganda of terrorism" and hence illegal.

See http://www.gotps3.ru/article/call_of_duty_modern_warfare_2_zapretjat_v_rossii/ for more details.

And yet

[Culture20]

A good percentage of games and media made in the U.S. portray the U.S. government in a bad light, and yet they don't get yanked. (pun merely fortuitous)

Re:And yet

[Phrogman]

Ah but I think Americans also distinguish between criticism of their Government by other Americans and criticism by foreigners. There is also the distinction between criticizing the Government and the System.

Pretty much every American seems willing to accept that their Government is not perfect and needs constant correction to keep to the right path; that its capable of corruption etc.

Pretty much every American I have met or talked with seems to think that in general their government system is the best possible option over other systems - and many seem to assign almost religious overtones to the US Constitution, like it was handed down to them from the hands of Jehovah himself.

If a game came out that portrayed the US Government as a malevolent system that dominated and abused its population, that portrayed the Constitution as a scheme/tool that permitted that domination, and which showed the US Government rounding up civilians both at home and abroad and slaughtering them in concentration camps - and encouraged you to support this view of the US by participating, I think that US gameplayers and the US Government might have some objections (although some would love it of course). I agree that they would likely founder on the rights of free speech mind you, but someone would be speaking up. There is a distinction between portraying individual Americans as evil and portraying the system as evil.

Now, I don't think that the US Government or the US Constitution are in fact evil. I do think that Corporations are inherently immoral, and that they have far too much control over the machinations of the Government (in some ways they appear to be the Government effectively). The truth of the situation is somewhere in between I think.

Re:Waaaaahh

[sopssa]

Shouldn't the story here be about censorship rather than game content? Make a game that portrays Americans in a negative light and sell it here -- I doubt our Government will feel the need to prevent our people from buying it.

I really doubt there would NOT be any problems to release a game where you're an Iraqi fighting against the invading your country by American soldiers, trying to protect your country from the "bad". To give some extra perspective to the game, the American soldiers could be raping your families and completely destroying your country (interestingly that's not even made up story, as it's real). Or where you would be designing terrorist attacks against USA. Do you really think that would be allowed?

But there's no need to think what would happen. It would be banned for obscene material and the creators sent to jail, like in earlier case:

Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet and got over an year in jail time.

Re:Germans and Wolfenstein ....

[Anonymous Struct]

It's not like we don't have a culture of denial here in the US. We wiped out the American Indians pretty remorselessly. That's pretty close to genocide, but it doesn't get taught that way in our schools. Every nation tries to overlook the terrible things its done in the past. People and countries are pretty much all the same, wherever you go.

Re:they purposefully wrote this law

[NeutronCowboy]

I'm pretty sure I can see the headlines already, should Germany decriminalize the swastika: "Swastikas endorsed by German Government", "Germans are again flying SS symbols", etc.

I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.

Re:Germans and Wolfenstein ....

[theArtificial]

I think you're confusing Germany with Japan. Japan gloss over their ww2 history with the atrocities they inflicted upon their neighbors and that is part of an on going problem to this day.

The Germans do not have a culture of denial. Time is spent covering this theme although it varies from instructor to instructor what material is covered. On average I would say anywhere from 3 to 4 months is spent studying but it is not a tabu thema.

Damals war es Friedrich is a book that is usually covered in class. The reason for the ban of symbols, greetings etc. are set in the constitution. Example: Imagine if you will that Democrats are outlawed - to be a member is illegal, the party is not official, the symbols are illegal. Fast forward 60 years and it becomes a big PC issue.

Russia was a part, but not the sole factor

[hellfire]

Russians who believe they single-handedly took down the Nazis are as foolish as Americans who think they single-handedly took down the Nazis.

As any reasonable historian will tell you, it was a combined effort. The Nazis lost because they were outnumbered. Had the Nazis not invaded Russia (or at least waited until the UK fell) or Japan hadn't bombed pearl harbor, the war would have been quite different. It's a testament to both the Russian and US soldiers for what they had endured, but to say simply that the only factor was how awesomely great one army was over the other discounts the thousands of factors that go into modern warfare.

Oh and by the way, we didn't get a whole lot of help from the Russians in the pacific theater. You like to take a lot of credit over the Nazis and you forget that the Italians and Japanese were allied with Germany and someone had to deal with them, and it sure wasn't the Russians.

Re:Sad

[Zordak]

but censorship by the masses is very alive and very well here in these United States.

Please explain to me how "censorship by the masses" is different from plain old "voting with your wallet." For my part, I see a huge, fundamental difference between the people saying, "No, we're not interested," and the government saying, "No, you will not be interested."

Re:Waaaaahh

[kevinNCSU]

I'm curious what America's response would be to their people being demonized. I'd love to see a game set in Iraq or Vietnam where America invades your country, kills your people and attempts to rest control of your homeland away from you.

You mean like a game where you play as a suspected American terrorist who murders hundreds of civilians in an airport of a superpower and then that superpower comes and fucks your country up? I played it this morning, it's called Modern Warfare 2, and we reacted to it by buying millions of copies. Any more questions?