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Comment by duffdevice | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to your team for rising to this challenge! I love the idea of using games to help kids learn, well, anything really.

But this part sort of took my breath away:

> COD is Call of Duty, the latest ultra-violent first person shooter which kids are playing at a rate of more than a millennium per day.

Am I the only one who finds this number mind-boggling?

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In August, Activision released an infographic that stated that Call of Duty players had accumulated 2.85 million years[1] of playtime.

[1] http://www.vg247.com/2013/08/13/call-of-duty-100-million-pla...

Playing two hours a day per person would make 4380000 players. Which seems pretty realistic considering there were 12 million active Wow players at one point.

Many COD and WOW players are adults. According to some stats I read, an average player of big single player games is more then 30 years old male. So I assume that many of them will play multiplayers too. Plus, I know many adults that play those games.

I'm not sure that COD is "ultra-violent". It is violent of course, but not much more then an average action movie.

You're joking. There aren't a constant 10 deaths/minute in an average action movie.

No, but death in most action movies are much more effective. Meaning they "feel" more real and killed people are more real. Plus, they are often framed in real world like story and often as positive action did by good hero.

Killed guys in COD are just pictures - they have no personality or story. The action is in context of warfare and no one there is believably "good" and "bad". Only better at shooting.

I do not think you can judge violence in such simple way. To use analogy, the movie reservoir dogs has scene with ear cutting where nobody dies. That scene is way more violent and disturbing then dozens of killed enemies by James Bond.

I call it "ultra-violent" because the one time I played it myself, this was the first level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NoRussian.jpg

Basically you're pretending to be a terrorist, you have to shoot up an airport full of civilians (who die very realistically, beg for their lives, etc.), and then at the end of the level the main terrorist whose cell you're trying to infiltrate shoots you in the face and you die.

The thing is, in a multiplayer FPS, the "killing" is just a competitive metaphor. The mechanics for "killing" are oft-remarked as being very unrealistic, and the "death" is just a temporary delay before respawn. It's a kill in name only.

As far as the single-player mode goes, I can't speak from experience... and neither most other CoD players, I wager.

What happens if you don't shoot the civilians, does the game end?[/qurious]

It's slightly possible to do the level without shooting the civilians yourself (your terrorist buddies can kill them for you), but you do have to kill the Russian airport police who show up to stop you. If you refuse to shoot them, the battle just continues forever until you open fire.

I had multiplayer in mind - most call of duty players do not play campaign. But yes, that scene was debated a lot.

I think that scene is something that makes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 a game for adults, the same way as ear cutting scene in reservoir dogs makes it something for adults.

As far as I know, other call of duty games do not have such scene. I may be wrong on that one through.

Definitely, the really shocking bit is that number is about a year old, so presumably it's even higher now. Nick researched it and I thought he was being his normal hyperbolic self, but no, it's legit. PG's essay about addictiveness definitely springs to mind.

Er. Is "millennium" actually "million"?

a millenium is one thousand years.

So kids are playing COD at a rate of more than one thousand years per day? What does that even mean?

If 100 kids played for 2 hours in one day you could say they have a combined 8 days of play time in a single day.

If you wanted to use proper dimensions, you would more accurately say they had a 8 child-days of play time in a single day.

Messing up units turns sensible claims into gobbledygook.

So the claim is that there have been at least 9 million hours played per day by an unknown number of "kids". That's... profoundly difficult to unpack from "more than a millennium per day". And I'm still not actually sure that's what they meant. Is this kind of construction common?

I understand "man-hours", but I've never heard words like "millennium" inserted like that.

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