For a large portion of my life, I have enjoyed video games. While I played games a lot growing up, I would not call my younger self a gamer.
It is my belief that I have ascended into my gamer lifestyle most recently. I have spent a lot of money on games over the past three years and have spent countless hours procrastinating with their help.
For the most part I play single player, offline games- mostly because I don’t have very many gamer friends.
When I look at my collection of games, I realize that I am somewhat of a gamer snob. I only own games that have won or been nominated for awards. Many of the titles I own are Game of the Year or collectors editions. I spend most of my gaming time playing games from the role playing genre.
As a result of my video game snobbery, I looked down on games like “Call of Duty.” I grew up playing the original “Call of Duty” games — the ones that actually had a pretty good campaign mode with a good story line.
Once “COD” jumped into the next generation era and focused primarily on its online multiplayer aspect, I lost interest.
Recently I played one of the newer “COD” titles and wasn’t very impressed with it. I felt as if I had more or less confirmed that I wasn’t a fan of that type of game– it just wasn’t for me.
Then a friend recommended that I try my hand at “Battlefield.” So I went down to Gamestop and picked up a copy of “Battlefield 3.” I played through the campaign to get a handle on the game play and then jumped on a server to play against other people.
I was hooked almost immediately. The amount of strategy involved in a game of “Battlefield” was much higher than that of “COD.” That is probably because the maps in “Battlefield” are massive compared to “COD,” which means you aren’t dying or killing another player every 30-40 seconds; you can go minutes without encountering a single enemy character.
Despite the few features that improve on the game play, the game is still pretty similar to “COD.” And as a result players can experience the same frustrations on either title.
There is nothing more frustrating than spawning after being killed, only to be killed six seconds later by an enemy sniper that is hiding out near your squads default spawn area.
When you see someone using a shotgun, odds are they aren’t very good and are using the weapon to level the playing field. However, this leveling of the playing field tends to make some of the higher ranking players upset. Most of the time those upset players are also server admins.
I have been on many servers that warn against using shotguns: Use a shotgun and get banned instantly. The trouble with that is that admins often ignore when their teammates use shotguns and sometimes even use shotguns themselves.
That kind of hypocrisy is enough to make me stop playing for a while or at least leave the server and try to connect to a new one.
After spending countless hours over the past couple of months on the online battlefield, I have come to realize a couple of things: Campers are the worst kind of people, using a shotgun is a cheap way to boost stats, and server admins can be gigantic piles of poop.
Teniente is a junior majoring in journalism.
