This is an essay that I originally wrote in December of 2024. As such, some of this does pertain to content that has since been censored from the full release of Ready or Not. However, it is all content that VOID Interactive at one point thought was totally acceptable to play through in their shitty B-ranking SWAT roleplay game.
Two pretty major things to get out of the way before we start the video. First, a trigger warning and spoiler warning, and second, a disclaimer. Grab a drink and get comfortable, this is a long one. Spoilers for: The entire Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, Spec Ops: The Line, and VOID Interactive’s Ready Or Not. HEAVY Trigger Warning for: Torture, terrorism, violence against children, mass shootings, bombings, implied CSA, racism, police brutality, suicide, homophobia, and alt-right “humor”. If you need a break, feel free to take one at any time. Disclaimer: I am not calling you a bad person for playing Ready Or Not. I am not calling you a bad person for playing Call of Duty. This is not an attack on capital-g Gamers (see: young, cishet white guys). This is me asking you to consider these games beyond a purely surface level.
Should you be able to “play” through a waterboarding?
In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019), there is a brief section where you play as Farah Karim, a freedom-fighter from the (fictional) Middle-Eastern country of Urzikstan. During a flashback sequence, Farah is interrogated and waterboarded. This might seem par-for-the-course for most gritty war media. But there’s a small difference. This waterboarding in Modern Warfare is interactable. You, the player, have to dodge the stream of water.
Me saying that just seems weird, right? It is odd to have a playable waterboarding sequence. But just being uncomfortable doesn’t necessarily mean that something is morally or artistically wrong. However, I’d like to raise a point from the Narrative Director for the game, Taylor Kurosaki. In an interview with Russell Holly of WindowsCentral, Kurosaki says “you mentioned that we're forcing the player to do this, we're actually not. You have the choice as the player in that moment to just submit, and to not try to get air, and the game progresses” (Holly).
He’s not lying. You can, in fact, choose to do nothing. But you’re still making a choice there. Choosing to do nothing is still making an interaction with the content. No matter what Kurosaki says, you are forced to interact, short of just stopping the game entirely. Choosing not to do anything is still making a choice, and making a choice is interacting.
(Chronologically) later in the same campaign, the power dynamic is changed. In Clean House, Captain John Price leads an SAS team on a no-knock raid through a suspected terrorist stronghold. This level was central to the game’s marketing, and was the mission everyone talked about. Partway through the mission, after you've been trained to fire on all targets, you enter a room containing a mother and her infant child. The mother rushes for her child, in the crib. It is entirely possible, either by panicking in the moment, or through intentional experimentation, to kill both of them. Assuming you kill the mother, another soldier wordlessly picks up the baby, and places it back in the crib. Killing the baby fails the mission, “Children are noncombatants” displayed on the fail screen. Doing this multiple times over gives you the simple message “Are you serious?”, and boots you back to the menu.
This isn’t even the only example of a child inadvertently dying to a choice made by the player. In a scene in the US Embassy in Urzikstan, a boy and his father are behind a glass wall, being held captive by a terrorist known as The Butcher. The Butcher gives the player’s character, Sergeant Kyle “Gaz” Garrick, the option to open the door, and let them go. When Gaz opens the door, the Butcher immediately shoots him, failing the mission. Assuming you choose not to, the boy and his father are both executed. The only remark made by Captain Price is a simple “Hey. We’ll get him”, as if the scene was added late into production, purely for the sake of shock value.
Does the player technically have the choice to interact here? Yes.
Does this choice matter for anything? No.
Should you be able to “play” through the murder of a child?
Again, these are strange choices. These few nameless characters didn’t need to be included, and they didn’t need to be interactable. But they are. An intentional choice was made, for this baby and its mother to be able to be killed. An intentional choice was made, for the player to be unable to progress at least one child dying. These aren’t even the only scenes of violence against children in the game (with the child Farah sequence coming to mind), but they are some of the most notable.
Public opinion seems to be that Call of Duty is known for these sorts of controversies. In the original Modern Warfare games, there are comparable scenes of interrogation and violence against children. Call of Duty is known for rage-bait marketing; hype up the next installment with input from “military experts”, have a standout controversial mission, and watch as the rage-articles pile up.
