I don’t like Call of Duty.
I just can’t get along with it... and God knows, I’ve tried.
I tried when I noticed that the world was passing me by. I’d watched my friends reconfiguring themselves around the cult of C.O.D: I’d realized that gradually, inexorably, almost all of their conversations were becoming magnetized towards it. If they weren’t together, playing it, then they were putting on headsets, and continuing to fling their banter across the city. Competing; sparring; strategizing. Committing every cranny and nuance of it to memory; eeking out those little advantages over each other. It fast became an obsession.
And soon, I came to worry that this game was in fact marginalizing me from my own friends (that, and – not insignificantly – my failure to reply to almost any of their text messages for about nine years). It seemed as if they’d crafted new personalities, new correlations and terminologies, even new insults around it. To watch them play Call of Duty was to observe the mechanisms of some mad, private society.
So I tried my best to like C.O.D, but it just never ‘clicked’, unfortunately. Yes, it's an incredible, remarkable achievement of a game. It’s penetrated our world in such an unprecedented, complete way that it’s now moved far beyond being “just a video game”: it’s an all-encompassing, devouring phenomenon, and I can only assume that (like the music of the Beatles, another source of personal indifference) it isn’t actually crap – it just happens to be something that I fundamentally “don’t get.” But I don’t get it – that’s the point. C.O.D is just so fiddly, and over-elaborate. Plus, it’s bogged down in too many details; it strives for authenticity so much that it’s actually mired in realism, hamstrung by it. I mean, I’d played the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem’ and Wolfenstein to death years previously, but it seemed that since then - across the intervening decade or so - first-person shooters had alchemized themselves into these grand, complex, profound... simulators. They’re just not games any more.
Now as I said, I don’t doubt that the Call of Duty games are an incredible technical achievement. And I had to remind myself, confronting some very inconvenient truths in the process – there comes a time in every man’s life when the games of the day (or rather, the dexterity and motor skills that they demand) are suddenly, unexpectedly beyond him. I mean, there’s no denying that my dad’s a smart guy, but at some point in the early ‘90s he came unstuck - sometime during that hyperspacial jump from 8 to 16-bit - and he never found his way home again. He just couldn’t deal with that shift from joysticks to joypads. And to see him nowadays, pawing cack-handedly at a Wii remote every Christmas... it’s sad. Like watching a monkey wrestling with a Chinese finger-trap.
Maybe it’s just run its course. I mean, I never had that compulsion to keep up with the changes and the trends, I never self-identified as ‘a gamer’... but then when I was growing up, it wasn’t the glossy, urbane, GQ-pursuit that it is today. It wasn’t really something you could define yourself by, at that point. But I did love my games. Something to do with being an only child, I think; I could lose myself in them, and commit completely to them without necessarily having to involve anyone or anything else.
So I thought I’d write this blog. I don’t play much nowadays, but there was a time when computer games were a far more significant part of my life, and it’s those games – and their attendant glut of memories - that I wanted to celebrate here. Throughout my life, games have been just like songs; the good ones, the really memorable ones, they all summon a distinct memory. They conjure people and places and feelings. For me, they’re an evocative, sensory thing. The games systems I’ve owned – from C64, to xBox 360 – have all neatly encased a separate, definable section of my life; they’re all umbilically linked to a unique place, and a particular time.
Looking back, I was never really one for girls. I was a bit of a loser in school, to be honest - didn’t really do anything. I didn’t drink, or smoke, or do drugs. I wasn’t in any clubs, or societies; I didn’t play any sports, or an instrument. Wasn’t massively sociable. All I was really interested in was computer games, football, and rock music... and though the world and many of its curiosities have since revealed themselves to me, very few of those things had that feel-good resonance of finishing school on a Friday lunchtime, wandering down to Select-a-Disk and picking up a second-hand Van Halen album, reading the liner notes in Burger King, and then going home to play Ocarina of Time for the rest of the afternoon.
I figured that at this point, the world doesn’t really need another angry amateur rattling on about some bollocks or other. And that’s why this is a happy blog; it won’t be of any significance, they’ll be nothing profound or enlightened about it, but it will at least be happy. It’ll bring me happiness, writing it. And because of that, I hope it makes you happy too.
