The game’s mood of geopolitical confusion might appear to be an overly clever plot gimmick—Activision’s PR copy likens it to a “dynamic and intense spy thriller” pitting solitary would-be heroes against an emergent world order where they’re “never sure who to trust, and what is real.” But uncertainty is precisely what keeps players engaged and vigilantly trigger-happy: The only trustworthy broker in Black Ops 6 is, in most cases, a dead one.
Black Ops 6’s suspicion-filled netherworld is a fitting gloss on a generation’s worth of harrowing intrigue on the frontiers of American war-making. With regime-change initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan falling into subcontracted chaos, and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon a human rights horror masquerading as Israeli self-defense, American defense intellectuals might recognize Frank Woods’s disorientation as he launches into a fresh killing spree. In this sense, the Space Force’s Call of Duty champs might well be able to claim their gaming belts as a central advance in their combat training.
The “realistic” flourishes that heighten the combat experience in Black Ops 6 took shape under a Pentagon brief, one that predates the game’s early-’90s setting. In fact, when the modern gaming industry was coming online, the Department of Defense already had skin in the game. The concept of simulated warfare, which has inspired game designers and war planners alike, reaches back to Pentagon-led efforts to re-create a battle from the first Gulf War—and, earlier yet, to attempts to rehabilitate the US Armed Forces in the aftermath of their defeat in Vietnam. By creating readily executed models of combat on simulation consoles, US defense officials wanted to identify weak spots in military strategy and counterinsurgency planning, rendering mobilizations leaner and more efficient in the process.
Instead, what they produced was an influential and commercialized version of warfare for warfare’s sake, launched through Pentagon contracts with Silicon Valley’s rising mogul caste. By the time the first FPS gaming franchises debuted in the early ’90s, the basic model of the gaming/soldiering experience had been forged, auguring an interlocking vision of warfare as glorified gaming—and vice versa.