You know what I love? Modern Warfare’s single player campaigns. No, not just the first game: the whole trilogy. There, I admit it. Revoke my videogame critic’s license. Send me packing back to Bobby Kotick, who has clearly bankrolled every article I have ever written.

I never meant to love them. By all accounts, I should loathe them. They are patently absurd and the very notion that they in anyway represent ‘real’ warfare is nothing less than offensive to the thousands of people caught up in conflicts around the world. They are rigidly linear. They deal with race poorly, and gender worse. I was so certain I would hate them that I didn’t even play the first two for years after they were released. Call of Duty: Black Ops was out for months before I finally bought myself a copy of Modern Warfare.

But then, after I finished that game in a single sitting, I knew I needed more. So I bought Modern Warfare 2, and the same happened. I blinked, lost an entire afternoon, and finished the game. So when Modern Warfare 3 came out a few weeks back, I bought it on day one and, again, destroyed it in a single sitting. I then proceeded to do something I have never done before. After the credits finished, I went straight to “New Game” and started again.

Why? What on earth is it that I get out of this series? This is something I’ve tried to express many times in the past, never successfully. While I could give you countless reasons why I should hate Modern Warfare just like almost every other videogame critic out there, I struggle to put into words why, exactly, I absolutely love them.

It’s a tired analogy, I admit, but a roller-coaster is exactly what the Modern Warfare series is for me. It is an expertly directed, finely crafted linear experience. Though, perhaps a better analogy is a rollercoaster with a fake steering wheel. I can sit there and turn the steering wheel as I rush around the track and feel like it is me keeping the cart from flying off the edge, but the second I steer the wrong way, the illusion is broken and I realise the cart was safely on rails all along. In the Modern Warfare games, if you do anything apart from what the game demands of you, the illusion is broken, and, understandably, this turns a lot of people off. Though, if you are willing to just switch off and slip into the shoes of the character that the games have designated for you, it can be incredible.

I was willing. More willing than I expected I would be, and it definitely helps that the games always put you in the role of a subordinate character. With very few exceptions, you are always taking orders from another character you are accompanying. Somehow, having to do very precise things in a videogame is easier to accept when it is a fictional commanding officer giving the orders and not the machine itself.

It would have been the Chernobyl stage of the first Modern Warfare where it first hit me how much I was enjoying following orders. On this stage, you are playing a young Price following his commanding officer, Captain MacMillan, as they infiltrate the nuclear wasteland of Chernobyl. The entire level is heartpoundingly tense as you sneak past the guards and go deeper and deeper into enemy territory, but there is this one section where you must follow MacMillan around and through a convoy. You weave in and out of the guards, ducking under vehicles and behind walls. You have to follow MacMillan’s footsteps perfectly if you want to get through alive.

The scene is ridiculously scripted, but it is also a scene that could never work in a game less scripted. In a less scripted game, the player would undoubtedly die a dozen times as they try to figure out where is safe and where isn’t. In Modern Warfare, because all you have to do is follow MacMillan, you don’t have to think; you just have to experience. If you can actively suspend your disbelief and believe you actually are following this veteran SAS through all these patrols, it is utterly nerve-racking.

A suspension of disbelief is essential to enjoying the Modern Warfare series, and it is a far greater suspension of disbelief than games typically ask of us. It requires you to not ask when you are in control and when you are not but to just go with it. There is a small section of Modern Warfare 2 where you are climbing a glacier with hooks by pulling the left trigger, then the right trigger, then the left trigger. Then a jet roars overhead and you nearly fall in this little non-interactive segment where your character nearly falls to his death. I didn’t realise until the scene ended that I had spent the entire time squeezing the right trigger, holding on for dear life with my remaining hook. I didn’t stop to think about whether or not I was still controlling the character. I just acted.

It’s almost a meta-commentary of the series: “Don’t Think. Do.” It’s the only way to enjoy the Modern Warfare series and, undoubtedly, is what has lead many a game critic to discard them as stupid, silly things for the brainless masses. But counter-intuitively, this is not at all an easy thing to do for those used to typically wider scopes of freedom in a videogame. You almost have to consciously think about not thinking.

