How I became a hardcore gamer!

The adventures of David, a hardcore video gamer, teaching Katrina, a n00b-type video gamer, how to play Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Katrina's perspective:

Previously, the only vidjo-games I ever played were on Nintendo consoles (such as the Wii and DS) as Nintendo has recently started to target 'casual gamers' (or, in hardcore-gamer speak: n00bs) with easier and mote intuitive control layouts. You may have already read my blog posts on Nintendogs and Scribblenauts, both on the DS - if not, you might want to read them here and here.

Besides these games, I have also played Pokemon (Diamond version), Professor Layton, and Super Mario Bros. On the Wii, I've played Wii Sports Resort, Super Mario Galaxy, and Wii Fit Plus, all very entertaining games (even the Wii Fit Plus, despite its endless anti-fat guilt trips).

Yesterday, David taught me how to play a Xbox 360 game - Call of Duty: Black Ops. Despite the fact that I sometimes erroneously refer to the game as "Spec Ops", I think I am pretty good. I have had Kill-to-Death ratios of over 1 (meaning that for every time I die, I also kill someone), however most of my KD ratios are around 0.2 to 0.5. We have been playing the game "Team Deathmatch" which I realised refers to the fact that the teams are competing in a death-match against each other - at first I believed that it was because my team was called "Team Deathmatch".

I have played against enemies on the 'recruit' level (meaning that the enemies are easy to defeat), and I think that the 'veteran' enemies should come much, much later. I already know which multi-player maps are the best (the ones where the environment is not all one colour, like Summit or Jungle - ideally I like the more colourful maps such as Nuketown, or at least the maps that feature a little more built environment), and I know that if I were to ever play against real people I should not reveal that I'm female, otherwise they'd demand to see boobs.

After learning Black Ops I think that combat games that involve killing people and just generally being super-competitive and aggressive are not my cup of tea. I much prefer games where you solve puzzles, train puppies, or work on your fitness. The Xbox console is not as user-friendly or intuitive as the Nintendo Wii or DS consoles. Many games have different controls to each other, which is quite cruel. The hardest things to learn are using the dual joystick controls, one which controls your movement, and one which controls your vision, but I am getting there!

The best part of Black Ops Multi-player is killing people and the worst part is getting killed yourself. Once I actually did kill myself by falling off a bridge. The most annoying deaths are the ones where you are standing off with an enemy, and they manage to kill you before you kill them (mostly because you have forgotten to reload your weapon after discharging all your ammunition into a point somewhere next to the enemy's knee). Other annoying deaths are the ones where you die unexpectedly, for example, if your killer was standing behind you, or was a sniper and was a long way away from you.

It's also pretty fun to experiment with the various face paints you can wear. However, Call of Duty: Black Ops does not give you the opportunity to play as a female character; something that most Nintendo games I have played allow. (Even Super Mario Bros. where you play as Mario - at least he is portly and stylised enough to pass off as non-gendered, despite the impressive moustache). All of the Black Ops avatars and enemy characters are testosterone-charged macho soldiers and therefore can be a little alienating to female players.

David's perspective:

I've been playing videogames for as long as I can remember; they were a big part of my childhood, and still eat up a lot of my free time. A lot of people consider videogames, particularly the "hardcore" or "violent" kind, to be the realm of male players, and "casual" games the domain of female gamers. This is a complete fallacy; 50% of gamers are female, and the disparity in preferred genre is near nil. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to introduce Katrina to the "hardcore" videogame; as she mentioned above, Katrina has played plenty of DS and Wii games, and I felt it was time she graduated from these "casual" mediums, and moved onto something a little more intensive.

I thought the end goal of this experiment would be to foster an appreciation for the games that can really be considered art, games with plots rich in theme and meaning (like last year's brilliant Red Dead Redemption, or the cyberpunk classic Deus Ex), games that tell masterfully crafted epics and fairytales (like Mass Effect, or Majora's Mask). I realised however that these games weren't things that could be readily experienced like books or films. There's a lot of assumed knowledge in videogames, common practices, conventions and terminology, but most importantly controls; without understanding how to navigate a game, it would be impossible to appreciate. So our training began with a game lauded for its perfection of first-person shooter gameplay mechanics and control, an inherently popcorn experience, though one widely considered a pillar of the "hardcore" gaming experience: the Call of Duty franchise, more specifically Black Ops.

Introducing Katrina to the basic controls of an FPS, I realised that it is far more difficult to pick up a controller and start playing now than it ever was when I started gaming in my formative years. When I started playing shooters, they didn't exist on consoles; you played on a home computer, with a keyboard and mouse, controlling your avatar with the W, A, S and D keys, using the mouse to pan and control pitch (if such a feature was included - in early shooters the concept of vertical gameplay was entirely foreign, and you could look neither up nor down). There was no sprint key, no reload key, no alternate fire, no crouching, proning or diving, no picking up weapons, no grenades, no alternate grenades, no radar, no melee/knife attack. Furthermore, there was no great multitude of weapons, attachments and gadgets, nor the confusing process of character creation and modification. The modern-day shooter is the product of an evolutionary process, and gamers of my generation have had the fortune to be part each step of that process. We learnt piece by piece; Katrina had to learn it all on day one.

And learnt it all she did. The two-stick control system was certainly the greatest barrier to control mastery; it's not a particularly intuitive system, but in less than an hour Katrina was circle-strafing admirably. A couple of one-on-one rounds on Firing Range, and she was ready to fight some bots in Nuketown. A couple of matches later and she had a 1KD, (Kill to Death ratio) a very impressive score for a beginner.

While it was rewarding to see her playing competently so quickly, what really made me smile was the way she picked up the terminology and language of competitive gaming, a lingo I had been speaking since those first days of four-player GoldenEye on the N64. Whether she was scolding me for "stealing a kill", blaming a loss on slow reload, or lamenting a "spawn kill", Katrina was naturally developing an understanding of decade-old competitive gaming convention; it made me realise that gaming isn't just a cult hobby. It can be enjoyed by anyone who gives it a chance, and I found that very encouraging.

It will be a while before she's making a name for herself in New Vegas, lassoing bounties at the Hanging Rock or strategically dismembering Necromorphs, but I think this has been a greatly successful first step on a very exciting path.