Last Wednesday Kotaku republished (with permission, of course) my review of Modern Warfare 3′s single player campaign. A review in which I described it as an “un-game with a core of nastiness”. This caught the attention of Kill Screen’s Brendan Keogh, who wrote a riposte to my piece on the Australian K, in which he called me, in the nicest possible way, an “un-player”, and detailed why he believed my article was incorrect. He perhaps slightly misunderstood, so here is my reply.

Dear Brendan,

Indeed, I don’t think we’ve talked, but I’m sure you’re super-lovely. High five! Also, I agree that I’m endlessly awesome! But let’s not get distracted. To the matter in hand. I’m not sure you really noticed what I wrote in my review, and thus have missed why I am criticising Modern Warfare 3. Let me explain again exactly what is wrong with the un-game.

The core of your response is to explain that I was wrong to demand more freedom from a game such as Call Of Duty, that I condemned linearity, refused to cooperate with it, and that I therefore played the game wrong(ly). The problem is, I didn’t say any such thing at any point. In fact, the words “freedom” and “linear” don’t appear in the entire two thousand words.

The nub of the core of my problems with Modern Warfare 3 have nothing to do with desiring open-world freedom nor railing (geddit) against linearity, hence my mentioning neither. They have to do with that it’s barely a game. It is, as you suggest, a rollercoaster. Except I would qualify this and say it is more like one of those water rides, where you sit in the slowly drifting boat as it wends its way past a series of animated dioramas, please keep your arms and legs inside the boat at all times. No standing. Apart from when you should.

Where you recognise the game’s successes, I do too. Repeatedly I celebrate the skill with which the sheer scale and volume are delivered. We do not seem to be in disagreement about the exceptionally high standards of the show we’re sat still, watching. I happened not to enjoy the show, which I found wearyingly bombastic and hollow, all style and a void of substance. Where I contend the game falls short is in actually being a game. I’m fascinated to learn what it might have been that you actually enjoyed doing.

If spectacle is what you wanted from MW3, then clearly you would have been delighted with the result. Spectacle, as the name suggests, being something you stare at in a non-participatory way. Which, I would suggest, is the very definition of my newly coined term (that I now fully expect to see appearing in one of those end-of-year Times articles that lists the new words in the parlance), un-game.

My issue here has nothing whatsoever to do with having my freedom restricted. In fact, in a narrative FPS the very last thing I want is abundant freedom. While I express my frustration in my review of not being able to choose where next to go (and I concede the word “where” is ambiguous), I do not mean choose from passage A, B or C, nor want to tramp off over the barren countryside, but merely wish to be able to choose to walk forward. Corridor shooters have been one of gaming’s greatest genres in all its lifetime, from the joy of realising it was a possibility in mazes like Wolf 3D, to the spectacular fixed-rail rollercoaster rides of the Half-Life Episodes. Not having a choice about which direction to go in is never a problem when there’s only one direction you want to go in.