Jimquisition: Defending Call of Duty

[remnant_phoenix]

Although I understand the point being made, I simply just don't like any FPS that's set in a realistic situation. I prefer the more fantastical style shooters like Bioshock, DOOM and Blood. I think it's mostly due to the narratives,characters, enemies and the environments; because they're so strange and interesting it makes the experience that much more entertaining. I suppose if COD were to make a game completely out of their zombie mode I'd give it a shot (no pun intended), but the standard military shooter is just unappealing.

This is my exact feeling toward modern military shooters in general.

When I play a game, I have the opportunity to go into a virtual world and experience something that isn't possible in the real world.

Of all the creative and fantastical video game worlds out there, why would I want to go into a world that is almost identical to my own, except terrorism is even more dangerous and I'm a special ops soldier action hero wielding normal modern weapons (Modern Warfare 2) when I could explored a stylized steampunk dystopia where I wield an electro-shotgun in one hand and shoot fire out of the other hand (Bioshock)?

Don't get me wrong. If you like the more "modern realism" approach, I'm not judging you. If that's you're thing, cool. It's just not my thing. I understand that everyone has different tastes.

What I DON'T understand is why the "modern military shooter" genre seems to be so incredibly appealing that CoD breaks sales records yearly... and Black Ops is the ONLY video game I EVER hear my secondary students talk about... and said students think I'm some kind of freak because I love video games but I have no interest in Black Ops.

 

[Gralian]

This is my exact feeling toward modern military shooters in general.

When I play a game, I have the opportunity to go into a virtual world and experience something that isn't possible in the real world.

Of all the creative and fantastical video game worlds out there, why would I want to go into a world that is almost identical to my own, except terrorism is even more dangerous and I'm a special ops soldier action hero wielding normal modern weapons (Modern Warfare 2) when I could explored a stylized steampunk dystopia where I wield an electro-shotgun in one hand and shoot fire out of the other hand (Bioshock)?

Don't get me wrong. If you like the more "modern realism" approach, I'm not judging you. If that's you're thing, cool. It's just not my thing. I understand that everyone has different tastes.

What I DON'T understand is why the "modern military shooter" genre seems to be so incredibly appealing that CoD breaks sales records yearly... and Black Ops is the ONLY video game I EVER hear my secondary students talk about... and said students think I'm some kind of freak because I love video games but I have no interest in Black Ops.

Three words: Male Power Fantasy.

When you shoot someone dead, you are exerting power over them. Having a high k/d ratio makes you feel powerful. Dominant. Being the biggest badass on a scoreboard is all about power. Killing someone before they kill you is about effectively making them "your *****". Even in the military culture portrayed, glorified and somewhat satirised in the game itself demonstrates male power fantasy. The machismo surrounding the characters is unquestionable and that mentality is carried over into multiplayer. Before you say not everyone who plays COD are men, i will counter that by saying male power fantasy does not apply exclusively to men. It also affects women. Evidence for this comes from filmography. When a woman picks up a gun or other weapon, it is a symbol of male power. Women are able to experience and desire the male power fantasy just as much as men. The term simply comes from male culture being often surrounded in competition and struggle for domination among peers. Power is a means to attain esteem. Hence male power fantasy.

While your point about modern military shooters being mundane is very valid, i will say this. I love all kinds of video games, from COD to Bioshock to MMOs and to point and click adventure. But there is one thing that can bug me about 'fantastical' shooters. It can break immersion when the world is so dreadfully inconsistent. Example being Bioshock. When i shoot someone in the face with a 12-gauge, i expect them to drop down like a sack of potatoes. Instead in bioshock i see a health bar pop up and they keep running at me. When i make an explosion or empty 50 machine gun rounds into a person, i expect them to be dead. Not the case in Bioshock. This also carries over to the super powers you get like incineration and electrocution. That kind of thing can feel incredibly disconcerting, frustrating and outright inconsistent. The world is weird and wonderful, but the mechanics are not for everyone. In COD, one good shot, or one very broad shot from a shotgun will kill someone. When an explosion goes off, someone near it is going to die. The world behaves and reacts in realistic ways which in turn do not ruin the immersion and experience. This helps to maintain the world as believable. I know you are meant to suspend disbelief for the fantastic in a world like Bioshock's, but suspension of disbelief can only go so far.

Finally i'd like to say that your secondary students are young adults and teenagers and glorification of male power fantasy will likely be a very big part of their culture until they enter their tweens.

 

[jebara]

Nicely done jim,you might just have a spot here.

