Assignment 10: Call of Duty 4

For this post, I decided to use the game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a recently released first person shooter for various gaming systems (I played it on Windows.) The premise of the game is “realistic” modern combat, played out in a tense single player campaign or in a multiplayer environment. The game’s multiplayer aspect had several types of game play. For this post, I chose to experiment with three of them: Sabotage, Domination, and Team Death Match. One drawback of the game with respect to the post was that avatars were not individually chosen; a player chooses a side and a weapons kit, and assigned a player model based on the two choices. This lead me to wonder if the selection of side would affect the ability of the team to function. Would a player’s self perception of their avatar (either a United States Marine/British SAS agent or non-descript Middle Eastern Soldier/Russian Spetsnaz operative) prime them to behave in a certain way? The US/UK soldiers appeared better equipped and perhaps a little more professional than the model for the other two factions.

My first game was with the Sabotage game type. In this game, each team attempts to carry a bomb to the other team’s weapons cache, and defend the device until it detonates. I chose this mode because it requires teamwork to accomplish the goal. I first noticed that there was a heavy number imbalance in players, favoring the US side. This is not uncommon to see in online games, especially when playing on servers based in the US. For this game, the “Op For” (as they’re called in the game, probably to not offend any single country; instead opting to slightly agitate them all at once) team lacked teamwork to overcome the enemy. We were almost immediately surrounded and picked off, giving the other team complete control over our cache.

The second game used the Domination rule set. In this style, there are three flags placed around the map. A team accumulates points based on how many flags they are holding at any given moment. They also serve as spawn points for the team’s players. I played on the Russian Spetsnaz side, facing the British SAS. The sides seemed evenly matched, and both sides used a fair amount of team work. Once again my team lost, but it was by no means a lost cause for the Russians. This game seemed to contradict the first in terms of whether team selection affected teamwork.

The third game involved the much faster paced Team Death Match. Once again I was put on the “Op For” side due to a numbers imbalance, but it was not nearly as bad as the first game. One thing I noticed while player was although the combat was extremely chaotic, whenever I checked the UAV screen (essentially a screen that shows you where all players are) clear territories were present at all times. There was a definite “front line” apparent whenever I checked the screen, around every 10 seconds during the match. The territories shifted quickly, but any soldier that got too far into enemy territory was quickly shot down and forced to re-spawn on his side. No apparent difference in teamwork between the two sides was revealed by this match.

In retrospect, three games was not nearly enough experience to be able to make a judgment on whether team selection affected a player’s self-perception of their avatar, and thus of themselves in game. In Yee/Baileson’s 2007 study, they found that height and attractiveness of an online avatar increased that player’s aggressiveness and level of self-disclosure/comfort with strangers, respectively. This effect, known as the Proteus Effect, was not apparent in my limited experience with this game. The inability to change one’s individual avatar probably had an effect on the apparent lack of effect. All models were relatively of the same height, and of the same general facial features and shapes. Instead what seemed to predict dominance was weapon choice and numerical superiority/inferiority. When a team I played on was badly outnumbered, they tended to withdraw and allow the other team to dictate the areas of conflict on the map. When people chose weapons with shorter range, they showed much more aggressiveness in getting closer to an enemy soldier than one who chose a longer range weapon. Both of these observations most likely had more to do with game mechanics than the Proteus Effect or behavioral confirmation.