14 DAY TRIAL // I was on holiday when the leak and then the official announcement of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare were revealed to the public and the first information about the coming title from developer Sledgehammer Games and publisher Activision arrived when one of my friends told me that Kevin Spacey was now the face of a video game.
I like him as an actor since the days of The Usual Suspects and I have seen many movies he starred in, including the two seasons of the beautifully build, if sometimes a little pulpy, House of Cards.
Kevin Spacey is the kind of performer who seems to inhabit the characters that he plays and has a knack of creating complex personalities that have deep reasons to act and always seem to hide something from the public.
The quality of his work is probably what persuaded the executives at publisher Activision to work with him for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
It’s also what makes him, especially in his Frank Underwood persona, completely unsuited for the coming first-person shooter from Sledgehammer Games.
Call of Duty Dropped the Plot Long Ago
House of Cards is a television series, although created by primarily online-focused company Netflix, that is based on the characters that are involved in the power struggle linked to the United States Presidency and the other core positions of the administration.
It is plot heavy, asks the watcher to pay attention and often throws twists that have their origins in older episodes or in interactions between characters that some might have missed.
Call of Duty, on the other hand, started life trying to tell stories about World War II, with a Band of Brothers vibe, but has since then decided that over the top violence and spectacle-filled combat is more important than coherence.
The villains rarely make sense, motivations tend to be poor on all sides and the twists often come out of the blue and lack any structure.
The company has tried to give its games a veneer of respectability by using high-quality actors for voices, but they rarely have the narrative elements they need to deliver impressive performances of their own.
Call of Duty is a shooter that focuses on its core mechanics and its multiplayer to sell copies and which has been a great choice for the development team and publisher Activision.
Frank Underwood and Respectability
Kevin Spacey plays a PMC owner in the new shooter, but the persona he has in the trailer for the game is very close to the one he plays in House of Cards and his speech is interesting and could offer an interesting jumping point for a strong narrative.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that there’s any chance that Call of Duty is aiming to create a thoughtful, solid, well-argued discussion about power, the limits of violence, the privatization of security or the way technology creates more opportunities for oppression.
And that means Spacey, and thus Underwood, and House of Cards will be hurt by the association in the long term, while the Activision franchise will not get the respectability that it is currently seeking.
It might be a good thing for video games and for traditional television series to remain separate for a while before they find a common language that they can use.