 

[Chumba]

I still dont find this guy funny.

Yeah, calling your audience "malcontents, rebels and pseudo-intellectuals" isn't pretty funny.

That's why in just 34 seconds, Jim started to invalidate his point he was trying to labour in the following 6 minutes and 4 seconds to me.

Then the stupid yellow hat persona guy just killed off any gaming related cultural capital he had built up with me.

When your fans and followers can succinctly (and objectively) relay your point across without coming off as a huge troll then I think it's time to re-evaluate how your communicate to the unwashed ignorant masses.

 

[ProtoChimp]

I just dont have fun when I play it, glitches and being totally one sided.

 

[jmarquiso]

"CoD is shit because it's popular."

Yeah, no serious critic has said this. And further, obviously CoD isn't shit, you know why? It's popular.

While there are people who think this, and there always will be. Especially in the gamer market, which is largely made up of geeks that go up against the mainstream.

That being said, I always thought CoD looks like a really compelling game to play, I just never have since the genre of the military shooter never appealed to me.

There will always be an outspoken minority that DOESN'T like the popular thing. So it really doesn't pay to address them in this way.

 

[kouriichi]

While id hate to say it, im with him.
Alot of the gaming community looks down upon CoD as a whole because of the few problems the series has had.

Yes, noobtoobs were the worst thing to ever enter videogames.
Yes, second stand is a "dick move" that can cause moments of complete bs.
And yes, quickscoping can be horribly annoying.

But you can point out problems in every game series out there that are just as annoying.
LA Noire for instance.
Unskippable cut scenes. And dozens of them.
Car controls being strange. ((eather way to sensitive, or not sensitive enough))
Hitting a civilian because he literally "JUMPED" in front of you, ruins your entire score.
Only 1 peice of evidence EVER being right. Sure, i can place him at the scene, with the hatchet, by 6 eye witnesses, bootprints, fingerprints, and absolutely no alibi, but all of that doesnt matter because the evidence that proves him guilty is a random button from his jacket.

CoD gets a bad rap because its a game anyone can play and be decent at. But arnt half the games produced? Cant you button mash at 80% of fighters and win every match? Cant you bump the back of a car in a racing game and make it do 6 random game ruining flips?

CoD has its ups and downs. ): People need to get over it.

 

[unicron44]

While the only Call of Duty game I've played was the first Modern Warfare in 2009, two years after it came out, and I have to say it was pretty good. Now I hardly ever play multiplayer, but I played a few games and it was pleasant. I thought the single player campaign was really good.

 

[sora91111]

Really I personally have no problems with call of duty, but I have seen what it does to people. They play nothing except for the multiplayer, which is fine, but to them it's like other games and even CoD single player is nonexistant.

 

[No_Remainders]

... I actually agree with him, so much.

I especially like his making fun of the abnoxious pricks who say it's bad because it's not art.

Obnoxious*, and those people come about because the majority settle for what they're given.

Its like the whole anti-intellectualism thing you get here (and moreso in the States it seems, given FOX news and their audience size). Try and move away from the lowest common denominator - and that is what Call of Duty aims for, and no that is not me saying everyone who plays it is stupid - and you're pretentious.

... I'm terribly sorry for the typo. It'll never happen again.

And I'm not anti-intellectualism, and neither is being happy with a decent game, which is what CoD is, regardless of its status of "Gaming for idiots".

But I don't think you can argue that the majority of people who "demand" that games should be art and that slate CoD for not being such are pretentious. After all, they seem to think of themselves as better than everyone else who enjoys CoD, and for some reason they can't comprehend the word "opinions".

 

[EdgeyX]

I had to laugh at the Black Ops "has a wonderfully paced narrative".

 

[Woodsey]

... I actually agree with him, so much.

I especially like his making fun of the abnoxious pricks who say it's bad because it's not art.

Obnoxious*, and those people come about because the majority settle for what they're given.

Its like the whole anti-intellectualism thing you get here (and moreso in the States it seems, given FOX news and their audience size). Try and move away from the lowest common denominator - and that is what Call of Duty aims for, and no that is not me saying everyone who plays it is stupid - and you're pretentious.

... I'm terribly sorry for the typo. It'll never happen again.

And I'm not anti-intellectualism, and neither is being happy with a decent game, which is what CoD is, regardless of its status of "Gaming for idiots".

But I don't think you can argue that the majority of people who "demand" that games should be art and that slate CoD for not being such are pretentious. After all, they seem to think of themselves as better than everyone else who enjoys CoD, and for some reason they can't comprehend the word "opinions".

