From the Editor’s Desk: Game (Premium)

have developed what can only be described as an unhealthy relationship with video games. Well, not with video games. With the only video game I really play, Call of Duty.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the issues I had with the past several Call of Duty (COD) titles, where COD: Modern Warfare (2019) and COD: Black Ops Cold War (2020) were both unplayable online because of lag/latency issues, or where COD: Vanguard (2021) was just a lackluster multiplayer experience, forcing me to mostly stick with the same tired and years-old game, COD: Black Ops 4 (2018), for longer than I’d wished. No, this is a bigger problem.

I’ve been playing video games for most of my life, and I am part of the first generation of people to have access to home video games from an early age. As an adult, it was reasonable to expect that my gameplaying time would decline over the years, but I also experienced the golden age of video game innovation, largely driven by John Carmack and his unprecedented string of first-person shooter successes over a decade starting with Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 and ending, for me, with DOOM 3 in 2004. No worries: by this time, Halo, Medal of Honor, COD, and other shooters had picked up the slack.

I was also taught to use video games as a reward of sorts for work accomplished: Gary Brent, the person who jumpstarted my career, used to celebrate the completion of a book chapter or whatever amount of work by winding down with some Wolfenstein 3D. And so we—and then I—continued the tradition with whatever similar game was new at the time as we wrote into the years to come. It seemed healthy enough.

And it can be: distracting your mind is a key way to use it more efficiently, which most people understand implicitly because we’ve all had that “ah-ha!” moment in the shower, while walking, while driving, or during whatever inconvenient time, have all thought of the perfect comeback later or have belatedly remembered some thing that was right there on the tip of your tongue … but wasn’t. The nice thing about gaming, for a writer like me, is that it’s right there next to where you are writing, and you can just stop playing when inspiration, memory, or whatever winks into existence. It’s not that inconvenient.

My unhealthy relationship, with COD, with the latest COD, called Modern Warfare II (MWII), thankfully isn’t about me taking time away from work or important life events. Although one could argue, pretty effectively, that any time spent gaming is taking time away from things that are always more important. I get that. But I think my output speaks for itself, whether it’s the Windows 11 book I’m publishing as I go or the writing I do for Thurrott.com. I’m writing as much as I ever have, and thanks to Grammarly and its weekly reports, I at least have the data to back that up.

But this relationship is still troubling. It’s not fun anymore.

A big component of that is that this latest COD is incredibly difficult. I long ago settled on Team Deathmatch as the only type of game I play in COD online, and I’ve always played the so-called hardcore version of that game type, which ups the difficulty level. But MWII renamed hardware to Tier 1 for some unknown reason and amped up the difficulty even more than before. You would think that someone as familiar as I am with this series and this very game type would adapt in time, but I haven’t. In fact, I’ve given up on it and have gone back to normal Team Deathmatch. I’ve had to.

There’s a frustration to that. But the broader issue, and I promise I’ll finally get to the point, is that my daily interaction with this game is not good. Where video gaming is usually a way to blank my mind in small nuggets of time, playing this game is just an exercise in frustration. And not just because it’s not fun. But because it’s impossible to succeed.

Success in games like COD can take a few different forms, depending on which type of game you’re playing. There are, for example, goal-oriented game modes where you must work as a team to win, and so, logically enough, you’re successful by winning games. But in Team Deathmatch, winning games is secondary and, in my case, entirely beside the point. No, this game is all about the K/D ratio, which stands for kills/deaths. The goal here is to kill more than you are killed. And to have the highest K/D ratio possible. This pits you against the enemy players, of course. But it also pits you against your teammates, rendering moot the “team” in “team deathmatch.” I need my teammates to fail too.

Succeeding this way is perhaps more difficult than it sounds. For example, a K/D ratio of 1.2 is, for me at least, pretty good. 1.4, 1.5 would be even better. But as long as it’s positive, whatever.

MWII is so hard, however, that I started off slow and had a negative K/D for a long time. I struggled from game to game to get it up to 1.0 and then above that. I hit 1.01 eventually and then, blessedly, briefly, 1.02. But I’ve been stuck at around 1.01 ever since.

1.01 is nowhere close to 1.2, and to illustrate the issue, consider some math. I’ll use big, round numbers to make this easier on me. Because math.

Let’s say it’s months in and you have 10,000 kills and 10,000 deaths, and so you have a 1.0 K/D. What would it take to get to 1.1? Well, you would have to score 1000 kills—1000!—without dying once. That’s impossible, of course. But since MWII is the hardest COD I’ve ever played, it’s even more problematic. I do have the occasional standout game, but in most games, I’m pretty even or have just a few more kills than deaths. Getting to 1.1 is never going to happen. Never.

Well, how about 1.01? In this case, you would need to score 100 kills without dying. Just to get to 1.01, which to be clear, is not a one percent improvement or even a one-tenth of one percent improvement: it’s a one-one hundredth of one percent improvement. Also impossible, but something achievable over many games. Many, many games.

Except for two things. As you work to improve your K/D, COD uses a matchmaking system to pair you with players of similar skill, so the game keeps getting harder. And as you score more and more kills, the numbers need to move up to 1.01 get higher and higher. Again, because math.

In the old days, I suspect what happened is that I quickly got up into the 1.2 to 1.5 range and then basically maintained my K/D for the duration of the game lifecycle. But with this game, I started in a hole, barely got out of it, and now I’m maintaining that lower K/D. And it is ruining this game for me because every kill suddenly matters quite a bit.

As my wife can no doubt tell you, my incidents of what I think of as in-game Tourette’s have multiplied in recent months, coincident with the release of MWII. I try not to obsess over it because it’s only a game and it’s not important. But after a lifetime of being good at this kind of thing, it gnaws at me. It’s not good.

And in that sense, this game is like any other addiction. I know it’s bad for me, but I can’t walk away from it. I can take some small solace in knowing that I’m not skipping out on other things to play the game and am not doing the gaming version of day drinking. But as with overdrinking, overeating, or whatever else one might do habitually and against all reason, it’s a concern. And so I’m taking steps to step back from that cliff by playing less frequently and for less time. And by trying not to obsess over it and the impossible math. And, as with drinking, I see a future in which I simply walk away for good. That might be the healthiest outcome of all, though perhaps there are other, less stressful forms of gaming that will make sense. I doubt it.