In a recent article in Edge Magazine, N’Gai Croal (previously Newsweek’s videogame writer) bemoans the lack of agency in the No Russian mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In case you haven’t played the game, spoilers follow - it’s impossible to describe the mission without ruining its twists, so consider yourself warned.

A summary of the mission can be found here.

It’s a disturbing mission. In my playthrough, I didn’t shoot any civilians myself. I wanted to play as “heroically” as possible - so I did fire, but above the civilians’ heads - not that it made much of a difference to them. This was uncomfortable. The game renders the scene of carnage in a convincing way - the civilians struggle to survive, and there are a number of them that are gunned down trying to help others escape. It’s gutwrenching. Later in the mission, fighting the riot police, it became so hard to stay alive that I did fire on them, killing several, though as few as I could. Deciding to pull the trigger was agonizing. Fighting through, and finally escaping was a tangible, visceral relief - and the moment when Makarov shoots you, and you realize that you’ve been set up is shocking.

Not only did you go through a torturous experience, not only was there nothing you could do to actively stop it, but you did this voluntarily - and more - for nothing. Worse than nothing - your presence provides the impetus for the beginning of World War 3.

N’Gai Croal’s assertion is that the fact that “No Russian” is a relentlessly linear, scripted level makes it weaker is, I believe, mistaken. He proposes a solution where Makarov is not on the scene - and you can stop the Russians, but eventually become the fall guy anyway, allowing players to behave “heroically” while still maintaining the required elements of the plot. I think he misses the point.

“No Russian” is about knowing that what you’re doing is reprehensible, but doing it anyway, becuase the alternative, in your character’s eyes, is even worse. The setup is clear - Makarov is an absolutely vital target. You can’t kill him in game, because your character, Pfc. Allen, would never kill him. You can shoot the other terrorists, but it creates a fail state where Allen has blown his cover - again, something that Allen is explicitly not supposed to do.

The game forces you, through the limited actions you can take, to inhabit someone who has made an explicit choice to not behave “heroically” - to let the civilians die - perhaps even assist in their slaughter - in pursuit of what he believes is a greater goal. One that is worth the deaths of those people. I found that an immensely powerful experience, because I’m the kind of guy who would have tried to stop the terrorists. The issue, though, is that the way this is set up, Allen is a character who has made a decision that goes beyond the immediate horror you’re presented with - he understands that to achieve what he considers ultimate “good” the immediate bad is worthwhile.

In games, if I was given the option to “do good,” I would have done it - because it’s extremely rare in games for players to have to look beyond the immediate - to look at things in a larger perspective. In Croal’s setup, I would have “done the right thing,” then lost, and it would feel cheap and meaningless - a game forcing a lose state because it needs you to lose. Because I was forced to essentially “suck it up” - to have played through the level in the shoes of someone who has chosen to pursue this larger goal at the cost of something monstrous and horrible, it made me play as someone who’s inhabited a vastly different moral space than my own - and as a player, it’s forced me to inhabit that character - to accept, perhaps, that getting to Makarov was worth this much.

And then, in the end, not only does it strip me of that awful success, it doubly turns me into the villain - the fall guy for the full-scale invasion of the US by Russia. In the end, you do both the thing that is reprehensible, and twisting the knife, you’re also the lynchpin in the thing that was even worse. And your character, Pfc. Allen - dies knowing that this is what’s happened. It’s utterly heartbreaking.

Agency, in this case - the ability of a player to write their own character through action in-game - weakens the point. This is a really unusual thing for me to say, because I’d say that games are almost entirely about choice - but this is one case where restricting the player’s choices to the choices the character would have made really adds something immensely powerful to the experience. And letting me be the shortsighted hero, rather than one who’d taken the larger view, would have utterly destroyed the point of the whole thing.

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There is a bit of a side note that goes along with this, which may be really, really weird for some people. Ico is one of my favorite games ever. I had been looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus for years. And yet I’ve never finished it. A quarter of the way into the game, I got such an overwhelming feeling that what I was doing was *wrong*, I couldn’t bring myself to keep playing the game.

And yet, I feel like that’s part of the experience - and what makes it one of the most successful games I’ve ever seen. Because they forced me to question whether what I was doing was worth it - not only in the context of the game, but in the context of my actions, as a player. That they created an experience that was so disturbing to me that I couldn’t keep playing… hell, if that’s not a powerful piece of narrative, I don’t know what is.