'Hot damn!' Occasionally, the fire control officer chuckles in approval. 'Woah,' yells the TV operator after a direct hit. Your only feedback comes from your fellow crew. Instead, the entire mission is accompanied by the malevolent bass note of your plane’s engine – a flat drone unmoved by the chaos on-screen. You hear the clack of your cannons firing, but not the boom when they hit, removing you from the consequences. The distance in itself is dehumanising – not only because you're spared the blood dispersed by your explosions below, but the screams too. One of the game’s first scenes traps you inside the body of a deposed president as you are flung into the back of a car, snarled at by your captors and driven to your execution, robbed completely of control.

By the time Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released in 2007, however, Infinity Ward was using perspective for highly specific emotional goals. Originally it was a conceit that simply allowed you to see the breadth of the European Theatre of World War 2, through the eyes of a US paratrooper, an SAS saboteur, and a Russian volunteer raising the victory banner over the Reichstag. But what follows, in this case, makes you afraid to fire those weapons at all.Ĭall of Duty has always played with perspective. It's a gratuitous display typical of shooters of the time, and particularly those out of Infinity Ward, a studio whose admiration for soldiers and their equipment was clear. The camera swoops around a 3D render of the aircraft, slowing to circle the cannons that hang phallically from the ship’s exterior 83.2 inches long, ten inches wide, 4,200 rounds per minute. The scene opens with a fetishistic accounting of your firepower, as if a pre-awakening Tony Stark were demonstrating the military might of a new superweapon. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’s eighth mission, Death From Above, casts you as the gunner in an AC-130 Spectre, a US aircraft designed for close air support at night.

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