CALL OF DUTY OR CONTRA?

So first, a thank you to Brandon, a reader of the blog, for contributing this idea and allowing me to steal it (it was originally about Halo, but the point will still stand) after my previous entry regarding the Game Genie, because video games are always fun to talk about.  I’m 41, and my first ever for real video game console (so not a Tiger Handheld Electronic, which is you know what those are, you know what it feels like to get hoodwinked) was a Nintendo Entertainment System, which, upon being introduced to, consumed my life and put me on a downward spiral of video game debauchery that continues to this day (though my regular readers will know I’m still stuck in the 90s and too much a curmudgeon to learn how to play new games).  Through my decades of gaming, I’ve lived to see many eras transpire, to include indulging in the craze that was online gaming with the (at the time) juggernaut of the venue: Call of Duty.  On the NES, we didn’t have online gaming: we had “couch co-op”, and our wargame to play with a friend was Contra.  And these two games represent an interesting intersection and dichotomy in the world of video games that, predictably, extrapolates into a metaphor for the world of physical transformation.  Both are a product of the era and represent a prevailing approach and philosophy in regards to their presentation, and those who grew up on one are going to have a differing perspective vs those that grew up on the other, while, similarly, those who were around when both came into the light are going to have a different understanding and appreciation compared to those who started off with the future and worked backwards to the past.  Allow me to further explain what it is I mean here by starting with the present and then working backwards.

And yes, for true disappointment, they DID make a Tiger handheld electronic Contra

 

Call of Duty, and specifically the “Modern Warfare” variant, represents exactly that: warfare at it’s most modern.  In the realm of gaming, it is the top of the line showpony representing all the technical accomplishments that modern technology can render us, with hyper “realistic” action (no video game is ever going to realistically capture a gunfight, warfare, etc, but they sure can make it SUPER unreal), researched gunplay, a physics engine that SHOULD be being used for ballistics research, and the aforementioned online support that allows dozens of hyperstimulated pre-teens to swear at each other in different languages across multiple timezones while fragging each other with “n00b tube” grenade launchers.  This is the “latest science”: we’ve taken all that knowledge we’ve accumulated over the decades and have achieved this.

 

Contra, for the Nintendo Entertainment System, is primitive.  It’s 8-bit, blocky, with a tiny 80s soundtrack of hypersynthed beeps and boops, where you and (possibly) a friend navigate an impossible hail of gunfire that CAN be dodged through a series of acrobatic flips and jumps while you fire rifles that never run out of ammo and have the potential to be upgraded with bullets that float in zig zag patterns.  Oh, and there are aliens.  There is absolutely nothing realistic about this game: it’s an Arnold action movie with a controller.   AND it starts up AS SOON as you put the game in the NES and press “power on”.  And THEREIN lies the difference.

War is Hell

 

When you boot up Call of Duty to play, you first will most likely need to sit through a software upgrade download just to even be allowed to start the game you “own”, after which point you navigate through several dozen menus before the game will graciously allow you to actually “play” the single player campaign…at which point, you will now have the privilege of sitting through about an hour+ of tutorials on HOW to play the game.  They often try to disguise these tutorials as “fun” or perhaps “edutainment” by making it SEEM like you’re playing the game and advancing, even going so far as to maintain the narrative by putting you through an actual bootcamp scenario, but in reality you’re being handheld the entire time in a completely zero-stakes nonthreatening environment while the game is trying to give you a masters level education on the innerworkings of it’s various mechanics so that, hopefully, by the time it’s done, you actually know how to play the game.

When you boot up Contra and select 1 or 2 player mode, you are shown a black screen that says “Jungle” before your character walks 2 steps to the right and is immediately fired upon by 3 men with rifles from 2 different angles.  If any of their bullets hit you: you die.  You are given 3 lives, and if you die 3 times, it’s game over: better luck next time.  So what do you do?  You die.  A lot.  Savy gamers learned about the Konami code, such that you had 30 lives vs 3, but even with those lives, you basically just had to keep dying, restarting the stage, learning where the traps were and coming up with strategies to dodge them, just so you could get a little further than last time and die in a new and exciting spot.  You’d eventually repeat this enough until you made it to the end…and you felt like you accomplished something.  You could brag to your friends: “I beat Contra”.

Meanwhile...

 

But irrespective of BEATING these games, let’s really take some time to appreciate the fact that, with Contra, you get to start PLAYING the game much sooner than you do with Call of Duty.  Call of Duty tries to take away the hardship and frustrating of dying all the time, in the hopes of giving the gamers a more satisfying experience, but in doing so, it forgets that it’s primary purpose is to be a GAME, which is to be PLAYED.  It attempts to circumvent failure through education, but it has the unintended consequence of circumventing SUCCESS through the same means: we never get the chance TO play because we’re spending too much time learning how to play.  In the time it takes to get through Call of Duty’s tutorial mode, we’ve died 400 times in Contra…but we also got to PLAY through 400 lives during that time, and we learned so much in the process of failing while ALSO being able to play the game.  Instead of trying to learn BEFORE we played, we learned AS we played, which meant we got to get the same amount of education while also getting more actual gametime compared to what Call of Duty offered us.

 

And here we observe the world of trainees who want everything to be science backed, peer reviewed, triple blind studied with randomized control trials and backed up with decades of Russian studies compared to those that are willing to just throw the spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks.  The trainees that will spend months, if not YEARS, consuming every single bit of media they possibly can as it relates to training and nutrition before setting a bar on their backs vs the dudes that just show up and try to max out on the lat pulldown machine on day 1.  Because funny enough, despite all that research and effort, both dudes are going to look like Bambi on ice the first time they try to do a barbell squat, because some things simply can’t be understood intellectually: they have to be lived and experienced.  And, consequently, despite how “primitive” some of the older ideas regarding training and nutrition may appear compared to the current buzz of the scientific world, the reality is that these methods STILL remember that the point of this game is to play and have fun.  Do you NEED a gallon of milk and 20 breathing squats in order to get big?  Maybe not, but it sure does work as good today as it did back then.  Are meatloaf sandwiches slathered in mayo an ideal intra-workout meal?  It was good enough for one of the two men that benched 600lbs in 1967 in a t-shirt. 

On a bench that looks like this

 

Look, there’s no denying that Call of Duty is fun.  I lost plenty of time to that game.  But there’s also no denying that, sometimes, we just need to shut off our brains and go have some real, just plain old stupid fun.  Not hyper-realistic, not the latest and greatest, not the top of the line specs: just plug in, turn on the game, and try not to die for as long as you can.  There’s a time and a place for both of them, and being able to appreciate them for what they are will better allow us to know WHEN that time and place is.