There are some huge surprises. What's awesome is, we've done all the press we've done so far...and yet there is something we haven't talked about...and the reason we haven't talked about it is because once you see it you completely forget everything we've already talked about. It becomes this whole new game. That's what I'm excited for...There are a lot of surprises. Some stuff we will never talk about till launch, and that's just because we want that... it's emotional stuff that we want to have that emotional response when you play, not read it in a magazine and then you're like, oh yeah I know about that.

         --Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward community manager, in an interview last September

So the elevator opens and there are a bunch of nervously shuffling people looking at us. I can see a couple of repeating character models, although they have different colored shirts and whatnot. That's how you do crowds in a videogame. Repeat the models, but mix up their incidentals. In the back of my head, I wonder how many polygons they have to be pushing at this point. That's a lot of people out there. Is this the upper limit?

I know this is supposed to be some controversial scene, and not just because the game warned me about it as soon as I started playing. A little box popped up asking if I wanted to skip a potentially disturbing level. "No way," I told the box. "I want the whole story. I can take it!"

So we're standing in the elevator. According to a very brief loading screen briefing, I'm apparently undercover during some terrorist operation. I don't really know the details of what we're supposed to be doing, but I'd heard there was an airport massacre in Modern Warfare 2. So I aim at the crowd. Ha ha, let's get this massacre started, right? I'm here to gun you down. Hee hee. I'll be your murderous psychopath today. Might I recommend something in a 7.62mm? I tentatively let loose a single burst.

It's the last time I'll fire at a civilian on this level. I immediately feel like a jerk. I seem to have felled two of them, but I can't tell because the other guys in the elevator open fire now. Screaming and general panic ensues. We all stroll out of the elevator. I get to watch my teammates (Is that what terrorists call each other?) fire into the crowd and pick off stragglers as they disperse. You have to walk during this part of the game, slowly moving through the carnage, as if you were a mass murderer taking his time or Marcus Fenix listening to exposition.

People scream and run. They fall down and bleed. They are wounded and they try to crawl away, dragging behind them trails of blood that I know Infinity Ward has carefully scripted into the game, because there is no dynamic blood trail technology in Modern Warfare 2. Infinity Ward has also scripted a sequence in which one guy runs out into the open to try to drag a wounded victim to safety. He gets shot, of course. At one point, one of the terrorists is firing down from a balcony into a crowd that's apparently trapped. They're like cattle on a killing floor. It was various guys' jobs at Infinity Ward to carefully build those vignettes. An artist drew that blood trail. An animator programmed that doomed Samaritan. Someone had to work out the AI of all those jostling victims under that balcony.

I went to a midnight release of Modern Warfare 2 last night. I figured there'd be maybe forty people at my little backwater Gamestop up in the foothills north of Los Angeles. There were easily three or four hundred. There was a lot of rowdiness. People were excited. Cheerful. A lot of children were there with their parents. One kid with his copy ran back to the car ahead of his grandparents. He was literally leaping into the air, clutching the box, kicking his legs out eagerly, like a gymnast or a spazz. "Don't get too far ahead," the grandfather said as the kid plunged into the sea of cars in this parking lot that would normally be abandoned at this time of night.

Eventually, we fight the Russian police. At this point, if I don't open fire, I'll be killed. Well, okay, they're armed. It's no worse than Grand Theft Auto, right? But it is worse. This isn't about the freedom you're afforded in Grand Theft Auto or Fallout 3, where if I do terrible things it's because I chose to do terrible things. This isn't goofy or sanitized. Nuking a settlement from a comfortable distance is one thing. Gunning down 50 cops during a bank robbery shootout is another thing. But strolling slowly through an airport murdering people? Why is this in here?

I thought of Fort Hood. Mumbai. Columbine. Things I don't particularly care to think of in a glib action game that also has me zipping around on a snowmobile like James Bond or rallying on the roof of the Burger Town. When the previous Calls of Duty presented disturbing scenes -- bringing down a building full of German soldiers, taking out insurgents from the cool quiet of an AC-130 gunship, presenting the point of view of an executed politician, nuking an entire city -- they earned it. They were even, dare I say?, subtle. But this is just flat-out mercenary shock value, trawling for comments from guys like me on blogs and the sort of publicity that partly made Grand Theft Auto what it is today.

It is unnecessary, cheap, and disgusting. It's exactly what I'd expect from a company that has lost track of the line between controversy and poor taste, a company who doesn't think that fag jokes aren't a good idea, a company whose success doesn't seem to have instilled in them any sense of responsibility. In other words, move over, Rockstar. There's a new enfant terrible in town to embarrass and shame us all.