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In a couple of interviews conducted between Game Informer and developers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare from Infinity Ward, we once again see that devs are just too afraid to admit that yes, their games are indeed political.
Given that nearly every single game is political in some way, this seems like a rather perplexing stance to take. It's even more so when we're talking about a game that has "war" in the title, takes place in Syria, places you in the shoes of armed military forces, and allows you to drop nukes or even white phosphorus on your enemies. Even if you ignored all of that, it's a game in which you use guns to murder people. That alone is an absolutely huge and very hot political topic, especially in the United States.
Developers from Infinity Ward say that their game isn't political because they don't reference any "specific" leadership, nor any "specific" fight, nor any "specific" political event. Taylor Kurosaki, Jacob Minkoff, and Joel Emslie continue on to use the "both sides" argument as to why their game isn't political. They don't want to say that one side is "right" or one side is "wrong." It's kind of like how there are two sides to the debate about climate change or vaccinations.
This isn't the first time we have seen developers and publishers fail to take a confident stance behind their work, and I doubt this will be the last time either. These incredibly cowardly takes can be seen in the interviews below.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and its totally apolitical story will be released on October 25, 2019!
WW2 games are a little different, because of the space in time we're very comfortable portraying exact events, being historically accurate (unless you're Germany and you've banned everything Nazi), using the names of real people, even naming and shaming allies who came out of the war with negative reputations, but we're in a much more complicated, connected and protected world these days. I don't at all blame developers of "geopolitically charged" games for replacing fact with fiction, changing things enough to be safe, for example we have to be really careful about how we portray Islam in media, it's a HUGE part of modern conflicts but in extreme cases a simple negative gesture can get you killed (Charlie Hebdo being one of many instances), we can't make a truly "authetic" game with so many restrictions, the oldest instance i can think is Ocarina of Time needing an update to remove an Islamic prayer and i think you'd see similar issues if you too closely reference real world political... "challenges".
Outside of games recently Rammstein caught some flack for its politically, or maybe just historically charged music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc, i thought it made a refreshing change to see German's reference their not so distant history rather than try not to talk about it.
These are just my on the spot thoughts, i don't know if WW2, Nazis, music videos, religion or extremism are a part of this conversation.
Politics in games have never and do not have to directly reference events, places, or people to be "political." That's just moving the goalposts so as not to upset a certain segment of their potential customer base.
Wouldn't want to ruin a chance at getting a few extra bucks from jackasses.
I mean, even if you just take the fact that the game has guns is, in itself, political because of how polarizing the 2nd Amendment is in the States. And that's just a very minor, singular way in which a game can be political. Then you throw in everything else in a typical CoD game (military, war, superpowers, weapons, global domination, even the gender of your character, motives, kill/leave alive, methods/means of killing, races, nationalities, etc...) and yeah... games are just bathing in politics.
As far as guns go i might be outside of the conversation living in the UK, we have mass killings too they just happen with knives and cars instead (there are guns it's just rare), not to downplay the risks of civilian gun ownership in the USA but i don't think COD has any correlation with that topic being a game about war, it has guns yes, but i don't think anyone's taking issue with the use of guns in Fortnite or the beaches of Normandy. My position is that guns as tools of war are not directly political, there's a separation to be made especially as the weapons doing most of the killing these days are probably drone strikes.
Making a game about Mandy next door and the fear and risk her guns pose to society, that's very clearly a home soil political topic, using guns as tools to stop terrorism (which is what i assume the new game is about) is a war topic.