Turns Out I Suck At Modern Warfare 2

I’m awful at Modern Warfare 2. But don’t ask me. Ask my OCD.

During the end of the semester last year, I decided to sit down and annoy my housemates by playing a bunch of games of Modern Warfare 2 so that I could learn about the game. Like how your average college kid thinks he can develop an awesome throw by watching the techniques of great quarterbacks, or like how Dane Cook learns how to be a comedian by studying the routines of other comics. I figured using the magic of statistics, I could track my numbers, observe some learning effects, and get some unambiguous feedback on my performance. Unfortunately, the feedback was unambiguous indeed: I’m so, so fucking awful at this game.

I set out to see how I did with three different guns the game has to offer: the ACR, the FAL, and the M16. I chose these three guns because they were the three highest-rated primary weapons we had unlocked at the time, they have three distinct firing rates and, above all, they were the three weapons I most felt like using at the time. This nerditudinous trek involved ninety rounds of a pretty average game, after all. Oh, and for those of you keeping score, the FAL was last seen in District 9 and Escape from L.A., the ACR was featured in Terminator: Salvation and Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen; and the M16 has most recently been used in Alone in the Dark and Land of the Dead. Obviously, I expected the FAL to all-around dominate, the ACR to show promise but result in two wasted hours of my life, and I only used the M16 at the urging of one of my lonely nerd friends. You see what I did there. However, as it turns, out, all of these guns gave me a basically comprehensively Alone In The Dark: The Movie performance.

I am the Uwe Boll of Modern Warfare 2.

Regardless of which gun I used, my kill/death ratio didn’t surpass one over the course of thirty games played per gun. For those of you with things to do like hang out with your friends, go outdoors and other things besides meticulously build spreadsheets of your reliably lousy video game performance, a kill/death ratio not surpassing one means I was killed more often than I killed. In every theater in the history of the planet this would mean I would be, mathematically speaking, the worst soldier ever.

For standardization purposes, I used the same secondary equipment for each weapon: The attachment was the grenade launcher, my secondary weapon was the rocket launcher, and my equipment consisted of the stun grenades and Claymores. For those of you who don’t play the game, don’t worry, my choice of secondary gear probably didn’t make any difference. I didn’t learn a damn thing about using them while playing. I played the magic-social-sciences number of 30 games for each gun, randomizing which gun would be played at the start of each given round through the entire round to avoid exogenous time-series effects, and I have to say: If sucking ass at Modern Warfare 2 is annoying, sucking ass at Modern Warfare 2 ninety times in a row is as about as bad as life gets. Ah, life in the First World.

One thing I was hoping was that my awfulness at this game was a function of the type of map I was playing. After all, the ACR, FAL, and M16 are all non-sniper rifles, and some of the game’s maps are just designed for sniper chicanery. Some maps just have exceptionally long or wide open areas. Well, in the words of your mother, nothing’s too long or wide for… Hey look, a graph!

From inexcusably bad to 'where's this kid's crash helmet?'

However, there is one interesting stand-out in my performance: My M-16 Experience Point gain per map played. My theory is thus: I suck at using the M-16 even more than I suck at using every other gun. This forces me to try other tactics, fancier moves that earn more experience points like using grenades, making knife kills, and wildly firing the rocket launcher into the air until I hit somebody’s airplane. Who knows. I probably would’ve taken better track of my statistics but, er… ahem…

No stastistically-significant relationship with the quality of my playing, by the way.

Thus, through the power of quantitative obsession, I can now safely say I have absolutely no business playing this game.

Afterthought:

Yes, I spent this entire blog post wondering this, too: