There has been a lot of buzz recently about a leaked video of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.  I overheard that the video depicted the player as a terrorist and that the scene was very graphic. (highlight for spoilers.)

I’ve already heard too much and personally haven’t bothered to look for the video.  I would like to experience that jaw dropping moment for myself, even if I already know it’s coming.  I was late in the game when it came to playing the first Modern Warfare.  The game had been out for months and you couldn’t turn without seeing an advertisement or a blog that raved about the game.  The raving and the advertisement rang in my ear for so long that I eventually purchased the game and was surprisingly underwhelmed.  It’s not that MW was a bad game.  It was absolutely a great game for many reasons, but I feel like I had been exposed to so many little clips and trailers of the game that the OMG moments had a certain deja vu.  It was as if I could piece together the story from trailers alone.

I would like just once to go into a store, buy a game, and play it without a mosaic of trailers in my head that seem to lessen the experience.  I’m doing my best to avoid the leaked trailers and gameplay clips.  I would like to feel like a kid again; like a time before the internet ruined that feeling of Christmas morning for me with bold fonts and capslock.  EVERYBODY DIES AT THE END.

I know that it’s not good for sales, but I’d rather see less of something and let the word-of-mouth tell me that it is worth buying, instead of showing me half the experience through partial clips of the game’s cut scenes.  This works for movies because we are looking at 30 seconds out of two hours of constant story; not the case for most games.  A brief gameplay trailer is more acceptable to me than one that rips from the major plot points of an already brief story.  So please; the next time you sit in front of your video editing box to cut a trailer, ask yourself, “am I stealing Chrismas morning?”.