Call of Duty topped Korea's charts by invading Korea. Handle that with care

What does it say about a game when the country it imagines being invaded is putting it at the top of its charts? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 launched on October 23, and it is already No. 1 on Steam, both worldwide and in South Korea. Its premise is a full-scale North Korean attack on the South. In our view, that is not a quirky marketing footnote. It is the most revealing thing about the franchise right now.

What happened, briefly

As BFM reports, the campaign opens with a surprise invasion: paratroopers, plus a tunnel used to catch South Korean and American troops off guard. South Korean reactions have generally been positive. But Kim Sung-jae, president of the Kim Dae-jung Peace Center, wrote in the Hankyoreh last month that the game raises the question of whether it is appropriate to present the tragedy of the Korean War, and the current antagonism between South and North, as entertainment.

The game was developed by Infinity Ward. According to franceinfo, it is rated 18+ and includes the hanging of a North Korean deserter and several summary executions. It also lets you play a new North Korean leader for one mission. The same report says the game has to repair the damage after a badly received Modern Warfare III.

Realism is the product, not the side effect

Call of Duty has always sold plausibility. The fictional Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries are gone, and the setting is now a real peninsula where, as BFM notes, the two Koreas are still technically at war because the 1950-1953 conflict ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,000 US troops are stationed there. Conscription in the South runs 18 to 21 months. In our view, many potential buyers have lived or will live that reality.

That helps explain one South Korean reaction cited by BFM, which said this is what would happen if the North invaded: Gangwon overrun in under an hour, the defense line pushed back to Seoul's gates. It is a single commenter, but it shows the appeal. People are not buying a fantasy. They are, we think, buying a rehearsal of a fear they already carry. MCE TV describes proximity to current events as one of the franchise's habitual marketing levers. We would go further: it is the lever.

The discomfort is a feature of the pitch, and it needs an owner

Here is where we take a side. Spectacle is cheap, and Call of Duty is excellent at it. Franceinfo notes that Insider Gaming calls it the best campaign ever created, and that Eurogamer Germany calls it a real action blockbuster despite a weak script. A Best Buy Canada review found the story predictable. So the writing is not obviously where the care went. That is the worry.

A fiction that borrows a live geopolitical wound has a debt to it. Not censorship, and not an apology tour: just craft. If the North Korean leader's story and the civilians fleeing a bombed city are only set dressing for the next firefight, the criticism that war is being packaged as a product will be hard to dismiss. If the campaign gives its South Korean characters room to be people, as the Best Buy reviewer says the squad conversations with Park do, the game earns some of the license it is taking.

We should also be fair to the other side. A hit among the very people most exposed to the scenario suggests, to us, that many of them do not feel exploited. CNN reports mixed reactions in Seoul, and Korea JoongAng Daily says politicians and civic groups are debating it. Debate is healthy. A game that starts a conversation about the armistice is not automatically doing harm.

What we would do

For players: judge it on how it treats the human side, not only the gunplay. It is a roughly six-hour, 16-stage campaign, per franceinfo, so there is limited room for nuance, and we would not expect miracles from a series built around set pieces.

For Activision and Infinity Ward: the commercial lesson is tempting, and it is wrong to read it as "real fears sell, so go darker." Our reading is that real fears sell when the audience trusts the studio not to treat them as props. Spend that trust carefully. The next Call of Duty will probably want an even more current headline, and that is exactly when a little restraint will matter more than another explosion.