War Games

Gun Fight

Battle Zone

Front Line

While I don’t really think of myself as a ‘gamer’, I’ve pumped my share of quarters into quite a few machines in their 80’s heyday, and we’ve had our share of computer games and game consoles in my adult life. I typically play games in obsessive spurts. Not dabbling across many different games, but becoming totally engrossed by a particular game until I rule it, or it sends me away defeated. My latest addiction is Call of Duty: World at War.

First some quick history. Video games have been giving us the opportunity to kill each other, again and again, since the earliest classic games. I cut my combat teeth on games such as Gun Fight, Battlezone, and Front Line (much more to follow from me soon on my recent renaissance of classic arcade game play) The 90’s and our Playstation provided new and more realistic opportunities to play at war with EA’s Medal of Honor series.

On his last birthday, my son Will received an Xbox, and his first game was Call of Duty: World at War. Not surprisingly, the graphics, sound effects and overall gameplay make all the predecessor games seem pitifully primitive, and by comparison, they certainly are. But the biggest innovation is the ability to play the game on Xbox Live, in real time against other players. And unlike playing soldier as kids with the uncertainty of shouted, “I got you” and “No you didn’t”, the online game leaves no doubt when you’ve been got or have gotten someone else, typically with a graphic display of your limbless corpse and a ‘Nemesis Killcam” view showing you what your killer saw as he ‘got you’.

The other innovation, almost sinister in it’s ability to keep you playing, is the way the game doles out new and improved weapons earned with Experience Points (XP), and dangles ‘challenges‘ to be completed, such as my favorite in the ‘Humiliation’ category called ‘Cruelty’ in which you must “Kill an enemy, pick up his weapon, then kill him again with his own weapon”. After fighting your way up 65 levels of rank, unlocking new features along the way, you have the option of doing it all over again by entering a ‘Prestige’ level, which gives a new insignia and one new slot to save your favorite guns, but basically is just a voluntary do over.

So, after more than a couple of late nights of doing my duty, killing (and more often being killed by) my fellow basement dwelling online warriors you can expect to find online at any time of day, I noticed that my accumulated play time had passed seven days. Not seven days in a row, but 168 cumulative hours playing this damn game. And I can say with my new lingo that I took advantage of a Double-XP weekend to enter 2nd Prestige, and ‘Nightfire’ is my favorite level from the new map pack. Previous experience tells me that that I WILL reach a burnout point and put this game behind me. But for now I’m still hooked. Here’s what I’ve accomplished in this online week of war;

Playing Time:	7 Days, 2 Hours, 1 Minute
Score:	94,109
Kills:	7,463
Headshots:	713
Streak:	18
Deaths:	13,862
Rank:	542,550
Wins:	669

And for those who’ve never seen the game, here’s a brief video example of what it’s like;

For those that remember the 1983 hit movie War Games, in which Matthew Broderick’s character almost accidently begins WWIII by playing ‘Global Thermonuclear War’ against the W.O.P.R. computer. I’d like to reassure you that no such thing could ever happen. But when I ponder that I’m playing a realtime shooter against the typical 100,000+ people who are playing at any time of day, on a platform built by Microsoft, I just can’t make an promises that something won’t go horribly wrong.