The latest installment in Activision’s “Call of Duty” video game franchise, released last week, is set in the fictional South Korean city of Hajin as it comes under a North Korean attack. But it was a reference to real life — footage of an actual tragedy — that has caused an uproar in South Korea.
The clips in question appear in the opening sequence of the game and depict the emergency response following a fictional North Korean attack.
Some of those images, such as a man performing CPR on another person, are from actual footage of the aftermath of a crowd crush in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul in 2022, in which nearly 160 people were killed after being trapped in a narrow alleyway during Halloween celebrations. The tragedy, which led to charged debates about bureaucratic negligence and political accountability, was one of the worst mass casualty events in South Korea’s recent history.
A group representing families of the dead has called for Activision to remove the scenes from the game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.”
“The citizens who participated in or witnessed the rescue response to the tragedy have been living through trauma and pain,” the Itaewon Tragedy Bereaved Families Association said in a statement. “Using this incident for entertainment purposes as material for a game is highly inappropriate and lacks common sense.”
The association added that many of those people were now being re-traumatized by hateful online comments about the tragedy.
In the years since the disaster, three people who helped victims at the scene have died by suicide, including two firefighters who developed post-traumatic stress disorder. The South Korean government has officially recognized all three as victims.
The use of the footage has also drawn criticism from the Korea Game Users Association and the country’s interior minister.
In a statement to MBC, a South Korean broadcaster, Activision apologized to the victims’ families and said that it had used the news footage as a narrative tool, not to trivialize the tragedy. It added that the clips would be deleted from the game in a Nov. 12 update, MBC said. Activision did not respond to a separate email inquiry from The Times.
Introduced in 2003, the first-person shooter “Call of Duty” franchise is one of the most successful game series in the world, with over half a billion copies sold. Activision has not released official sales data for “Modern Warfare 4.”
But the title has found a large audience in South Korea, where the Korea-based story line — and faithfully rendered details of local scenery like convenience stores — recently helped send it to the top of the best-sellers leaderboard on Steam, an online game store.
Even before the latest outcry, the game’s premise, which imagines the outbreak of another inter-Korean war, had also rankled some in South Korea, which has technically remained at war with its northern neighbor for over 70 years. The Korean War ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, in 1953.
Some South Korean conservative politicians have turned the game into political ammunition against President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea, a liberal whom they have accused of being overly conciliatory toward the North. “Modern Warfare 4” is a lesson in the importance of military readiness, they said, and the president should play it.
Ephrat Livni contributed reporting.
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