Now, I repeat and stress that in no way do I think the Modern Warfare series realistically reflects the ways and methods of actual modern warfare, because of course it doesn’t. But having to think about not thinking is, for me, a far more interesting commentary on warfare. Among the absurd Hollywood blockbuster plot is a moment-to-moment depiction of war as horrific. In absolutely no way realistic, but still utterly horrific. It is a horror that is most hard-hitting when it is you consciously unthinkingly doing these horrible acts.

Some of the first men you kill in the trilogy are asleep in their bunks. Later, in the third game, you gun down enemies as they are trying to drag their own wounded away from a giant door your support helicopter just blasted. And, of course, there is the notorious stage of the second game where you participate in an actual terrorist act, a massacre in a Russian airport. In the Modern Warfare games you are regularly sanctioned to do horrible, horrible things.

But here is where I start to question my own love of the series. If to enjoy these games I must not think about the horrible and morally questionable things I’m doing and just do them, is that really okay? If a videogame is going to depict war, surely it should hold me accountable for the terrible things I do, right?

Well this is where it gets tricky and everything starts to fold in on itself. See, when I play the Modern Warfare games with all their scripting and directions, I don’t at all feel like I am in these battles but that I am simply acting out my character. The game is always so careful to make sure I know just who the person is behind each level’s floating gun that I have no trouble acting that character out. But that character is not ‘me’. That is the role I have slipped into in order to make the game work. Outside of the game, I am still me, the player. I am still thinking. I realise (I hope) that this stuff I am doing is horrible. That war is horrible. That despite the blockbuster bombast, all three Modern Warfare games are ultimately telling a terrible and tragic tale of the world ripping itself to shreds. That the Americans are no more able to call themselves the good guys in this nonsensical conflict than the Russians.

So, for me, it is not me who is acting without thinking, it is my character. It is Soap or Frost or Price or whoever else. Sitting in my house looking at my television screen, I am thinking about the things my characters are doing unthinkingly. I am sitting there thinking “Wow. Soap/Frost/Price isn’t a good person at all.” And yet, through my control of these characters, as coerced as it is, I can’t help but feel slightly responsible for their actions. I feel like I did bad things without questioning them because I had no choice. For me, that is the more interesting thing the Modern Warfare series has to say about actual modern warfare: this isn’t a black-and-white world of good guys following the rules and bad guys breaking them. It’s just desperate people doing whatever it takes to win.

But it is a message that can easily be missed. This is why I refuse to let my ten-year-old twin brothers play Modern Warfare when they come to visit, while I have no trouble with them playing Halo or Borderlands. The one time I did let them play a Modern Warfare, I watched as their eyes glaze over as they just gunned down the human enemies like so many cardboard cutouts without really thinking about their actions or the morality of it all. They weren’t thinking about the fact they were acting without thinking. They were simply not thinking.

But despite all these issues, the trilogy houses the most beautifully crafted, perfectly directed, elegantly chiselled linear videogame experience ever. It’s an experience that, at its best, gives you exactly the right amount of control and takes exactly the right amount away to guide you where it wants you to go while you still feel like an active part of it—as long as you are willing to cooperate.

So there’s a thin line on which the optimal experience of Modern Warfare hangs. Think too much and the illusion is shattered as the tightly-scripted, on-rails path is exposed. Think too little and everything that is problematic about the series will just wash over you. But think just the right amount about not thinking and you will find this perfect balance where the game doesn’t so much wash over you as allow you to surf the wave.

Maybe I was lucky. I came to the Modern Warfare series expecting nothing, so when I walked away with something, I was impressed. Maybe it’s not really “lucky”, because now I am stuck with this torn mind trying to understand why I feel about it the way I do. And, in the end, perhaps that is why I love the Modern Warfare series so much. Because more than any other series they have forced me to question myself and just what it is I look for in a videogame.

So this is why I have trouble detailing my love of the Modern Warfare series. I know they are problematic. They depict unrealistic warfare in a fantasy world of manly men through mechanics that require next to no conscious engagement beyond shooting the next target.

My enjoyment of no other videogame series has baffled me so much as my enjoyment of Modern Warfare. Everyone else can dismiss the Modern Warfare series as one of the most straightforward and brain-dead series of recent times, and maybe they are right to do so. But I can’t deny the mind-bafflingly complex and torn reaction I have had to the games. I have learnt (and continue to learn) more about the pleasures and dangers of videogames from Modern Warfare series than any other videogame in recent years - and that is why I love them. It’s complicated.