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According to the Activision press release, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 hoovered-up $400m in its first day in the stores. Our spies tell us that COD MW3’s continuing its blistering sales pace, heading for the billion dollar mark like a profit-seeking missile. Gun 2.0 is alive and well and heading for a range near you. Eventually. Meanwhile, normalization never looked so good. Is that the right word? Good? Let’s go with that.

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29 COMMENTS

  1. i have been a COD fan since the old school WWII games on play station 2. This game is pretty fun, albeit located solely outside of the realm of possibility.The graphics are fantastic but the campaign mode plays like cold war fantasy land with (another, like MW2) large scale Russian invasion. The xbox live multiplayer (the largest feature of this game) is pretty good. You can still run through gunfire to stab people (ridiculous i know and one of the worst parts of COD black ops) and the sniper rifle (of any variation) is still a death ray. Aside from a couple of gripes, this is a fun game that should not be taken too seriously and does literally nothing in terms of real simulation of the manipulation of weapons and shooting. (this is especially true for sniping, where every “camper” (pendejos who hide the entire game) in the world can shoot like Vassili Zaitsev.

  2. They got my 60 bucks and in a year when the new one comes out they’ll get another 60. I never bother to play the campaigns and just enjoy the online stuff. I’m nearer to 40 than I like to think about and thought that I would lose interest in gaming by now, but the online FPS games are just too much fun. I don’t take it seriously and laugh at people that think they are learning “real” tactics.

  3. I wonder if any of the adolescents (not the adults) who bought COD have ever read a book. A book that doesn’t need crayons. One with writing in it.

    Probably not.

  4. Maybe its just me, but I do not believe that video games either normalize guns nor do they promote violence. It is not viewed in the same way. I believe that people in general can understand real versus fake/fantasy/cartoons what have you.

    That said, they are fun to play — they are another aspect of the social internet.

    • I do believe that video games normalize guns. I started shooting when I was about 12 or 13 years old, and at that time I learned tons of information about guns from video games. Counter Strike was a pretty big influence on me, as was an old Half Life 1 modification called “The Specialists.” Granted, most of the things I “learned” from video games were completely inaccurate and I had to unlearn and retrain myself as I grew but I did gain a healthy respect for “cool” guns and learnt the names of different guns, different types of actions, and different calibers.

      Video games were a huge influence on me as I grew up, and back then the depictions of guns in shooters were not as realistic or as detailed as they are now. There are a lot of middle schoolers who are playing CoD right now that will be firearms owners in the future.

    • I worked for a firearms manufacturing company for 10 years, we also did direct sales to the public. Video games most certainly helped sell guns. For a lot of young people it is the first exposure they have to firearms. They want to own the cool stuff that they used in video games. Some companies even pay for product placement in video games because it is that effective.

  5. Everything I’ve learned about firearms, I’ve learned from COD:MW. I fully intend to dual-wield Winchester 1887 shotguns and run through town until I get my first 7 kills and can call in a Harrier when the SHTF.

  6. While I haven’t played these titles, I think it would be obvious to most how much games like Call Of Duty have increased the overall interest in all things tactical/gun related. Airsoft has probably been the biggest beneficiary, but the firearms industry has also enjoyed a nice boost. We could debate all day if that’s a good thing or not. Probably a good QOD for the armed intelligentsia. COD good or bad for 2A proponents?

    • You could also say that games like COD have boosted the military enlistment rate everyone wants to go out there and be some kind of black opp. Sad part is most of them wont.

      • Funny, I’d argue the opposite. Since the younger crowd (those under 30) grew up seeing movies like Saving Private Ryan, We Were Soldiers, Black Hawk Down, etc and playing games like Call of Duty, they’re less inclined to enlist because they’ve seen how brutal war is.

  7. from playing the first two games in the Modern Warfare series along with airsofting, I find the people that are brought into shooting and airsoft from these games to be a mixed bag, yes there are some truly interested and grounded people who want to learn about real fire arms but there are just as many who come in treating everything like a video game and that is bad for everyone.

  8. The first thing they should tell COD-generation recruits is that if they get shot, they can’t just crawl behind cover and regenerate, and if they take a fatal wound, there is no “respawning.”

  9. If you like to read AND play video games, have a read of this article (or even if you just like to read)…there is another one that is a someone’s dissertation on the power if video games…until I find that one, there is this specific example of the messages some of these games carry, focusing on Pro-Arab games, or games that tend to counter the traditional US perspective.

    http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/006/281/TawilSouri-ProArabVideoGames.pdf

    It is true that everyone can tell the difference between reality and games, however I think it would be a mistake to totally disregard the subtle messages that are typically embedded in the game content/design. Its my opinion that these sorts of messages influence public opinion and attitudes on things in one way or another. Some have pointed out that gun sales and air-soft have boosted from these games, so perhaps this would support.

  10. Here’s the long dissertation, and its long so the patient and truly interested will probably be the only ones to get through it. It discusses the power of this media form and how it is supporting the message of militarism, or essentially the neoconservative world view. It doesn’t have to be limited there, but that is how it has been used and when other ‘unsavory’ groups have made their games, those games like in the previous article, they have been demonized.

    http://etheses.nottingham.ac.uk/672/1/Matt_Thomson_PhD_Thesis_Pdf.pdf

    Consider the talk of Iran today from politicians and leaders, and the recent release of Battlefield 3, focused on war with Iran. Also consider how the Pentagon has been sending their consultants and experts to aid in movies, shows, and now the production of most of these video games.

    Some food for thought. And I used to play a lot of video games myself, namely Rainbow Six series, Ghost Recon, and ARMA Ops II. I have enjoyed much of these games but feel there is a subtle message that goes with most of them (how to solve global issues, who’s the hero, who’s the villain) and its a message I disagree with.

  11. One of the reasons I got into gun enthusiasm was from COD. I virtual shooting was fun, but there was always something off about video game guns. Hopefully more people from the call of duty generation will become gun enthusiasts as well. I had no trouble teaching a younger relative how to shoot an air rifle. All I said was “Remember the sights on the CZ-75 from BLOPS? The sights on this gun work just the same”

  12. I gave up on CoD games after MW2 (Blacks Ops broke the camels back, so to speak). They just don’t support their games and cheaters become rampant. If you want a truly tactical situation go with any Battlefield game, plus they ban cheaters (from all EA games) and regularly release patches. They have a huge community of involved players trying to make the game better (I know CoD has a large community but they are complainers – I’ve been on both sides).

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