Modern Warfare 2’s ‘Borderline’ Mission Is The Latest Outrage

It’s always interesting to see what offends or upsets people on the internet. There’s no shortage of controversy and outrage to be found, and more often than not it’s contrived for attention or clicks (though not always, of course).

Kotaku’s review of the Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 single-player campaign brings up some of that game’s ‘controversial’ moments:

“A later mission has you literally shooting people climbing the United States border wall in Texas. Here, you’re playing as Mexican special forces tracking down cartel members who are wrapped up in the overarching narrative. These are, technically, the “bad guys” you’re shooting, but the gross imagery is still there. You are shooting at people climbing a border wall. And the United States-Mexican border wall of all places. How anyone thought, regardless of the narrative wrapping, this is in good taste is beyond me.

“This Texas level, “Borderline,” doesn’t stop there. Not only does the game literally ask you to “de-escalate” potential standoffs with armed American civilians by raising weapons at them. You do end up having to kill civilians who are armed and think they stand a chance against fully suited special forces. Then, when the cops show up to racially profile you (a cop in a cowboy hat literally says to Mexican special forces “it’s hard to tell you boys apart from the cartel”), if you shoot them, it’s game over: fade to black with a warning that “friendly fire will not be tolerated.” Mhmm.”

This is curious. For one thing, you shoot cartel members who are just returning from the American side of the border over the fence. Not immigrants. You’re playing as a Mexican Special Forces operator and you gun down bad guys who just smuggled a terrorist onto American soil. Bad imagery? I guess so.

I thought it was more interesting to see just how easy it was for people to scale the wall, personally. I also enjoyed just how much Spanish language this section of the game includes. There has never been this much Spanish or this many Mexican characters in a Call Of Duty campaign before, but this increased diversity and inclusion seems to have gone unmentioned by the gaming press, which is odd.

As for shooting the armed civilians, this only happens after they draw their guns and start firing. It’s either shoot back or be killed. In other scenarios, killing a civilian will result in a fail-state and restarting at the check-point.

At least Kotaku notes that you’re playing as Mexican Special Forces in this mission. Over at Polygon, they make the de-escalation bits an entire blog post and they don’t even get the details correct.

MORE FROM FORBES‘Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare II’ Single-Player Campaign Review: A Return To FormBy Erik Kain

“Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launches Thursday, but its campaign is playable right now for anyone who pre-ordered it; and it’s getting dragged pretty bad on social media for this awwwwwwkward quick-timer event in an early level. Apparently Task Force 141 is raiding a trailer park, and NPC Cletus comes out to tell the soldiers the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 is respected in this household. The player is then instructed to aim down sights at the civilian, who gets the hell back inside.”

So many details are wrong in this paragraph it’s almost humorous.

First, this is not a ‘quick-timer event’ (which involve pressing a key or button at a specific time or before a timer runs down) it’s merely pointing—but not shooting—your gun at hostile civilians who think you’re a criminal trespassing on their property. (You are trespassing but you’re not a criminal).

Second, this mission doesn’t involve Task Force 141, a multi-national elite force comprised of characters like Ghost and Captain Price. You play as a Mexican Special Forces operator under the command of Colonel Alejandro Vargas. The two operators cross the border as they pursue a terrorist named Hassan who is being smuggled by heavily armed cartel goons into the United States.

Third, the NPC is not named Cletus. Apparently in pointing out how it’s bad to de-escalate a situation like this involving civilians, Polygon feels the need to mock those very civilians for some reason. Peculiar. I guess that the diabolical act of living in a trailer park in Texas is grounds to be mocked.

The article continues:

“We searched online for actual training documents and/or tactics that police (or any armed paramilitary service) use to de-escalate a volatile situation with civilians, whether they are suspects of a crime or not. It didn’t take very long to find several such documents, and none told police professionals to do what Sgt. Maj. Rodolfo Parra does in those clips.”

The Mexican Special Forces operators are neither police nor “paramilitary” of any kind. These are highly trained elite soldiers and members of an actual army. They are absolutely outside their jurisdiction here, true, but doing so on behalf of CIA operative Kate Laswell.

Soldiers in urban environments often use the threat of violence to de-escalate potentially dangerous or hostile civilians. And yes, even police will sometimes point a gun at someone who has a weapon in an attempt to get them to put the weapon down. Hopefully that doesn’t lead to shooting and the threat of shooting does the trick. And we’ve seen this in plenty of movies that were not deemed controversial at the time.

I’m honestly not sure how Polygon or the many other people who are criticizing this scene think it should have been handled differently since nobody actually offers up an alternative.

Bizarrely, Polygon quotes the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Journal of Police Negotiations. But “The officer de-escalating the crisis should also avoid speaking too loudly, which may cause further anxiety and agitation,” is entirely unhelpful in this scenario, which is not about resolving a crisis but rather capturing a fleeing terrorist and the heavily armed cartel gangsters who are protecting him. This isn’t a police negotiation, Polygon.

In the mission you’re essentially in a war-zone. You’re pursuing heavily armed combatants through an urban area and don’t really have time to stop and chat with angry Americans waving baseball bats at you. Pointing a gun at them seems to do the trick in relatively short order. Obviously that’s not going to work, or even be desirable, in totally different scenarios.

Then again, the Polygon piece was written by someone who clearly didn’t play the mission and it shows. Others, who tweeted clips of the scene, have left out all context, leading many commenters on Twitter and elsewhere thinking it’s police-related—unaware that you’re playing as Mexican soldiers pointing weapons at American civilians—an interesting and subversive twist given that we almost only ever see the opposite in film or video games, where American’s do the same thing in foreign lands.

Perhaps some interesting debate could have stemmed from this mission with a little context and a less trigger-happy impulse on the part of the media to generate outrage. Alas, that does not seem to be the case. Much more fun to create a controversy than to discuss or analyze a video game mission and what it’s actually trying to say.

I made a video about this as well, which you can watch below:

Let me know what you think about this mission and drummed up controversy on Twitter or Facebook.