Right Now i’m in need of my fix…. No, I don’t have a drug problem or an addiction to some hidden vice(…women..lol) but right now the only thing that can bring me happiness is looking through the first person camera view as I throw out a flash grenade, blinding three enemies as I run in and proceed to shoot two of them in the head and slice the third one’s throat open. As their bodies collapse and my point count rises, I can’t help but feel the adrenaline pumping through my body even though i technically haven’t done anything other than input a few commands from my controller.
What am i talking about? Call of Duty Black Ops of course. And if you are fortunate enough to have a PS3 or Xbox 360 and enjoy shooters then you probably have some installment of the call of duty franchise or it’s equivalent.
Now let’s backtrack for a second… I’m what I’d like to call a ‘binge gamer’ meaning I can go for long periods of time without touching a video game but when i do decide to pick one up I will play for hours on end, with little regard of how long i’ve been playing. I’ve been like this since the days of pokemon, often going through packs of energizer batteries to power my gameboy so I could ‘catch em all’ not even realizing just how inconsequential that goal was.
Time went on I got older and started to find my preferences in games, opting more for the casual and anime inspired fighters, action adventure games, and 3rd person shooters, with each game that I buy taking small to significant chunks of my life depending on how dedicated I was to beating/mastering the game. I was particularly fond of fighting games Such as the super smash bros series, etc because it gave me a chance to see all my hard earned practice pay off. My friends would either come over or I’d go over to their house, and we’d make an evening/all night event of proving who had the best skills in whatever the latest fighting game one of us had. I didn’t realize it at the time but again there was that rush, that thrill of male vs male(sometimes female) competition of who could beat the other at the video game.
Fast forward to the next gen consoles and the full introduction of online gaming to the masses. Now not only could you prove how beastly you were to everybody on your block and in your friend circle, you could show up strangers halfway around the world only requiring a Wifi connection… and still initially i wasn’t into it. I would play a game, beat it, play it with my friends a couple of times and call it a day. In fact I didn’t even sign in to my PSN account to play online till like January of last year. I didn’t understand why people were ALWAYS online on some game till I tried it for myself one day.
Now ladies, I feel for you because even as I’m about to type this because I realize that you may never truly feel what a guy feels playing games online but I have to say it anyway. The allure of the endless competition is what keeps bringing us back and what ends up addicting us. It doesn’t matter that essentially we’re doing the same things over and over again. I’ll use black ops as an example. Usually, People play in team deathmatch, which splits 12 players into equal teams and spreads them out over 2 parts on a map in which they meet in the middle and shoot/stab/blow up the other team. That’s it. There really isn’t any complexities to it, very little strategy involved. Yet we play for hours on end… why? because there’s hundreds of thousands of people on the network and we can’t be satisfied until we’ve played with and/or against them all so we can showcase how well we stack up to people who, in the larger scheme of things, don’t really matter.
In conclusion, is it a healthy obsession? Probably not but seeing how i’m more likely to convince my friends to hop on their PS3 then i am to get them to play some basketball and football outside, I’ll take what I can get. Also I feel that there’s something almost therapeutic about cussing out some redneck with a headset who just decided he wanted to call everybody a ‘stupid nigger’ (happens all the time) because he’s getting shot up repeatedly in a match. And though I’m sure this yearning to be the ‘best’ in all these meaningless(it’s true) video games will only get worse or at least be maintained as time goes on, I can’t see it as a ‘bad’ thing. History has proven over the centuries that mankind strives to compete with each other and video games are pretty harmless so why not indulge in my blood thirst by mowing down a few faceless names every once in awhile? How bout you guys, what are some of the games that have you all sitting down in front of your TV all night?
