COD

My roommates play a lot of Call of Duty so I've been getting back into the games a little bit.

We have been playing the most recent COD games, Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3. I enjoy first person shooters and I love online multiplayer but I honestly have never been that into COD. I've been more of a Halo fan over the years but I still enjoy the games because so many people play them and I usually play these games for the social experience.

My Favorite COD game so far was MW2. I loved that game. I really put some time into the game and I pursued a lot of the multiplayer content. I was quickly becoming a Call of Duty fanboy. When Black Ops came out, I traded in my copy of MW2 to play the newest game. I enjoyed the new content of Blacks Ops but for some reason I didn't enjoy it as much. I didn't want to play as badly and I definitely didn't strive to unlock everything like I did in MW2. There was just something missing. I thought that Call of Duty had just become stale to me so I just forgot about it mostly. I played the game every once in a while but not seriously.

A couple months later and I have just moved in with my new roommates. James has a copy of MW3 so I decided to give it a try and I was immediately reminded of why I loved the first game. There is one big thing missing in Black Ops that I think makes it a dramatically inferior game, a reward system. A really addictive/fun video game should be like gambling. You should get sucked in. You should feel good playing the game, you should be aching to play more, and you should get excited everytime you win or get something.

In MW2, every time you get a kill points come up. Every time you rank up, there is an epic guitar riff. Every time you do something cool, you are given a new item, emblem, or logo. The game is constantly giving you an endorphin rush by having you feel like you're "winning" constantly. As I said earlier, you get that gambling feeling and I wanted to get that feeling more. I also loved the mechanic of unlocking special logos and items for your character from special actions. It made you want to play the game just for the possibility of a cool thing happening. You wanted to constantly pull the slot machine to try and have that super rare event happen so you could have the super rare logo. I loved that. I really liked seeing similar mechanics come back in MW3. I think that MW3 might even continue that "win" feeling even better. The game feels a little stale for other reasons but that's another post.

When Treyarch was first showing off black ops, I remember them showing the callsign and emblem creater. In MW2 you had to earn a cool callsign but in this game you could create a cool one. Treyarch was under the impression that people wanted cool looking call signs. Well people do but they didn't want them because of asthetics, they wanted them because they were rare or difficult to get. A huge driving force to play MW2 was to get those cool callsigns and emblems. Black Ops completely removed those mechanics. When that mechanic was removed, it also made the challeges section of the game useless. People didn't really care about if they were completing challenges when there was no reward for doing so.

This little change in game mechanics really sucked the fun out of the game. I think that Black Ops has great weapons, fun kill streaks, cool game modes, and better maps that MW3 but the removal of that reward system made the game less addictive. Playing the game is fun but Black Ops made it so you didn't want to keep playing.

This is an incredibly important concept to remember when designing games. Why does the player feel good? Why does the player want to pick up the game and play? What makes the game fun? Why do people want to play over and over gain? All good questions and I think the difference between a game that is good and a game that you never eject from the console.