Call of Duty: Black Ops is a first-person shooter, created by Treyarch, that takes place around the Cold War, a time where tensions were rising between the United States and the Soviet Union. Apart from the setting, Black Ops is your typical first-person shooter with plenty of guns and action to keep the player engaged.
Treyarch is not afraid to depict acts of torture within its video games
However, among all that action you are also able to witness and play through some torture scenes found in the game. It’s also through these scenes that Treyarch seems to be trying to justify the use torture and thus conditions its audience to accept torture as a valid method of interrogation used by the good guys. Not only is torture unnecessary but being exposed to cruel and violent media starts to slowly desensitize us as a society and disconnects us from reality.
Take this torture scene for example, where an American soldier is psychologically and emotionally tortured by foreigners and being forced to play a game of Russian roulette with another fellow American captive. In this scene Treyarch shows how the the enemies are using torture on our soldiers. The point of this scene is to get people thinking on what’s stopping us from doing the same and using torture one the enemies as well so that they get a taste of their own medicine. This is exactly what Treyarch wants. Treyarch wants their audience to begin to justify the torture themselves even before they justify it for them.
In Black Ops the player gets to experience a scenario similar to the ticking time bomb torture scene.
In this next torture scene, the player is playing the role of the torturer who happens to be an American soldier extracting information from a captive enemy agent. By putting the player in control it puts them in a position of power which sparks their patriotism and conditions them to believe that torture can be used to achieve good things which in these case is to save the US from complete nuclear annihilation. By having such high stakes, suddenly torturing someone doesn’t seem like that bad of an idea compared to the millions that will die if the US is completely annihilated. Coincidentally, this scenario is similar to the ticking time bomb scenario in that there is a lot of stake and that the necessary information can only be obtained through torture thus justifying the use of it.
Some may argue that the players should know better than to let themselves be carried away by some video game propaganda. That may be true but this whole idea of Call of Duty using the torture scenes to help justify and condition us to accept torture is made even worse by the fact that most of the people that play this game are young adults who haven’t even cemented their views of the world yet. They are even more susceptible to the consumer cuture and the messages that they convey than any adult. The question is, will the American public realize that the media is slowly conditioning them or will it be to late by the time they realize?
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