When I was 12, my favourite book in the world was An Illustrated Guide to Rifles and Sub-Machine Guns by Major Frederick Myatt. I was fascinated by it, I memorised every fact; I could have told you the muzzle velocity of just about any weapon in the modern armoury. I thought the Colt Commando rifle was the most beautiful object ever designed.
I turned out fine.
As humans, we’re often interested in terrible things – and sometimes these things are sport and war. If you think about it, the two are inextricably related. Sport no doubt evolved as a form of ritualised combat – a counter-point to hunting as a method of exploring and releasing aggression. In his fascinating book The Soccer Tribe, the people watcher Desmond Morris observed the primal, atavistic appeal of the sport – its theatrical representation of victory and defeat, enclosed in a stadium of baying supporters. For hundreds of thousands of years, we all lived by spears and senses, killing to survive, relying on bodily systems of speed, violence and adrenaline. Those chemicals still sluice inside a lot of us.
So I’m not at all surprised that, every year, the best-selling games are Call of Duty and Fifa. What’s more, I don’t think that the people who enjoy these annual excursions into tribal competition are stupid. Primarily because I’m one of them.
The joke about Fifa is that it’s the same game every year, just with new team sheets and tweaked shirt designs. This both is, and isn’t, true. It is also an utterly irrelevant complaint to fans, who understand that football itself both is, and isn’t, the same every year. What these fans want from Fifa is the chance to experience the competition they adore at the highest level; the school-boy fantasy rendered in pristine detail. Within the game, co-conspirators find a graphically alluring representation of televised sport where they can enact playful jousts and pretend they are grand encounters.
It is, in short, a social role-playing adventure; a shared imaginative journey. Indeed, when the writer Alice O’Connor previewed Fifa 15 this year for gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun, she brilliantly treated the game as some strange new entrant into the fantasy strategy genre:
If you’ve played Unreal Tournament’s Bombing Run mode, you’ll get the basics: two teams are fighting to gain control of a bomb (defused, in this) and launch it into the enemy’s goalzone. Except you only have melee attacks. It’s made trickier yet by playing from a third-person perspective, and having 11 characters yourself. You only control one at once, switching in real-time (no tactical pause!), while an AI babysits the rest.
It is true though. In Fifa, you represent your team, the team you love, and you battle your friends, online or in the same room, and you live out that rivalry, that pain and pleasure, that all sports fans are cursed to live out every Saturday. Except in Fifa, it is not as a passive viewer, unable to intercede, except through superstitious routines or shouting at the opponent’s keeper before a penalty. In Fifa, the football fan is finally in control. It is glorious catharsis. And better still, you get to play against and beat your friends and talk and laugh about it, which for some people is as close as they ever get to saying, “I love you, old pal”, without alcohol.
Meanwhile, Call of Duty is a machine of absorption. Every component of this military shooter behemoth is painstakingly designed to put you into Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow state” – that sense of total immersion into the task at hand. The quick-stop menus, the stabs of guitar music, the blipvert loading times, the smooth 60 frames-per-second visuals; the speed of death, the speed of resurrection. A Call of Duty multiplayer map is a football stadium crossed with a Sam Peckinpah movie – everything is fast, brutal and lusciously choreographed. The bullet noises, the footsteps, the re-loading animations, they all work like the flashing lights and hypnotic tunes of the Las Vegas slot machines, lulling you into woozy world of repetition and psychologically pleasing feedback.
In his documentary The Perverts Guide to Cinema, Slavoj Zizek refered to video games as a medium of self-expression rather than escape. Both Call of Duty and Fifa offer many avenues for ostentation, allowing players to developer and display skilful brilliance – they let people be creative in a very direct and visual way. You have to be a fellow fan to see it and appreciate it, but that’s part of the allure. These games are about identity too.
Both “franchises” also say something important about games - and about entertainment in general: that any work of popular culture can be simultaneously enjoyable and problematic. Call of Duty tells a neo-con fantasy of victory through brute firepower and fetishised military technology; it tells us nothing of suffering or the ripples of hatred and resentment that pass from one generation to the next through every chemically scarred war zone. Fifa joyfully accepts and reproduces the crass monetisation of football, celebrating the excesses of TV coverage and the vacuous cult of the superstar player. Its simulation is hyper-realistic; it is football’s Disneyland.
But as entertainment products, these games understand their audiences and provide exactly what is required – a competitive space in which battle can be seamless and enjoyable. Both games fit into people’s lives, effortlessly filling minutes, hours or days, whatever is available. Each fresh instalment promises a grander experience and they usually deliver it to an extent, but like soap operas, sitcoms and James Bond moves, they don’t stray too far from the underlying formula.
We all think we want new experiences, but most people actually don’t, not really; we work on repetition and security, we like familiar systems of pleasure. Every goal is a narrative refrain to savour and celebrate. And in Call of Duty, every kill is a catchphrase.