In the original Modern Warfare trilogy, for example, there are sequences firing on a church in Modern Warfare (2007), the No Russian airport attack in Modern Warfare 2 (2009), the chemical car bomb scene in Modern Warfare 3.
One rage-article that I don’t believe Infinity Ward intended for, however, is centered around the Highway of Death. The Highway of Death, more formally known as Highway 80, is a road that runs between Iraq and Kuwait. In February of 1991, a coalition of American, British, Canadian, and French bombing runs with cluster and incendiary munitions massacred the fleeing Iraqi population, both military and civilian.
0 casualties were dealt to the allied forces on the Highway of Death. Between 500 and 600 casualties on the Iraqi side were accounted for. Again, fleeing military and civilians. This wasn’t a battle or skirmish, this was a massacre.
In the universe of the Modern Warfare remakes, this event does indeed happen, as seen in the mission Highway of Death. However, Farah recounts that it was the Russians who massacred those on the highway, with America’s role in the war crime totally erased.
Naturally, this caused an outrage, with articles (Hall, Batchelor, and Gault) and essays being released confirming that no, actually, this was historical revisionism. Rather the screw-up was the fault of the studio’s “military experts”, the writers, or an intentional piece of rewritten history to be used as propaganda is to be determined.
Should you be able to “play” through the falsified record of a war crime?
The newest installment has its own versions of rage-bait missions, Flashpoint and No Russian, terror attacks on a crowded stadium and an airplane, respectively. However, there’s another interrogation scene, one that’s so tame it’s boring by comparison.
While trying to find the terrorist responsible for the previously mentioned attacks, you use his accountant to get his location. Rather than threatening this woman’s family or waterboarding her, like they might’ve in previous games, they… withdraw money from her bank account.
This is absurdly tame. So tame that it caught me off guard when first watching it. Why would a series so intent on "not caring about being canceled”, and that thrives on rage articles not have a more brutal interrogation?
Maybe the people at Sledgehammer decided that they didn’t want to deal with the controversy of having another Butcher interrogation scene on their hands, and maybe they just didn’t have time to develop a more fleshed out scene. Or maybe it's because the accountant is a white woman, and that's just too far.
Maybe interrogation scenes shouldn’t be playable.
If Modern Warfare ‘19 is shock for shock’s sake, Spec Ops: The Line is shock for storytelling’s sake. The Line was the final installment of the declining Spec Ops series. The series released to critical praise, but commercial success. A cult classic might be a fitting label.
The game is difficult to market; on face value, it seems to be a generic 3rd-person cover shooter, riding the coattails of the success of games centered around the War on Terror. However, hiding under that “generic” exterior, is some of the most powerful storytelling I’ve seen in a war shooter.
If you’re going to play any game from this video, let it be Spec Ops: The Line, and if you do, go in blind.
I won’t go into a play-by-play of the story, since there are already people who’ve done full literary analyses of the game, much better than I could. However, I want to talk about two stand-out sequences from the game.
In the first, Captain Martin Walker and the other two men in his Delta Force squad are attempting to make their way through a heavily guarded area of the wasteland that was once Dubai, known as The Gate.
Realizing the odds that the three-man squad has against what appears to be an entire army, Walker suggests that they use a nearby white phosphorus mortar. Lugo, the typical comedy relief character protests, saying there has to be another way, “there’s always a choice”. But to progress, the player has no choice.
For those of you that don’t know, white phosphorus is a real-world chemical weapon, used in incendiary munitions. Once white phosphorus starts burning, it is extremely difficult to put out, and can lead to catastrophic injuries. It can also technically be used as a smokescreen. This is its intended purpose, and using it as an incendiary is HIGHLY frowned upon.
As the player, through Walker, shells the enemy encampment with phosphorus, his face comes into focus, the bombardment finally ending when the enemy trench is set alight entirely.
As the three men begin to make their way through the desecrated area, they come to a realization; the trench they just set on fire was a camp of civilian refugees. As the camera slowly pans into the charred remains of a mother and daughter wrapped in a final embrace, the arguing of Walker’s other two squadmates fades into the background. Walker snaps to focus, blaming his direct, if unintentional, massacre of the camp, on the enemy, the Damned 33rd.
