The next 'Call of Duty' parallels Edward Snowden's story
Image: Activision
It's a dystopian sci-fi vision we've become oddly accustomed to seeing, but in the new Call of Duty game some elements are uncomfortably familiar, like the Edward Snowden analog who seems to be central to the game's conflict.
Thanks to the nearly three years it's been in development, Black Ops 3 seems to have more new features than the last five Call of Duty games combined. It's unbelievably fun to play. But the developers also had much longer to flesh out the game's bleakly futuristic world and the story it will tell. It's a story that starts with a leak.
Image: Activision
Drip, drip, drip
In Black Ops 3 you play as a technologically-augmented soldier, a member of a "black ops" team that doesn't have to play by the normal rules of engagement and diplomacy. As we've seen in past games, that means you can kidnap, torture and generally do whatever you want, wherever you want, as long as it gets you closer to your objective.At the beginning, that objective is to investigate a secret CIA site in Singapore that suddenly and mysteriously goes "off the grid."
"But that's not the end," said Jason Blundell, the game's campaign director and senior executive producer at Treyarch. "What follows is the largest leak of intelligence in military history, which leads to the collapse of covert operations worldwide, creating utter chaos. Your mission is to go behind enemy lines to find your brothers and uncover the disturbing truth."
Blundell was speaking to a small group of journalists and employees from Treyarch and Activision in an intimate, dark theater. Screens adorned three walls, five arrayed vertically on either side and even more in the middle. As he described this apparently disastrous leak, images of official-looking documents with large swathes of redacted text obscured by ominous black bars fanned out around him. They spread throughout the room, flitting from one screen to the next. The effect was impressive and, clearly, meaningful.
It's impossible to hear those words and see those images without immediately thinking of Edward Snowden's ongoing plight, and that fact is not lost on Black Ops 3's developers. Call of Duty is one of the most successful video game franchises of all time, and each new entry seems more mired in current events and controversies than the last. Obviously, this is no accident.
"We always have an eye out," Blundell explained later, during an interview with journalists. "We're reading the news articles. We're seeing what's happening. There's certain ideas that are obviously in the zeitgeist, you know, in popular culture. There's been leaks throughout history for as long as you want."
But the leaks in Black Ops 3 are not some "leaks throughout history." They're a clear and direct analogy to Snowden's NSA files, with one key difference: these leaks actually have devastating effects, and almost seem to imply that Snowden's might too.
"The leak [in the game] is of clandestine operations," explained Treyarch Studio Head Mark Lamia during the same group interview. It contained CIA secrets, he explained, including the locations of secret operations and military weak points. "Once all that's exposed, it creates incredible amounts of instability," he said.
A character in the game, a female soldier who's part of your squad, says during a mission shown to press, "The information Taylor released helped the NRC target strategic weak points in the Egyptian military defenses. They are gaining territory fast. Civilian casualties are high. Cairo's on the brink of total collapse."
Authorities have accused Snowden of stealing documents that pertained to more than just the U.S.'s invasive surveillance schemes, but there's no evidence that he did. And U.S. officials, despite their claims of "profound damage" and "lethal consequences for our troops in the field," have failed to provide evidence to press to back up their demonization of Snowden.
But many people aren't really aware of Snowden, or what he did. One of the best interviews with Snowden so far came from comedian John Oliver, who confronted the whistleblower on his HBO show Last Week Tonight with footage of random tourists in Times Square who have no idea who he is. Skip to 7:30 in the clip below to watch nobody manage to correctly identify Snowden.
Ripped from the headlines
The developers at Treyarch did their homework while making Call of Duty: Black Ops 3, whether the subject of the day was climate change, the legality of lethal drones or the current progress of robotic limb replacements. And it looks like the game may tackle these issues in a nuanced way and from a variety of perspectives, not just that of the beefed-up cyborg soldier who yells things as he kills people.But it’s hard to overstate this series’ reach. Lamia said the first Black Ops and Black Ops 2 alone garnered 100 million players between them, and last year's Call of Duty was far and away the biggest selling title of the year, according to sales data from NPD. It’s fair to guess that a lot of the people who will play Black Ops 3 will fall into the camp of those who've never heard of Snowden or aren't quite sure what exactly he did that pissed the government off so much.
Black Ops 3 won’t be out until the fall, and it’s unclear for now where the leak storyline will go or how the person behind it will ultimately be presented. Best case scenario, it gives players the ability to decide for themselves how they feel about the real thing.
