Beating around the George Bush
If rumour speak true, the next Call of Duty game will be another entry in the Black Ops series. It’ll also, allegedly, take place during the first Gulf War across 1990 and 1991, in which a US-led coalition of countries including the UK, Saudi Arabia and Egypt invaded Iraq in response to the Saddam Hussein government’s conquest of Kuwait.
All that comes fromWindows Central, who cite a number of sources “familiar with Activision’s plans”. The game will apparently eschew the borderline make-believe tech offered by other recent Call of Duties, and will tell stories about different participants in the conflict, which suggests that it might be another ensemble narrative that flips between perspectives.
The new Call of Duty doesn’t have a title as yet, the report continues - it probably won’t be calledBlack Ops 6. Internal codenames for the project include “Cerberus”, according to Windows Central. “Call of Duty: Black OpsGulf War” is the obvious choice, following in the footsteps ofCall of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, but maybe they’ll just call it “Black Ops” and continue Activision’s recent very irritating habit of giving sequels the same names as previous games.
The previous Black Ops Cold War was an introspective story about redaction, repression and phantasmagorical spaces such as model towns that portray history as an assemblage of symbols and cliches, always mediated by military technologies. Assuming the rumour is true, I’m interested to see whether Activision are prepared to carry that kind of storytelling forward into a Black Ops sequel that explores the first Gulf War’spop cultural branding as the first ‘Video Game War’, with smartbomb cameras and the like bringing the bloodshed ‘into America’s living room’.
Mind you, the biggest question to answer here is whether we’ll have to reckon with a CGI Margaret Thatcher.
