I only recently got Modern Warfare 2, not because I didn’t have the money (full disclosure: I didn’t have the money) and not because I’m weird, (full disclosure: I am a bit of an oddball) or because I’m a fag (full disclosure: you get the picture) rather, I just didn’t care enough. My memories of Modern Warfare 1’s multiplayer are dominated by frustration and failure: things I generally try to avoid. Even so, I ended up caving as this job dictates I must. Being late and reluctant to the party gives me an unique opportunity that other journalists who had the game mailed to them in advance or raced out to get a copy didn’t have. I can now look at the game with a level of emotional and intellectual distance, and attempt to understand how a moderately successful World War II shooter franchise became a cultural juggernaut (full disclosure: I have no freakin’ clue).

I came to wonder about this subject because, as I stated earlier, my experience of the multiplayer in the Modern Warfare series has not been, at least in the traditional sense, fun. Sure, it’s fulfilling when you ride a wave of luck to a good score, but even then you’ll be dying more frequently than in almost any other similar game; the system almost guarantees that. Death comes quickly and often with little warning or chance to defend oneself. It is always a result of not being able to pick an enemy out of the surrounding textures, or someone getting the drop on you, or even just not being fast enough. It’s the twitchiest of the twitch shooters. While one could argue that such an arrangement is realistic, realism almost never translates to mainstream success (I could trot out any number of flight simulators to prove that point). Still, this thing is huge: the biggest thing online with millions of people lining up to pretend to die. From what I can see these games are a tremendous achievement in understanding gamer psychology; where the act of playing a game is reduced down to the compulsions that have fueled the habits of gamers for decades.

Game makers have known for years that the simple act of leveling up can drive addictions or at the very least make people play more. In any number of RPGs leveling up is crucial to advancement and developers have noticed that people will actively fight the concept of playing to grind their way to a higher level by doing boring repetitive tasks. For reasons unclear Infinity Ward was the first developer to apply a level system to an online FPS with the tried-and-true RPG model of greater perks and abilities. Before this, FPSs were a genre unfamiliar with lending precise order to such things. Sure enough leveling became key to the Modern Warfare experience. Some people even reset their level every so often just to have the experience of climbing the ladder all over again. Leveling, to be sure, is a major driver of play in Modern Warfare but there are some other deeper factors at work, factors which have pushed the rise of online gaming from its beginings.

To be frank, the competitive online environment judges you; relentlessly. Your every death is a mark of failure for all to see and an unkind statement on your personal ability. Such a situation pushes buttons in people’s heads, especially men’s heads. It taps into core competitive instincts that also drive sport, politics, and the manufacture and sale of expensive cars. What Modern Warfare does is speed up that cycle of play-death-judgment. The sheer speed with which deaths happen makes a more powerful statement on your effectiveness as a man than any other game. Every death is a reminder of every time your father didn’t believe in you or sold you short, so to speak. I hypothesize, with nothing but the Psychology 101 class I got a B in behind me, that the appeal of Modern Warfare 2 is something primal and even a bit oedipal. Men feel the need to be judged better than another man, whether it be by a woman or a scoreboard. Part of Modern Warfare’s success is in prodding those competitive instincts to get people to keep playing. The competitiveness is really three quarters the appeal for what can be considered the gaming demographic, but it’s what matters most to the core male 18-35 bunch this series is aimed at.

The other quarter of the appeal of online gaming is something that draws in a different kind of person: cooperation. The ability to work together and meet people online is what draws in nerds and girls and other less testosterone-motivated types. You even see such teamwork in similar competitive games to certain degrees, and the rule of thumb going back to kindergarten is that working together allows you to achieve greater results.

Modern Warfare takes that concept and shits on it.

The Modern Warfare experience is extraordinarily insular. There is barely a whiff of teamwork in most online matchmaking. The idea is you contribute to your team by keeping your ass alive and getting your kills. There’s little opportunity to work together even in games labeled as team games. Whoever you’re teaming with could be dead, respawned and on the other side of the map before you realize what happened, and you were counting on that guy to watch your back. Hell, it’s even a liability to be near your teammates in most situations. It makes you vulnerable to a number of the popular killstreak rewards and a quick enemy can carve through an approaching bunch of your guys with ease.

In a way this is what the most competitive part of the male brain wants. All that namby-pamby sharing bullshit that’s been hoisted on you since childhood can finally be chucked. You are on your own to prove yourself and no one else can take credit for what you do or slow you down. Fight Club famously worked similar ideas on its way to cult success. The reason for having a fight club has to do with men feeling trapped and sissified by an increasingly feminine society. They need a place to work frustration out and be men. That idea grows into a seemingly noble plot to destroy the world’s credit system before the movie yanks back on the chain by telling those people how idiotic that is and showing how the fight clubbers had ceased to think for themselves.

That’s sorta where I’m at in my thinking on Modern Warfare. It’s the closest thing to a fight club for a large number of mostly men. Still, there’s something a little unsettling and “brainwashy” about how it draws those folks in and almost turns the game into a job. People can pour whole afternoons into this thing and I’ve witnessed firsthand the determination hundreds of people in just my college town alone have to give their money and time over to the game.

If nothing else these games are a good example of how all pop culture is essentially advertising. By observing what sold other games and applying smart marketing techniques based on psychology, the makers of Call of Duty have made several boatloads of money with no sign of slowing. Even the spin-off they sent back to the beaten-to-death setting of World War II sold big on that addictive gameplay, even if it was back to unsexy Thompsons and MP40s. For hopeless outsiders like myself, the interesting thing to watch is whether they can keep the momentum or if they will eventually lose the zeitgeist to something even more relentless. My money’s on the latter.