You spelt a word wrong, and considering the distance between A and O, I thought it might be likely that it wasn't a typo, and would be nice to point out the right spelling so you don't look like an idiot when you keep doing it. I won't point out the irony of "I'm not anti-intellectualism" being the beginning of your next sentence.

Anyway, the implication in the video is that people who don't like it and do pick perfectly good reasons not too are all inherently pretentious and "arty types"; that they hate it, "just because". That's not true - no, there's nothing wrong with enjoying it particularly, but its deemed the biggest release every year in spite of not being the best at anything. You described it yourself as just "decent".

The issue isn't that people enjoy it, its that they put it on a pedestal as something special. Its why games like Heavy Rain are then praised for their writing despite dodgy dialogue, plot holes the size of your face and often poor voice-acting.

 

[Xangi]

Alright, a legitimate argument against it he wants, then one he'll get. For most matches (in my own experience), slight server (or host) lag makes the game about 75% luck, and about 25% skill. I have seen and experienced many instances where I have emptied half a clip into a person, only to die without him firing a shot, then see on the killcam that he shot me before I even began firing. Basically, the netcode is balls, and if that was improved, it would be much better. Also, I find that some of the ingame achievements to unlock different perks and weapons cause players to not play the game properly, and instead focus on them.

Oh, and playing anything but TDM or DM is pretty much pointless, as any team game like sabotage is usually taken to be TDM by about half of the people playing anyway.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

You're defending CoD on the Escapist, one of the most sequel-phobic, anti-mainstream, "popular is bad (Unless it's Valve)", indie-snobby sites on the internet... that takes balls.

Anyway, the defenses have been pretty good. It's not the best defense, but it's good. And I do not like the whole "CoD players are dicks" mentalities.

I find that describing the Escapist community in that light takes serious balls.

Either way, it isn't any better than the "CoD players are all teenagers who ignore their girlfriends" stereotype, but hey, there are a lot of stereotypes of gamers that play certain games. The "WoWFag" that spends fourteen hours a day looting for gold in WoW, the "hard-core PC gaming fucktard", etc.

Still, great episode Jim!

 

[Sixties Spidey]

(despite their CoD clone called BFBC:2 which was stunningly shit)

I call bullshit. Bad Company 2 played very differently to Call of Duty. Similar(ish) controls, yes, but it took a completely different mind-set to approach them. The classes were clearly outlined by the actions you had to take and the abilities each class had, as opposed to the weapons they could carry. Call of Duty's classes were outlined more by the weapons than anything. I could go on and on, but I've said it once and I'll say it again, trying to compare Battlefield to Call of Duty is fucking stupid.

 

[grumbel]

Then why is COD to blame at all? "Everyone thinks COD did it, that means it's COD's fault".

The problem with CoD isn't so much linearity, as almost all shooters are linear to some degree, but the way it handles scripting. Almost everything you see on the screen in a CoD single player is scripted, the explosions in the background, the bullets hitting the ground, the vehicle movement, your team mates, etc. this makes the whole world feel incredible artificial and fake. When actually play none of what you do matters, all that matters is that you get far enough to trigger the next scripted event. In CoD4 you also have idiotic things such as endless respawning enemies, which destroy every last bit of immersion one might have had. Other games have game mechanics driving the world and just use scripting as the icing on the cake, in CoD its the other way around, you are just watching a script and every now and then getting a small glimpse of a game.

Simple thing if you wanna have some fun with CoD: Walk into the opposite direction of what the game tells you. The game essentially completly falls apart, your team mates will continue in their shooting loop waiting for you eternally, enemies will do the same. The game world simply will do nothing unless you come and advance it. Now CoD isn't the only game where you can do that, it works just as well in something like Killzone, but CoD certainly is one of the main series that makes that style of pre-canned game experiences popular.

I certainly can give CoD some credit, the 60fps are great, the graphics look nice and the moments like the nuke explosion and having your character die are certainly interesting, I just wish that those were implemented in a game that I would actually have fun playing and that would feature characters I actually care about. I can find neither of those in CoD.

 

[RJ Dalton]

The arguments seem logical enough, but I've never played any CoD games, so I don't know how to form on opinion on them.
Also, I've never heard the arguments against CoD, so I don't quite know whether to laugh at your satirization of the games silly critics, or take it as a stab at your credibility.
Also, taking credit for the capture of Osama Bin Laden. Extremely tasteless. Also possibly genius. I can't nail down your sense of humor, so I can't tell.