On November 13th, a day when President Donald Trump declared electoral victory in Pennsylvania and Georgia, almost accidentally conceded the election, and then threatened to withhold a coronavirus vaccine from residents of New York State, the marketplace welcomed Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, a video game that glorifies the schemes of an image-obsessed, cognitively dubious President with an ambivalent relationship to both work and the rule of law. In Cold War, Ronald Reagan’s Central Intelligence Agency operatives are the under-heralded heroes of the early nineteen-eighties—by an accident of timing, the game celebrates coup enthusiasts in the C.I.A. in the midst of an ongoing anti-democratic power grab.
A lesser franchise might see this as a P.R. headache, but Cold War is the seventeenth entry in the main Call of Duty series, which maintains massive bipartisan appeal, despite—maybe even, in part, because of—its reactionary nature. (According to its publisher, Activision Blizzard, Call of Duty has outearned the entire canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Activision Blizzard has always insisted that the games are apolitical, a claim that is absurd on its face; with Cold War’s ode to the Reagan-era death squad, however, the franchise has now pushed so deeply into the territory of right-wing fantasy that it reaches a point of inadvertent parody, as if you could squint hard enough at a Steven Seagal movie that it could start looking like a Paul Verhoeven movie—a skewering of American empire rather than a paean. It’s too generous to credit Cold War as a work of knowing interactive satire; hiring former Navy SEALs and Oliver North as consultants over the years would have required Andy Kaufman levels of commitment. But, depending on who is playing it, the game exists in one of two distinct, ideologically opposite dimensions. Those who think it’s a blast and those who think it’s an abomination will likely cite the same evidence for their beliefs.
The game’s jet-setting trail of blood starts with Iranian operatives who are believed to have participated in the Iran hostage crisis and leads to a Soviet agent, known as Perseus, who, we’re told, infiltrated the American security state decades ago and is now plundering its nuclear secrets, in a final plot to humiliate the decadent West. It is Reagan himself, reanimated with an uncanny eeriness that evokes Resident Evil, who lays out your mission: protect the free world from Communist infiltration through, more or less, state-sanctioned extralegal murder. The player is cast as an unaccountable gunslinger. One minute, you’re tossing an unarmed Iranian man off a rooftop, in a revenge mission against the Shah; the next, you’re liquidating a whole village en route to securing a nuke that the Pentagon had squirrelled away, just in case it wanted to flatten South Vietnam.
Cold War attempts to break up its rote shooter game play (walk from room to room killing everyone, until you run out of rooms) with the addition of some basic clue-hunting and puzzle-solving tasks. Perhaps as an homage to Langley’s historical analytical competence, these puzzles make little sense, and whether you solve them or not creates almost no appreciable difference in your fate. The real substance of the game is in killing hundreds of people without ever really knowing why. You’re joined by a cast of rugged, gorgeous paramilitary hunks whose main purpose is sharing square-jawed quips about how much they enjoy kicking ass and breaking all the rules. The former C.I.A. director Robert Gates once described the agency under Reagan as a “blindered fraternity living on the legends and achievements of their forebears.” It’s a remark that Cold War appears to interpret as praise.
Despite four years of mutual antipathy, the C.I.A. and Trump are spiritual siblings, defined in large part by the extent of their impunity and their ability to foment fear and paranoia. The announcement trailer for Cold War is built around footage from a television interview, in 1984, between Yuri Bezmenov, the K.G.B. defector, and G. Edward Griffin, the American conspiracy theorist and longtime member of the John Birch Society. In the interview, Bezmenov claims that the Soviet Union was working to subvert the United States by brainwashing American students into becoming Marxist-Leninists. Griffin, now eighty-nine, recently hosted the fifth installment of the annual rally known as the Red Pill Expo, which, the New York Daily News reported, “gathered hundreds of unmasked conspiracy believers, along with militia leaders, Trump backers, anti-vaxxers and religious crusaders.” It is this apparently timeless strain of paranoia, founded on the assumption of leftist treachery, that guided the real C.I.A. through a half century of coups and dirty wars, and which now serves as cable-news fodder: a Republican President whom millions of Americans believe to be a Russian intelligence asset is attempting to cling to power by mobilizing millions of other Americans who think that a leftist cabal of Antifa, Satanic child traffickers, and the corpse of Hugo Chavez has subverted their government.
The Trump years have scrambled the traditional party-line views on the C.I.A., with historically skeptical liberals hoping that the agency was part of the Resistance and historically sympathetic conservatives suspicious of deep-state meddling. Conspiratorial paranoia is pervasive enough that it doesn’t really matter where Cold War lands between its quantum states of right-wing chest-thumping and semi-accidental sendup of the intelligence community. If the prevailing bipartisan anxiety is the idea of America laid low from within, Cold War delivers an MK-ULTRA-calibre dose. It’s just too bad that we’ll likely have to wait decades for Call of Duty: Black Ops MAGA, with players sent on a laptop-hunting mission to Ukraine on orders from a computerized Rudy Giuliani.
