My Gaming Addiction

Back in 2006, I raved about much I enjoyed gaming on my "new" computer. It was Grubbs' VPR Matrix and the game was Call of Duty 2. The World War II shooter kept me coming back for more every evening and even threatened to cut into the time I needed to write my Honors Thesis. Carl and I even came to the conclusion that it would be damn near impossible to improve on the sheer visceral, addictive gameplay experienced in Call of Duty 2. The balance of the weapons, the AI, the difficulty, and the sheer nerve shattering chaos of the combat left you simultaneously freaked out and incredibly excited. It was very nearly the perfect game.

Two years later I am again horribly addicted, but this time the new fix is Call of Duty 4. And if Call of Duty 2 was addictive, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has been downright debilitating to my free time. Yes, it's just that damn good.

How is it better? In simple terms: In every possible freaking way. The combat is more intense, the weapons are incredibly life like, the AI is frighteningly good, the graphics almost leap out of the screen, the sound will keep you up at night, and, with the addition of a high speed internet connection, the multiplayer is addictive in ways that cannot be described.

And so it's been for the last four and a half months that Grubbs and I have made the evening pilgrimage to Xbox Live to continue, as we like to call it, "the killing." Our drug of choice is Hardcore Team Deathmatch - think of it as the straight heroin of gaming in Call of Duty 4. There are no visual aids, no radar, no help. Just you, your weapons, your radio, and your wits. While the rest of the teenie boppers online yell at each other, Grubbs and I are working the map, corner by corner, street by street, calling out targets and dropping baddies left and right. Grubbs loves to snipe - and you'll often see him ghillied up and hiding in some dark, far off corner, popping headshots from hundreds and hundreds of meters out. I like a more personal touch - so you'll often see me using assault rifles and clearing entire streets at a time.

I've also stumbled upon an addiction within my addiction for CoD4. It's called the RPG, or Rocket Propelled Grenade. It's a Soviet invention designed as an anti-tank weapon. It's purpose, first and foremost, is to knock out vehicles. But since there aren't any vehicles in multiplayer, I like to adapt the RPG into an anti-personnel weapon - with truly sadistic results. I fire it in closets, bathrooms, attics, tight corners, and across entire maps - hoping beyond hope that the end of the RPG's trip culminates with a giant explosion and a fiery death for the unfortunate victims at the other end. I'll even shoot down an enemy with my rifle, and as he's crawling off to die, I'll RPG him into the next world - leaving Grubbs to chuckle and remind me once again what a sick, sick man I truly am.

It doesn't always work. I've friendly fired countless teammates with my rockets - resulting in a litany of shrill obscenity from whoever I've wronged. I've even planted an RPG squarely in between Grubbs' shoulder blades - or rather, through them - leaving him simultaneously in hysterics and filled with rage. I've fired it in completely inappropriate places - and have taken myself out many times by standing too close to the blast. I simply stop thinking clearly when I have my rockets out. I've probably blown a few hundred kills by trying to use the flourish of sweet, sweet rocket-borne death over a simple bullet to the back of my enemy's head. But for every failure, there is a spectacular cross map kill, or a multi-victim charred flame-fest resulting from sending four pounds of sub-sonic rocket propelled death into a walk-in closet, or down a hallway. The satisfaction that comes from vaporizing half of the enemy team in one shot, combined with the cheers of my teammates and the assurance that every member of the opposing team just stopped in their tracks for a split second and shuddered, keeps me coming back for more.

That's the worst part of the game, it's mind numbingly addictive to play. I'm nearing 14,000 kills and I'm still hitting the servers night after night. The game sets out a fantastic range of weapons, and a sadistic set of perks (everything from RPGs to Martyrdom - which drops a live grenade from your corpse as you die, taking out everyone within a 10 foot radius of your dead body) and combines all of it with a wide range of maps that has you running through the open countryside, or down crowded streets, or through tight claustrophobic hallways. The more you play, the more you level up, the more weapons and perks you unlock.

Then CoD4 tosses in the ability to Prestige - which is truly the most twisted, perverse part of the game's design. You trade in everything, everything you've unlocked in order to change the icon that appears by your name. And the medals used for the icons grow increasingly spiffy, not to mention Prussian, as you advance. So as a confessed Germanic Freak, the temptation to have a Blue Max or a Knights Cross with Swords next to my name means I've happily dumped my precious RPG's, my handy M14, and my Desert Eagle pistol not once, but twice, in the endeavor to keep leveling up.

Other shooters have already come and gone. And even the gang of guys Carl and I teamed up with night after night have moved on to other games. Yet we keep logging on, calling out targets, and downing tangos. When will it stop? I have no idea - and that's the most worrying part. Right now my $1,400 gaming computer, complete with a new suite of driving, racing, and strategy games, sits idly by as my $300 XBox burns a hole in the desk. Once again, they've made a Call of Duty game that is so utterly perfect, so sublimely balanced, that Grubbs and I are left wondering how on Earth they'd ever improve on it.

And I'd love to sit here and guess how, but my trigger finger is getting itchy. Time to RPG some hapless victim.

Boom!