Again, here you have realistically no choice as to whether or not to interact with the choice made. You have the choice to rain hellfire over the encampment, and progress, or to not, and stop playing the game. Lugo himself references this, with one of the last lines of dialog before Walker mans the mortar’s targeting system.
The Line forces you to make an awful choice; but by interacting, and directly having you be the one to call the mortar strikes, you get to walk through the aftermath of your decision. Rather than making the scene interactable purely for shock value (albeit, it is shocking), it also serves to actually contribute to the game’s story.
The white phosphorus scene directly puts the player in Walker’s shoes, going against orders, stopping at nothing to chase down what’s ultimately a dead man in the middle of nowhere.
Eventually, Walker meets with a CIA operative, Jeff Riggs. Riggs intends to steal the last of the city’s water supply from the 33rd, returning it to the civilian insurgent forces. This will totally cripple the 33rd, allowing peace to finally settle in the region.
Riggs and Delta Team capture the water trucks, but once Riggs realizes that they won’t be able to make it past the 33rd’s defenses (or possibly all along), he changes plans, crashing the trucks. Presumably, by killing anyone left in Dubai, Riggs was intending to cover up the failure of the US “relief” efforts in the area.
Now, here is where the beauty of the phosphorus scene truly shines. In the white phosphorus scene, Delta Team is working off of an assumption (assuming that the entire encampment was exclusively soldiers), but they know that the mortar is still an inhumane means of fighting.
Lugo’s line, “there’s always a choice”, shows that they are fully aware of the inhumanity of the situation, and their actions. While they might not know exactly the situation they’ve gotten themselves into, they are fully aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they could be harming more people than they intended. The deaths of these civilians are indisputably Walker’s (and therefore the player’s) fault.
However, can the same argument be made for the destruction of Dubai’s water supply? Delta Team was lied to, either by omission of what Riggs’ “plan B” was, or by Riggs entirely lying about his intentions. Because of this, the waters are muddied.
Yes, the player’s actions (stealing the trucks) did result in the destruction of the water, but their intent was to redistribute it to the refugees. The player has to consider if this is their fault or not, and I believe without the earlier white phosphorus scene, players wouldn’t be likely to introspect to this degree.
Spec Ops: The Line, is an absolutely prime example of how to make interactivity, even in the case of committing an appalling crime, genuinely narratively important.
Seeing how well The Line handles interactivity, and how poorly Modern Warfare ‘19 handles it, it makes me wonder about the now-canned Rainbow Six: Patriots. Patriots was the precursor to the extremely successful Rainbow Six: Siege, but was far more campaign focused.
In the campaign, the Rainbow team would’ve been fighting a homegrown terrorist militia group known as the True Patriots. From what little we did see of the game, it would’ve taken a similar story approach to Modern Warfare 2019 — “We get dirty, the world stays clean”, as Captain Price might say. The press release kit for the game calls it the “doing-whatever-it-takes mentality” (Bergmark).
From the target gameplay footage, released in 2011, we can see some morally-dubious choices made for the “greater good” — civilian police are fired on; to prevent them from detonating a bomb vest, a civilian trapped in a taxi is ignored; in order to reach the vest in time to prevent its detonation, lastly, and what I want to focus on most: the civilian man who had a bomb vest forcibly strapped to him is thrown off a bridge, in order to prevent the deaths of 200 others. A classic trolley problem scenario.
However, the prompt, the interaction, to throw him off the bridge isn’t “throw”, or “toss”. It’s “eliminate threat”. Another layer of abstraction from what the player is doing, versus what is occurring in the story.
Credit where credit is due, the creative director for Patriots, David Sears, did not sidestep the question of interactivity in the same way that Kurosaki did. Rather, he said “We’ve seen counterterrorists fight terrorists that look very different from them (…) we hope the players will ask themselves the question (...) could I really pull the trigger on someone that is essentially just like me?” (Game Informer).
Sears gives good reason as to why he and his team chose to make these morally-gray choices interactable. These interactions force the target audience of the game (aforementioned capital-G Gamers) to confront the question the game presents.
Especially in the midst of the War on Terror, this is a fascinating question. The original Modern Warfare is a prime example of the opposite: when the enemy is a stereotypical “Arab” terrorist, do you have any qualms taking extreme measures to defeat them?
The answer is probably not.
