CHICAGO – I have been a fan of the Call of Duty series since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. The series was a huge part of my formative years and I have continued to be a fan throughout not only the first Modern Warfare 3, but also the second Modern Warfare 3. Like many Call of Duty fans, I was incredibly disappointed with Modern Warfare 3’s Campaign Mode. Each level was a bland and repetitive mess whose only redeeming factor being it is mercifully short.
Luckily, Modern Warfare 3 saved its innovation for the multiplayer mode, specifically the harassment from the voice chat feature. The game takes the classic voice chat feature, utter emotional devastation from faceless strangers, and adds some refreshing new twists, slurs, and high-pitched shrieking insults.
There are also some new features.
Past games featured opposing players and teammates alike telling me they “had sex with my mother,” a simple classic formula which we covered in our article “Have Some Empathy: Toxic CoD Tween Going Through Rough Patch With Your Mom.”
But in Modern Warfare 3, a player told me that he took my mom “to an all you can eat fuck-and-suck buffett.” The harassment was not limited to my mother either. Another player wove a tale of a long and romantic courtship of my father, including romantic picnics, horseback riding on the beach and a touching proposal in Paris. Each comment made me feel small and insignificant in new and exciting ways.
Another game, I committed the cardinal sin of finishing a round of Search and Destroy without any kills. Seeing that my teammates were a pack of ravenous teenagers, I expected the classic suggestion that I kill myself that got me into Call of Duty in the first place. Instead they subverted my expectations and went with reverse psychology. Uring to me, unprompted, that life was worth living and that I should not do anything drastic. They even began playing Logic’s don’t kill yourself song “1-800-273-8255” over their gaming headsets, claiming they were saving my life. This not only gaslit me into thinking I was suicidal, but it also turned me into a person who inserts the phrase gaslighting into every potentially applicable situation that arises.
One drawback from the older Call of Duty games is the fact that once you turned off your console, the harassment ended. Modern Warfare 3 fixes this immersion issue. After several games of verbal bombardment with a squad of players with different pornstars as their gamertags, which is objectively hilarious, I got called “a fat virgin who is going to die alone.” I turned off my console and I thought this would be the end of my harassment experience, but it turns out those players looked me up found my address. A few days later I began receiving dozens of Amazon packages all containing blow up sex dolls labeled “Mail Order Bride.” This game delivers a 24-7 mental torture that would make Dick Cheney do the closest thing to smiling that he can achieve.
Overall, Modern Warfare 3’s Multiplayer game chat delivers a horrifying experience and provides a new standard of psychological destruction. I rate it 4.5 DSM’s out of 5.
