Do Your Duty - Article

Do Your Duty
By Richard "DrGonzo" Lewis

November 9^th 2010 – Call of Duty: Black Ops is released worldwide and is greeted with the kind of frenzy that makes the previous clamour to purchase Call of Duty titles seem restrained. In the first 24 hours it has sold 7 million copies, 5.6 million in the United States and 1.4 million in the United Kingdom, eclipsing the record set by Modern Warfare 2 by approximately 2.5 million. There is a new sure fire guarantee of success these days – put the words “Call of Duty” on the box and people will part with money before questioning what’s inside.

Being a gaming journalist that’s starting to get a bit of recognition on the circuit I was invited to the UK launch of the game but declined to attend. I mean, these launches are usually extremely dull affairs, just an opportunity to grab some free swag and if you’re lucky some complimentary drinks, before watching people queue up to buy a game at the stroke of midnight. It is the centre of the hype cyclone, where everything seems normal and within context. It’s only outside of it a true measure of the impact can be judged.

As such I spent mine at home, in a lowly suburb on the outskirts of Birmingham, to ensure I had a much clearer picture of what was going on. Sure enough, we weren’t untouched by the game’s release. My local Blockbuster had a queue going round the street to take advantage of its special opening hours, a one hour window within which to buy the game. In the end they pushed it back further and crammed everyone in the store and pulled down the main shutters. I’m not sure how many people went away empty handed but I do know that my local store won’t see activity like that for some time to come.

While picking up some whiskey from the corner shop I bumped into one of the lucky staff members on duty at the time who also felt the need for a drink. “It was horrible” he told me “and I don’t even understand what all the fuss is about. I mean, it’s not even that good a game…”That was his viewpoint, yet the statistics were telling a different story. My inbox was full of industry news and press releases telling me it was the most successful game of all time. Surely that many people couldn’t be wrong. I mean, Modern Warfare 2 might have been a rotten competitive game but from the viewpoint of a gaming experience, it had plenty of redeeming features and its popularity could be understood.

After sitting down and drunkenly smashing my way through the review copy of the game that had been lovingly shipped to me I realised what I had known all along. First, that the general public don’t know what’s right from wrong and never will, their collective consciousness tainted by mass media and fluorinated water… How else to explain that they laugh at something like WWE for being fake and then get involved in the manufactured drama of X-Factor? Yes, the general public is renegade scum by and large and can’t be trusted to choose what is good from what is bad, which explains why a game like Darwinia probably sold like fifty copies and this dreadful offering is the most successful game of all time.

Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Treyarch don’t really make great games, competitive or otherwise, and haven’t since back in 1998 where the criminally underrated and largely forgotten Die By The Sword showed that they had creative minds that wanted to try new things. Now? Well, when the going gets tough let’s fall back on the safe bet of adding zombies to a game. Seriously – zombies actually make everything 22% better. With the exception of Carmageddon, But it is a lazy method with which to mask their creative shortcomings and I felt that if anyone knew all of these things would be the Call of Duty community.

I never reviewed the game, which might be just as well, although I saw the mixed reviews the game garnered in the industry press. If you were to aggregate the scores and the comments into one comprehensive review anyone reading it would rightly arrive at the conclusion that it was, rightly so, an average game with many flaws both in single player and multiplayer modes. It has its moments in small doses and as such will enjoy a brief run of popularity before dropping off the radar altogether, like a party hosted on a stealth bomber. This is a conclusion bore out by reports that came in at the time of typing this screed, that in the second week of the game’s availability sales dropped 85%. These are likely to be further impacted upon with Germany stopping imports of the non-censored game, leaving their residents to play a heavily cut version. Hard to believe this is the same game that caused people to steal it at gunpoint stateside only a few weeks ago.