Meanwhile, when “the enemy” looks like you, when “the enemy” is worried about things like the economy and politics, when you can relate to and understand the ambiguous “enemy” — are you still willing to do whatever it takes?
While there’s only small bits and pieces of information we know about the game, I can’t help but wonder what it would’ve looked like. Would it have been a gritty, “gloves off” look at “the reality of modern day terrorism”? Would it be interaction with the shocking purely for the sake of shock? Would it have been a Modern Warfare ‘19, or a Spec Ops: The Line?
Or would it have been something else entirely?
While it’s almost certain that we’ll never see what Rainbow Six: Patriots would’ve looked like, I feel like the recent release of Ready Or Not gives us a glimpse into the worst possible timeline of what this game could’ve been.
I’m going to be as upfront as possible; I do not like Ready Or Not. To me, this game feels incompetent with the subject matter it handles, at best, and exploitative of real world tragedies, at worst.
With that in mind, I’d like to give a little information about myself. I am a queer person, in a small town in the Southern US, with family in law enforcement, I've lived through a shooting. I think it’s easy to understand why my view of the police is not favorable.
Now, back to the content of the game.
Twisted Nerve is one of the first missions that D Platoon, the game’s fictional SWAT unit is sent on. A raid on two back-to-back properties suspected of being meth labs. These properties are decrepit and quote-unquote “abandoned” homes in an affordable, low-income housing development.
Upon raiding the homes, you can find them neglected, busted windows and TV’s shattered, flickering light across the walls. Rooms with walls knocked down to make room for the cooking equipment. Bathrooms turned into storage closets for all of the “product” being produced.
This feels stereotypical, at best. Stereotyping low-income neighborhoods as strung-out, crime-ridden pits of squalor, calling them “the projects”, is an interesting “choice”. But, to be fully honest, this is not for me to speak on.
On the second floor of the second home, you can find a child’s room. Contrary to the rest of the home, the room is relatively well taken care of, and tidy. The child’s name is spelt in block-letters on the wall; Molly. Laying on the bed, on the opposite side of the room from where you most likely entered, you can find Molly herself.
Seizing on the bed, with a needle beside her, Molly has OD’ed. In earlier releases, looking on the nightstand, you can see a condom.
This feels exploitative.
This feels like rage-bait content.
Maybe, just maybe, I’m having exactly the response VOID Interactive intended for me to have.
My gut is telling me “There is no reason for this to be in this game. It adds nothing to the story, it is only here for shock value, and I am shocked”.
Really. Should you be able to “play” through abandoning a recently-sexually assaulted child?
I’m gonna be honest, each mission I’ll be covering from here on out feels worse and worse. If you want a break, now is the time to take it.
You may be able to give VOID the benefit of the doubt with Twisted Nerve. The mission immediately after, The Spider, is much worse.
In The Spider, D Platoon storms a harm-reduction clinic turned “talent agency” run by one George Brixley. The twist? Brixley is using this talent agency to scout for potential victims to send to a ring of child predators.
Now, could this, with proper handling, have the potential, to have been a genuinely compelling plot point, that could start a conversation about the exploitation of children in impoverished communities? Or could it at the very least have been an interesting mission, that respectfully handles a serious subject? Yes! However this is about Ready or Not.
Upon entering the talent agency (which is in a fictional version of Skid Row), you raid it rather quickly, containing the parents of the children who are being groomed by the agency, most likely killing the armed security, and if you complete the mission as intended, taking Mr. Brixley into custody.
Now, while this level does use a very, very serious subject as mere shock bait, it leads to the next level I want to talk about, Valley of the Dolls. Where, guess what, the exact same thing happens, but it's somehow handled even worse!
In Valley of the Dolls, a lead from the Brixley Talent Time raid leads D Platoon to raid the house of millionaire adult actor Amos Voll, who manufactures and distributes CP. While The Spider merely hinted at, and then butchered, a topic as serious as CSA, Valley of the Dolls comes out full frontal, and absolutely fails to stick the landing.
Raiding the Voll mansion goes similarly to raiding the talent agency. Civilians temporarily detained, armed security killed, sicko brought in for questioning. However, the environment is much different. There are rooms, especially on the lower level of the house, that have a very clear, and very disturbing purpose. These rooms are for manufacturing CSAM, and disposing of the child victims.
