First released in 2012, "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" was a futuristic first-person shooter where much of the action takes place in 2025, but some players say the game predicted the future in a way only “The Simpsons” ever could. It begins with the start of the Second Cold War, a war started by an international businessman with a large cult of personality amid a trade war where China cuts the U.S. off from rare earth metals.
Bit spooky, right? Some "Black Ops II" players are now playing “Bingo” with current events, and you really don't want to see the world if the rest of those “Bingo” spaces get filled.
Luckily, while the rare earth metals freeze and the trade war taking place in 2025 is suddenly a pretty funny meta joke from “Call of Duty,” much of the game remains clearly fiction.
We don't have the sort of high-tech gadgets that are common in the game, such as gloves that let you quickly grip onto a mountainside while carrying a hundred pounds of gear or an automatic grenade launcher that shoots explosive darts into enemies' bodies. No one will need to guard a superterrorist aboard the aircraft carrier USS Barack Obama. And no one is chasing the new rare earth element "celerium," which has quantum properties that make it a physical computer virus … somehow.
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Side note: The science fiction trope of finding new elements that don't fit the current periodic table is a frustrating one for science nerds. The point of the periodic table is to organize all known elements, and we created it, in part, to make it easier to suss out the likely physical properties of not-yet-discovered elements.
If you squint, very hard, there are other parallels between the current world and the game.
They fall apart quickly under scrutiny, though. That international business leader with a large cult of personality I mentioned? Yeah, he’s not the president in the game; he's a drug trafficker-turned-international terrorist with a digital alter ego that can inspire his two billion online followers to acts of extreme and coordinated violence (the in-game president is actually a woman with David Petraeus as her defense secretary).
Aforementioned superterrorist Raul Menendez faked his death in the invasion of Panama in 1989. President Trump certainly has his detractors, but my research has yet to reveal him faking his death in a hand grenade incident in 1989 or his raising an army of online supporters through sophisticated digital hacking.
I must have also missed the 2021 cyberattack that crippled the Chinese stock markets, and I'm sure all the effective brainwashing from the game is just too classified for me to know about. It was that hacking that caused the rare earth mineral export freeze from China. If there were really a four-year rare earth mineral export freeze, the United States would probably just start developing its own. Rare earth metals aren't actually rare; they're just hard to isolate and refine. America actually has a bunch of them and could source them at home; it would just be really expensive.
So, yeah, go ahead and assume that we won't see much more "Black Ops II" leaking into real life, but if it does, that means we'll soon see drones launched from U.S. carriers against U.S. cities. A floating city will soon become the site of violent raids, and a special operations traitor will help kill a four-star admiral on his own bridge.
Oh, and the two billion followers of the online megalomaniac will turn the Second Cold War hot with a massive global attack.Then, weirdest of all possible outcomes, the U.S. and China will ally with each other. You hit that parlay on a betting site, and you'll be a billionaire in the ashes of the modern world.
In all seriousness, "Black Ops II" is a wild trip. If you haven't played in a while, 2025 is a good excuse to pick it back up, especially since rumors say the next “Black Ops” game will be a direct sequel.
At least the writers will have plenty of real-world material to fold into the new game if they like. We've had a whole global pandemic, massive stock-market swings caused by political fallout and two trade wars since the last game came out. Now China revealed that it has realistic bird drones, so the game studios may have a bit more latitude for their crazy storylines. It's no quantum element super virus, but it does shift the window of believability quite a bit.
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