Right Click to De-escalate: Call of Duty and Turning Propaganda into Pleasure

This paper offers a case study of the Call of Duty franchise, focusing mainly on the Modern Warfare series, to examine how the pleasurable mechanics of first-person shooters carry political messaging about armed conflict. Drawing on Ian Bogost's framework of procedural rhetoric, the author argues that the franchise's systems make persuasive claims about war, and that these claims are easier to absorb because the fast, embodied, affectively immediate gameplay leaves little room for critical distance.

The analysis highlights several specific examples. In Modern Warfare II, a mission set on the US-Mexico border presents a de-escalation prompt that is undercut by the player character aiming weapons at panicked civilians, and an AC-130 sequence allows the player to destroy schools and residential buildings without the campaign acknowledging any breach of the laws of war. The multiplayer Killstreak system, which includes white phosphorus alongside conventional rewards, is read as normalizing questionable weapons. The original Modern Warfare trilogy is shown to draw on post-9/11 anxieties, while its enemies are portrayed as a dehumanized mass contrasted with professionalized Western forces. The paper also documents the franchise's ties to military recruitment and the use of its footage by official government channels.

The paper's central conclusion is that the series's depiction of war is selectively realistic, emphasizing authentic-seeming aesthetics such as weapon detail while omitting the harms of real conflict, producing what the author describes through Baudrillard's concepts of simulacra and the hyperreal. The author argues that the games' mechanics, including what is termed authored agency, restrict player choice and rarely acknowledge the moral weight of player actions, thereby glorifying the military and sanitizing armed conflict. The study is qualitative and textual, drawing on close readings of specific missions and a body of secondary scholarship rather than on survey or quantitative data.