However, these rooms are used entirely as set dressing, something to gawk at. At best, the game is using the topic of serial child SA as a creep factor with no real messaging behind it. At worst, however, the game is exploiting the topic, and simultaneously using it to paint cops as end-all-be-all heroes.
There are banners spread across the police station used as a gameplay lobby between missions that are so on the nose, they’re almost simultaneously parody and not.
Seriously, “OUR MISSION IS NOT TO CREATE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS” already sounds sarcastic on it’s own, but “(OUR MISSION) IS TO BRING ORDER TO CHAOS” falls somewhere between “I fantasize about being a cop” and “I fantasize about being a Disney-villain level of fascist”.
Never, in any of these missions, do you have any interaction with a civilian, a victim of the very crimes you are supposedly trying to stop, outside of handcuffing them. EVEN THE OCCASIONAL CHILD YOU ENCOUNTER. Never are these children escorted to a safe location, or their injuries cared for, or anything besides “reported to TOC”.
At the end of the day, in Ready Or Not, every interaction you have with another character is with the barrel of a gun. Suspects, you shoot on sight. Civilians, you shoot on accident. Your teammates, you try to avoid shooting.
Even by the standards of a team-based tactical shooter, Ready Or Not lacks in interaction. Practically the only interaction you will have with your team is informing them of the location of a suspect or what to kill them with.
When an interaction can be used for shock value? “Report overdosing child”, “stop attack on a school campus”, “locate drive containing CP”, VOID Interactive goes above and beyond to ensure that it gets attention.
However, when an interaction can be used to further the story, or themes, or even realism of this “realistic” shooter, it’s ignored. Multiple times, upon seeing an injured civilian or child, you’re prompted by TOC to “make them stable”, provide them with enough medical care to keep them alive. How does D Platoon do this? They cuff them, or ignore them entirely.
Am I saying that every level needs to have a minigame designed to console a child and provide a gunshot victim with first aid? No, that’s absurd. However, I am saying that if Ready Or Not is going to be a mature, “realistic” shooter, it needs to handle all sides of what the situation it handles looks like, besides just those that can be used for shock articles and controversy clicks.
In fact, there are some occurrences of this in-game that feel so shallow, it’s almost as if they’re a parody. If any of the D-Platoon become too stressed from the events of their raids, they either
How are these conditions expressed to the player?
Single-sentence post mission blurbs. For Christ’s sake, The Sims 2 has a more complex stress system than this.
How about another mechanic so shallow and shocking, I had to have another person confirm what I was seeing. If you kill a civilian, AND desecrate their body, the prompts for commanding your squad (“stack up”, “fall in”, “clear room”) are replaced with a “kill me” command, you can press this and command your squad to kill you, and your squad will immediately friendly fire you.
Is this trying to send a message? Is this supposed to be a gameplay punishment? Is it supposed to be a joke? Is it parody? Again, this is literally so jarring and sudden, I literally have no idea what it is supposed to add to the experience, especially when some of the lines for the command come off as jokes, like; “uhhhh, TOC…”, “Just end it”, “I fucked up”, “Fuck it” and “Do me a favor will ya?”
I’d like to end by discussing the two most egregious levels in the game, Elephant and Neon Tomb. I would like to reiterate; as someone who has been through a shooting, I see these levels as, at best, hamfisted fanservice that makes light of serious tragedies. At worst, these are disgusting, exploitative cash-grabs that mocks real world victims of gun violence.
If you need another break, now would be the time to take it.
Before we move into discussing what is likely the game’s biggest controversy, Elephant, I’d like to first discuss the marketing and “hype” surrounding it. The inclusion of a “school shooting mission” was first announced through a Reddit post. When the a poster asked if the game would include one, a developer from VOID Interactive responded “You better believe it’s gonna”.
There are a million-and-one different ways that this could’ve been responded to tactfully, with some level of respect for the seriousness of the content being covered. However, this response would go to show just how dedicated to “respectfully” covering the situation VOID Interactive would be.
What surprises me even more besides this (now deleted) developer response, is the community response to it. A small number said that this should be handled with extraordinary levels of care and respect, a smaller number said that the level should not be included at all.
