Call of Duty is now the most popular gaming franchise in history, and while its single player campaigns are always over-the-top rides through some ridiculous plot, the online play is where a vast majority of players put in the most time spent. The last few Call of Duty games have gone on to be billion-dollar properties - each - and the dollar of the teenager is most definitely fueling this. As much as Activision, Treyarch, Infinity Ward, and other developers involved in the franchise might suggest on the surface that Call of Duty is an M-rated game made for those 17 or older, any seasoned gamer knows the truth: the online play was basically custom built for America's millions-strong army of early teenage boys.
Think about it for a second. Nearly everything happens in Call of Duty's online play very quickly, as players often going from spawn to two kills to death in less than a few seconds. Its progression system makes players feel like they're accomplishing a persistent goal, but it never really forces them to make an important choice that closes off the opportunity to choose something else. Finally, the game asks little of its players to get them to work together, as the team's loss can still easily lead to a huge personal win. Oh, I'm sure there are a few semi-serious clan members that would disagree with my description, but the fact is that vast majority of games played have little teamwork in them. Despite the team-based objectives, players treat their buddies as enemies that they're simply not allowed to shoot right now.
Those of us who have made it down into the teenage dens of Call of Duty players know the scenario well: the Xbox 360 is spinning Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops, the parents are nowhere to be found, the kids are usually 15 or under and cussing and yelling non-stop over their headsets. Now, I would never suggest that games like Call of Duty make kids into killers - but it's turning at least some of them into douchebags. The anonymity of the internet and the complete lack of any structure that forces gamers to work together turns the whole thing into a breeding ground for abrasive, confrontational, over-competitive, selfish, and anti-social behavior.
It wasn't always like this, though.
The earlier days of first person shooters, when Quake brought us true online play over the still-young public internet, were different. Early games didn't support teams, but that didn't last long, as Threewave CTF and Team Fortress turned competitive gamers into team players. Other games followed: Tribes, Battlefield 1942, Planetside, and others honed the skills of players and got them working together to kill the enemy. And those games didn't serve up a constant stream of persistent point-accumulation to make players feel like they're winning - even when they were contributing nothing but a few worthless kills to a team that was losing the battle overall.
Let's look back for a second at the Call of Duty games that had slightly more advanced teamplay. I think the best examples are Treyarch's earlier games, Call of Duty 3 and World at War. Both games offered vehicles, and that alone kind of forced players to work together not only to support their side's tanks, but also to take out the other side's hardware. And those games did not do nearly as well in the sales figures as the rest. Even now, Treyarch has essentially given up on trying to shoehorn vehicles onto the venerable and tired Call of Duty engine, as Black Ops features the same bare-bones multiplayer that Infinity Ward's last couple of games included.
Some informal study has shown me that even in a teamplay scenario, Call of Duty does not foster any semblance of working together. It's akin to being on a deathmatch server where you're simply not allowed to kill half the team. Players are just as likely to get into pissing matches or idiotic tirades with their teammates as they are with their enemies. What's worse is that Activision knows precisely what they're doing, because they are not looking to move the series forwards - just update a few killstreak rewards, throw in a combination of new and old maps, tweak some weapons, and make another billion dollars, year after year.
One could argue that the technology and map size are holding back Call of Duty from having larger battlefields with more vehicles, more goals, and - possibly most importantly - more players, but it seems silly to me that after years and years of massive success, Activision isn't looking to the future with their biggest cash cow franchise. But for years in a row now, we see another Call of Duty using the same old technology - a game engine that has its origins in Quake 3, a game that started development over thirteen years ago - with the same disappointing scope and scale. Of course, it's not disappointing to today's gamers, because they don't want to work together, and they don't really care for the rock-paper-scissors style seen in the play between vehicles and infantry in today's teamplay games.
Battlefield 3 is coming this year for both PC and consoles, and while it will be a solid seller on PC, the majority of its sales will still be on consoles. We've already seen that its frame rate will be 30fps, half of the 60fps you can expect from Call of Duty, and that's a shame because I'm positive that even though a thirteen year-old doesn't know it, the smooth frame rates and near-instant reaction time that Call of Duty has (say, in measuring the milliseconds between pulling a controller's trigger and seeing a gun fire on the TV) is actually a pretty big reason that this franchise is on top. In that respect, it's possible that Battlefield's building destruction and awesome lighting systems are wasted on consoles; maybe they need to tone that all down and just deliver a superior game to Modern Warfare 3 with the same silky-smooth frame rate.
Call of Duty has its place. It has to, otherwise people wouldn't have bought it in massive numbers. It's a good start, if anything. But I suggest that when those "boys" (whether they're, in reality, teenagers or adults) are ready to move beyond the attention-defecit, flash-things-in-front-of-your-face games that amuse people at a low level, that they come join the men over in these other games. Over here, headsets are used primarily for players to work together, not to insult each other's sexuality. Whether it's a current or next Battlefield, a resurgence of Tribes, maybe the MMOs Global Agenda or Planetside... we're waiting for new players to team up with.
Little is going to change this year, though. Activision will still make another billion dollars from Call of Duty this coming November.
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