Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II has been available for less than three weeks, but it is already making waves. Breaking records, within ten days, the first-person military shooter video game earned more than $1 billion in revenue. Yet it has also been shrouded in controversy, not least because missions include assassinating an Iranian general clearly based on Qassem Soleimani, a statesman and military leader slain by the Trump administration in 2020, and a level where players must shoot “drug traffickers” attempting to cross the U.S./Mexico border.

Call of Duty is a Government Psyop: These Documents Prove It

Related:

Spies Infiltrate a Fantasy Realm of Online Games (behind a paywall)

Just some notes, for myself:

Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, released World of Warcraft in 2004. In 2007, Steve Bannon replaced Brock Pierce as CEO of IGE, which had rebranded as Affinity Media. IGE sold virtual currency for real money in World of Warcraft. NSA had started surveillance of World of Warcraft players in 2009. Bannon “served as a surface warfare officer and a special assistant to the Navy’s top admiral at the Pentagon”. He was in the US Navy from 1976 until 1983. Most likely, these are all coincidences but still interesting to me.

Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace

As Wired reported, IGE brought Bannon on board in the mid-2000s. Bannon’s “mission was to land venture capital.” That mission paid off for IGE. In 2006, Bannon’s former employer, Goldman Sachs, invested $60 million in the company, and Bannon took a seat on the company’s board.

The legality of real-money trading as an industry was never clear; it ran the risk of violating the terms of service of various games. With IGE facing a massive class-action lawsuit led by a World of Warcraft player, the company sold off its online marketplace to a former competitor and rebranded as Affinity Media, which retained a string of community message boards related to MMOs. According to Wired, in June 2007, Affinity’s board pushed out Pierce and made Bannon CEO, a role he would hold until he took over at Breitbart News in 2012. Bannon may have applied his web knowledge gained from his time at IGE and Affinity to Breitbart News, which he transformed into the preeminent destination for the internet-savvy, meme-centric alt-right—in part by stoking the anger behind Gamergate, which saw harassment of female gamers by their male peers.

GamerGate