Why I Fail at COD

Hey Sexy Sexies. Your brain could use some stimulation, so lets get reading.

**Disclaimer** I am aware there are women that play the game we are about to discuss. Girl Power. Women's Rights, and stuff. That's cool if you have a vagina and do play. I don't play, and have yet to find any women who really play it for themselves and not just to impress or interact with people with balls, so for all intents and purposes, this discussion is probably going to offend you.

For those of you that aren't aware, Call of Duty, or COD--if you want to sounds cool and like you know what you're talking about, which I do-- is a video game that was originally release to the masses in 2003. Since it's arrival almost 10 years ago, it has blown the F up, and morphed into something akin to electronic crack for men and boys between the ages of 12 and 35. There have been like 8 or 9 versions since the first one graced humanity with its presence, and each one incites riots in Walmarts and Best Buys across the globe upon it's date of release each consecutive year.

COD is defined as a "First Person Shooter", but what most people end up playing is a multi player version of the game referred to as "Team Deathmatch" which basically means the dude you are controlling is on a team with other dudes and their main goal is to kill all the dudes that aren't on their team as many times as possible in like 10 minutes or something.**Side Note**I do not actually know how long the TDM's really are because my husband constantly lies about how much  longer he is going to be playing by telling me "I only have 4 minutes left in this one, just hang on, almost done"

How I understand it, my goal, if I were to play this game would be 1) See bad guys 2) Shoot. Got it. Sounds easy enough. So the first time my husband passed over his Xbox controller and told me to try playing, I figured I was going to kick some mother fucking ass. Ha. Pssssh. This is not hard. How can it be hard? All you do is run around and shoot people. I've played Mario Kart, and won. I dominate at Wii bowling. I'm like a level 57 gardener on Viva Pinata 2. I've fucking got this shiat in the bag.

30 seconds in, and I somehow managed to find the only real corner in the entire map--which is set to be outside mind you, how are there corners when you are outside?--and am stuck in this corner staring at the fucking sky, shooting at a wall. 

31 seconds in and I get knifed in the back by an opposing team member since I'm still stuck in the corner, looking at the sky, shooting at the wall. After being stabbed in the back, and then mocked by whatever 12 year old killed me, I do something called 'respawning' which means I get to come back to life in a different section of the map and try my luck again at actually identifying an opposing team member and successfully hitting him with a bullet. I quickly realized that the issues I'm having stem from the fact that with COD, I'm supposed to use one joystick to move my dudes body around, but also need to use a separate joystick to move his head, to simulate his line of vision. Now, I understand that this is done to make everything seem more real and lifelike and wonderful, but in reality this is just stupid because in real reality, I don't have to consciously think about moving my head. I just fucking do it. So forcing a player to try to do both these things at once isn't only annoying, it's fucking inaccurate. Take that nerds who invented this.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you that I failed the mission, and let my team down. But I will: I didn't even come close to hitting anyone. At all. After 3 minutes of frustration to the point of tears and building humiliation as my husband literally rolled on the floor laughing at me, not to mention the mean things all the middle school boys were shouting into my headset, I had just about had enough of this game, and yell something like "fuck you I'm done" while throwing the controller on the floor.

Because I'm pretty competitive and am usually good at most things I do--this is a statement of fact, don't question it--I wanted to know why I suck at this game. Someone with moderate level intelligence like myself should be able to figure out how to work a controller with multiple buttons on it. It really shouldn't be that difficult.

So to make myself feel better and help explain away my ineptitude, I have come to a conclusion, a hypothesis if you will, on why I can never be good at COD: It all comes back to a little thing called Aiming Accuracy. And I give you the science to back it up:  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16350603

This explains why my dude is always either staring at his feet or looking into the sky. It also explains why I am unable to hit anything other than inanimate objects like that broken down tank in the middle of the street or that pile of rubble by the fire escape, even though there is a dude running straight at me. Either my head or my gun, I just dont have the genetic cajones to figure it out. And that's ok. Because as much as I was hoping to get to Prestige Mode faster than my husband and all of his other dork friends, and even though I was really looking forward to using my kill to death ratio to justify my existence on this planet, I know, that as a woman, I will always have my cleaning and baking to fall back on.

 So today's post is dedicated to all the men and boys (fine, and women) who waste away the precious moments of their life playing a video game that simulates the horrors of war without making you go through any of the bad parts: May your desensitization to violence never come back to haunt you in the form of 15 to Life. May your wives and girlfriends and boyfriends and significant others never realize that you play this game to get the F away from them. May your chopper gunners be plentiful and your enemy's sentry guns easy to destroy--you're never getting to ghost pro, just accept it. And lastly, May you one day realize that the meaning of life doesn't come in the form of an Xbox controller, no matter how sweet the graphics may be. You can get there. I believe in you. Never give up.


~Maria