It was a last minute choice as we were leaving the Family video. I had $20 to spend on food and entertainment for the night from my parents (a rare gift) and we had only found one movie to watch for the night. “How about we get a video game?” my friend suggested as we passed the video game alcove. Sure, what the hell. “Which one?” I asked. “Let’s get Call of Duty. The new one” she said as she grabbed Call of duty: Black Ops off of the shelf. Well this should be interesting. We grabbed it, paid the ridiculously high $20 deposit and left to get our snacks for the night.
We decided to watch the movie first and popped in Takers, a non-quite original but still very entertaining film, especially due to the appearances of T.I. and Chris Brown, including a chase scene where Chris Brown gets to show off his crazy acrobatics. After the movie ended, we decided to put in Call of Duty and play a few rounds. It really helped that the movie we had just watched had lots of intense shooting scenes. We were all ridiculously, almost frighteningly, pumped to gun each other down in a game that we all barely knew how to play.
It took a little while to figure out how to get started, but once we did, that was all that mattered for the next hour. It consisted of us all running around a level checking our radars to try and find the little red dots that represented our enemy’s (aka each other), and once we finally ran into each other we would start screaming and shooting wildly then yelling out expletives when we accidentally killed ourselves with our own grenades, or when couldn’t figure out how to aim so we would repeatedly shoot at the persons feet. One of my friends who wasn’t playing decided to take a video of us with her phone at one point during our gaming session. When we watched it back, it was a little embarrassing how into it we were. It consisted of periods of intense silence which would be suddenly broken by rounds of gunfire, which were soon drowned out by us all yelling. This cycle repeated several times.
After a while we became mentally exhausted from playing and opted to put the game away for the night. As I recall this incident, it becomes even more ridiculous to me. We aren’t gamers by any means, and yet all of our energy and focus was centered on the TV screen and all that mattered was that I got more lucky kills than anyone else, and when I didn’t, I was furious and resorted to yelling and rocking back and forth in my chair violently. It’s probably a good thing I don’t play video games more often.
