Rolf Ebeling
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Dec 19, 2007 12:13 AM
Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat, developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision
At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling, who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted here back in October about how Electronic Arts' Skate triggered his boyhood memories of the birthplace of modern American skateboarding. In today's entry, Level Up's foremost Halo fanboy and online multiplayer aficionado explains why his uneasy reaction to the single-player experience of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat has made it his Game of the Year for 2007.
I play games to vent. I feel weird admitting that, given that I'm an adult and should just gracefully accept life's real challenges and focus calmly on real solutions. Sometimes, though, firing a fake incendiary round into a group of fake goons and watching them fly into fake walls...well, there's a real satisfaction in that. Playing my own pop psychologist, the primary reason I've burned through two Xbox 360s is to keep a tenuous hold on my childhood and teenage years. It's the same reason I'm stupidly happy when I'm fish-tailing my mountain bike around curves, or how I can listen to "The Queen is Dead" over and over again and never really get tired of it. For that, I feel little or no guilt.
But another part of why I play is to have an experience that's insulated from the consequences or limitations of my current reality. For an hour or two, I'm can free myself of life's responsibilities (job, family, being a law-abiding citizen) and barriers (time, gravity, vulnerability to melee attacks) and put a serious hurt on somebody who deserves it (the Covenant, that sniper over flag three, whoever just ground their heel into my last nerve today). I can overreact spectacularly and get Achievement Points for it.
The very idea of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the franchise's first foray away from the well-trod World War II genre, has had me drooling for the past few months.
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