Such is life though… So imagine my surprise when at i-series, an event that quite rightly as things stand doesn’t seem to garner the attention from the wider CoD4 community, people were idly talking about the new game and how it had impacted on what people wanted to do. “I guess we’ll have to see what happens with Black Ops” they mused “might be the community wants to make the move.” Surely not? I sat there in quiet contemplation, unable to articulate my thoughts. I thought we’d got past that stage with CoD4… You know the stage I mean, where everytime a new instalment of the game is put out, the developers throw money at it in the hope – usually well founded – that you will all jump ship for the three to six months they support the game before going back to plan the next way to hoover money out your wallets. It seemed to me that the CoD4 community is now a bona fide one in it’s own right, not just a collection of gaming nomads.

Yet I asked around and that phrase came up again, even from people whose opinion I respect and feel have steered the community in the right direction. It seems odd and I hope it’s just a knee jerk reaction, an atavistic tic from the bad old days when nobody was certain where the future lay. But you guys have a future now and let’s be absolutely clear about the achievements of the CoD4 community. When the game first came out it was sneered at by the seniors of Call of Duty 2. They said – perhaps with a grain of truth in the vitriol somewhere – that the game lacked skill and would never measure up to their title. Those that made the hop even said that it was a fad, a flash in the pan and the way to make a cheap buck for the players. Indeed, the first few tournaments had prize pots that would have been well received by any e-sports title, let alone a game without an e-sports following.

Yet people didn’t go back and even in the face of Activision pulling those glittering prizes the game still managed to see large numbers of sign-ups, an increasing skill level and bigger and better LAN events. People took notice of the game and we saw record numbers of spectators and big event organisers talking about bringing in CoD4 as it was a more public friendly game than some of the other FPS titles out there. The Antwerp E-sports Festival saw the most competitive CoD4 event to date, drawing teams from all over the world, to underline that the game still had a competitive future no matter what was thrown at it. And it’s weird that one of the threats to that community are the same people that created the game in the first instance but such is the nature of Call of Duty titles.

Credit has to go to everyone who has stood by and done their part, rather than being pulled this way and that, numerical puppets for hire whenever a game needs that extra shot in the arm for promotional purposes. So why would this title even make a dent in the psyche of the average CoD4 player? Have we become so jaded and listless that we no longer feel motivated to support the title? Do we crave something new in the absence of regular competition? I have no idea myself, still feeling like an outsider when it comes to mindset, even in understanding the other facets of the scene. What I do know is this game isn’t the answer… It’s a flash in the pan, and a badly made one at that. CoD4 on the other hand is a refined competitive game that has life in it, something that needs to be underlined by proactivity rather than apathy and inactive confusion.

At times, it might seem like CoD4 is the afterthought of the e-sports world. Hell, I was there at DSRack where I saw the game largely neglected and the prize money still outstanding for the victors, while the other games left with cash in hand. For shame, because it was the Call of Duty players who were the most patient and respectful during the delays and technical problems, despite the absence of a dedicated tournament admin team. In this sense I understand the delusion, the want to believe that a new game would make something better, something different, that where there is money there is respect and professionalism.

Yet that’s not true at all. What brings those things is the resolute determination not to change, never to waver in that loyalty to the cause that makes people stand up and take notice. Being able to mobilise large groups of sign-ups with a single forum post, being able to attract outside media attention and having community mouth-pieces that can express the opinions of the many in a way that makes sense… All of these things are what makes a scene truly be respected by the people that matter and that’s not going to change for some time to come.

I hope it’s all nonsense. I hope that the people I overheard and spoke to where either strung out from lack of sleep or were just idiots, perhaps even both. It’d be a shame to get distracted now. 2011 is looming and there’s room for great things to happen for CoD4 if people can continue to stand firm, be resolute and do their duty. Don’t get distracted by these flashy baubles. It’s an illusion. Look at it this way, those women that dance on the stage in seedy all night bars… They might want you to force grubby notes into their g-string but believe me when I say they don’t want to go home with you. And on that awfully revealing note let’s leave it there.