DLX Design

I am bad at games. No, really bad. I’m not sure exactly why that it is. Maybe I overthink every situation. Maybe I just don’t have the patience to get good at a game. Whatever the reason, I am not good at computer games.

That being said, I love playing them! The majority of the last two weeks I have spent playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Assasin’s Creed 2, two of the biggest games out for this years holiday season. And I’ve been enjoying both immensely. However, and this is especially evident in the multiplayer modes of MW2, I am not good at them.

Assassin’s Creed is a game in which you, not surprisingly, play an Assassin. Set in the late 15th centuary, you play Ezio, a somewhat spoiled (at least at first) Fiorentini youth whose father is, unbeknownst to Ezio, an assassin. Ezio’s father and two brothers are first arrested, then executed by a supposed family friend setting Ezio off on a mission of vengence during which he travels far and wide and discovers more about his heritage.

Modern Warfare 2 is a much different game. The single player campaign follows a special International task force as events unfurl that lead to a Russian invasion of the US mainland. The single player campaign is excellent while it lasts but unfortunately is very short. The meat of this game is in the multiplayer, and it is in the multiplayer that I find out just how bad I am at games!

Currently my kill-death spread is 0.4. What that means is that for every two times I kill an opposing player, I get killed 5 times myself! Bear in mind that the best kill-death spread I’ve seen is 2.0 (two kills for every one death), you can see how bad I actually am! And believe it or not, this 0.4 ratio is actually an improvement of how I was doing at the start, which resulted after three days of play with a 0.2 kill-death spread!

So I am bad at games. Painfully bad in some cases. So why do I play them?

Well for me the playing of a game is never about the winning. Sure, I get frustrated when something isn’t going my way (“I hit him with three headshots! How did he kill me first?!”) but in general, I just enjoy playing the game itself, regardless of outcome. I like to win, who doesn’t, but it’s not the be-all-and-end-all for me.

I also like the social aspect of a game like Modern Warfare’s team games. Going online with a group of friends and chatting away to each other over the com system while at the same time trying to kill some terrorists (or whoever the opposing team is) is a great experience, one I think everyone should at least try.

So there you have it. I am bad at games. But that doesn’t stop me playing!

(Oh and before anyone brings up the violence aspect of games, I’ll just say this. The more killing I do on my xbox, the less killing I do in real life )

-Stevie