However, an overwhelming majority of comments applauded the dev for making such an amazingly inept comment. The original poster replied “big balls dev making big balls game”, others responded “based chad developer”, “my man”, and applauding the dev for “not bending the knee to woke censorship”.
I cannot believe I have to say this. Jesus Christ. A developer responding in this way to this question is not by any means a “political issue” or even “woke liberals getting offended”. This isn’t even an issue of censorship. This is an issue of having basic respect for extremely serious, real-world deaths.
The immediate aftermath was obvious. Scathing articles were released, mainstream news coverage was made, and Ready Or Not lost its original publisher Team17. In a statement made by the VOID Interactive team on Twitter, the developer was “reminded” of the “required care in discussing this material”.
As far as a brief sidenote, I would like to mention some other parts of their social media presence I found interesting. A few scrolls past seeing VOID refer to the game’s players as “officers” (which left a bad taste in my mouth), is another apology, this time for having alt-right jokes and euphemisms for the n-word featured as (supposedly) placeholders.
I think that these posts, combined with the comments we’ve seen from their target audience, are starting to paint a pretty clear picture of who these devs are, and what ideals they hold.
For what it’s worth, I’ve reached out to the VOID Interactive team for comments regarding the content of Elephant and Neon Tomb, and whether or not it is to their standards for respect, as well as the conduct of the developer who originally commented on the Reddit post.
Now, finally, to cover the content of Elephant.
Elephant is one of the few missions in the game to feature 911 calls as part of the pre-mission briefing. D Platoon is sent to the fictional Watt Community College to respond to reports of an active shooter. It plays out exactly as expected.
Upon entering the Science Hall of Watt Community College, an injured campus security guard is spotted, and TOC informs the platoon to “stabilize him”. D Platoon cuffs him, and continues about the campus.
There’s genuinely not even that much to say about the mission. It speaks entirely for itself. You cuff civilians, down the three shooters, and disarm three bombs. I’ll let a bit of gameplay footage speak for itself.
As a student in the States, shootings are nothing new. They’re in the news, and my own school has been threatened on multiple occasions. Lockdown drills are a regular occurrence. In the majority of these shootings in recent memory, it has not been a police officer nor a SWAT member who has stopped them. The perpetrator, or perpetrators, killed themself.
Should I even have to ask?
Should you be able to play through a school shooting?
I’d like to cover one final mission, Neon Tomb. Before I do, I would like to give some context regarding a real world shooting.
The Pulse Nightclub was a queer bar and dance club in Orlando. Florida. On June 12th of 2016, at 2:02 AM, a shooter who proclaimed himself to be allied with ISIS entered Pulse and took the lives of 49, as well as injuring a further 53 people, primarily queer Latino people. This was supposedly retaliation for the killing of another ISIS member.This is a tragic, tragic event. At the time, it was the deadliest terror attack since 9/11, and remains one of the deadliest to this day. One of the lingering memories of the massacre comes from the videos of phones ringing in the club, loved ones of the victims trying to reach out to check on them. The calls would not be answered.
On June 12th of 2022, exactly 6 years after the tragedy at Pulse, VOID Interactive released Neon Tomb, a mission wherein D Platoon is tasked with stopping a Yemeni terrorist group from committing a retaliatory attack on a nightclub known as Neon. Upon entering the club, the first sound besides the pounding music is the ringing of abandoned cellphones.
There is literally no way for me to describe how disgusting this is. VOID Interactive has, for all intents and purposes, recreated the Pulse Nightclub massacre, for LARPers and wanna-be operators to play through like any other video game level. There is a time, place, and way to handle subjects like this. Can you cover topics such as mass shootings in interactive media respectfully and tastefully? Yes. But Ready or Not does not make any attempt to, beat-for-beat recreating a real-life massacre less than a decade after it happened.
Again, even giving VOID Interactive the benefit of the doubt, this is a fantasy of a real world tragedy, where the player gets to be a “hero”, swoops in, and saves the day. At worst, this level is designed to appeal to the exact people who would be on the end of the barrel of a SWAT member. The amount of dog-whistles, “jokes”, and downright disgusting comments made by not only the game’s community, but its developers as well, shows the target audience of the game in plain view.
You should not be able to “play” through a recreation of a real world mass shooting.