The 2019 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare includes scenes that many players found shocking: a child fighting an armed soldier, a waterboarding, a London house-clearing encounter with an unarmed woman, and a chemical attack on a village. The developer’s stated reason is that these moments were meant to make players feel the moral weight of modern conflict and build empathy. Critics have accepted the intent in part while disputing whether the scenes and their political framing achieve it. Everything below concerns the fictional campaign released in 2019, not the earlier Modern Warfare trilogy.
Which game this is about
The 2019 title is a reimagining, not a sequel to the earlier trilogy. Infinity Ward and Activision presented it as a new story set in the fictional country of Urzikstan, where the Urzikstani Liberation Force, led by Farah Karim, fights to protect its homes in what Activision describes as a fictional proxy war (Activision, “Initial Intel,” May 31, 2019; Activision behind-the-scenes feature, September 25, 2019). Scenes from the older games should not be assumed to carry over.
| # | Preview | Product | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 |
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - PlayStation 4 | $16.00 | Buy on Amazon |
| 2 |
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II - PlayStation 4 | $28.99 | Buy on Amazon |
| 3 |
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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - PlayStation 4 | $28.25 | Buy on Amazon |
| 4 |
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Call of Duty Modern Warfare III - PS4 | $68.92 | Buy on Amazon |
| 5 |
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Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - PS4 Legacy Edition | $24.49 | Buy on Amazon |
What the campaign actually shows
Each of the four headline categories refers to a specific scene. Their scope is narrower than the title suggests, and that difference matters for judging them.
Child combat in Farah’s flashback
In a flashback, young Farah and her brother confront a Russian soldier after he has killed their father. Farah fights him with a screwdriver and then takes his rifle, according to GamesBeat’s campaign account (GamesBeat, 2019). The scene shows a child fighting an armed man to survive. It is a single desperate act within the story, not a depiction of a systematic recruitment of child soldiers.
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The London house-clearing encounter
GamesBeat describes a London house-clearing mission in which the player meets both armed and unarmed people, including an unarmed woman. The report says the player can fail the mission by not shooting people judged to be threats. That is a constrained encounter: the player is making fast judgments under threat, and the game penalizes some of those judgments. It is not an instruction to kill every unarmed woman, and describing it that way overstates what the scene shows.
Waterboarding
GamesBeat reports that a Russian officer waterboards Farah and that the scene can be opted out of. Its account attributes the design goal of the harsh scenes to narrative director Taylor Kurosaki, who said they were intended to make players uncomfortable and make them think.
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Civilian harm
The campaign includes a chemical attack on a village, dead children, mass executions, and violence against civilians. These are scenes of fictional content. They are not reporting on a real event, though the developer says the campaign was inspired by real-world conflicts.
What the developers said they intended
In a GameSpot interview published November 1, 2019, Kurosaki said the campaign was inspired by real-world events and stated: “The purpose of the narrative is, frankly, to build empathy” (GameSpot, November 1, 2019).
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In a PlayStation.Blog post published September 24, 2019, Kurosaki wrote that the studio wanted players to navigate moral gray areas and walk in the characters’ shoes. He explained the design logic this way: “Missions aren’t necessarily on battlefields; soldiers have to conduct operations where the enemy doesn’t identify themselves and, in some cases, blends in with civilians” (PlayStation.Blog, September 24, 2019). He also said the studio consulted people from the CIA, the UK’s Special Boat Service, and former Navy SEALs. Activision’s feature names retired Navy SEALs, war correspondent Hollie McKay, and writer Somaiya Daud among its advisers.
These statements describe the developer’s creative process. Consulting experts does not independently establish that the scenes are historically or operationally accurate.
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Why the framing drew criticism
The Washington Post reported in November 2019 that the game casts Russian forces as villains and that critics objected to this framing (The Washington Post, November 5, 2019). The specific complaint was that the game takes real incidents involving U.S. military operations and reassigns them to Russian forces in the fictional setting. The Post contrasts the fictional Highway of Death with the 1991 Gulf War event of the same name, in which U.S. aircraft attacked a column of Iraqi military vehicles and civilian vehicles retreating from Kuwait into Iraq.
The fictional campaign’s perpetrators and setting are distinct from that historical event. The objection is about how a real atrocity’s name and imagery were reused, not about a claim that the game depicts the 1991 attack.
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How to judge the scenes
The sources establish the developer’s intent and the content of several scenes. They do not settle whether the scenes work as intended. Readers can evaluate them by asking three separate questions:
- Stated intent: Did the developer’s stated purpose, empathy and moral ambiguity, match what the scene asks the player to feel and do?
- Player agency: Is the player making a meaningful choice, such as the London encounter where judgments decide mission success, or only watching? The waterboarding scene can be opted out of, which changes its role in the experience.
- Political framing: Whose violence is shown, and how do the fictional villains relate to real events and real nations?
A scene can be defended on the first question and still be questioned on the third. Readers who disagree with the framing are not refuting the developer’s stated purpose, and readers who accept the purpose are not thereby answering the political objections.
Bottom line
The developers say the scenes exist to show how civilians, imperfect information, and moral compromise shape modern conflict, and to produce empathy rather than simple power fantasy. The sources support that this was the intent and describe the content accurately. They do not show that every scene achieves it, and the framing of Russian forces and the reuse of real incidents remains a fair subject of criticism.
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