When asked about climate change at a 2011 appearance at the National Press Club, former U.S. presidential candidate Gary Johnson gave an interesting response.
“In billions of years,” he said, “the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right? So global warming is in our future.”
Putting aside that this is a swing and a miss at addressing the actual issue, there’s an important rhetorical gesture here. He’s suggesting that our contemporary problems are exclusively earthbound, and that if we were to look at them from a viewpoint that encompasses the cosmic, we would find them more manageable. It’s the same impulse that encourages space colonization as a response to climate change, that pushes Elon Musk to create plans to colonize Mars and that encourages some of us to consider signing up. It’s a belief that somewhere out there in the deep black is a way out of the overwhelming problems of living on Earth: If we’re beyond the point of fixing the foundation, it’s time we start thinking about running away from home.
It’s a belief that somewhere out there in the deep black is a way out of the overwhelming problems of living on Earth.
We’re not likely to get a better articulation of that ambition and its weaknesses in the year 2016 than Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Ever since developer Infinity Ward released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare in 2007, the franchise has been surprisingly adept at channeling cultural anxieties into its military thrillers. Modern Warfare itself was a paranoiac reflection of the post-Iraq War era, satirizing American involvement in the Middle East. Likewise, last year’s Black Ops 3 taps into the dangers of a fully mechanized military.
Is it any surprise, then, that now, as climate change pushes over its tipping point and a dangerous demagogue has now successfully claimed the White House for the next four years, that Call of Duty would go to space? In order to make military fantasy palatable in an increasingly dire cultural landscape, Infinity Ward’s impulse is the same as Johnson’s, as Musk’s: let’s get out of here.
Activision Blizzard/Infinity Ward
