The Call of Duty

Photo by Alexander Andrews

I don’t really play video games. My wife is happy about that.

Still, I know a bit about Call of Duty. The franchise has been around for over two decades and sold more than 500 million copies. You play from the point of view of a soldier, completing military missions and shooting bad guys. It’s a game in which “war resembles a sport.” For some, it’s even lucrative: the top Call of Duty player has made over $1.5 million in online competition.

Though recent data is hard to come by, I assume that most players of the game are male (this 2013 article says 80%). Boys have, of course, been pretending to be warriors for a long time. “All the children play at war now.” Reflects the elderly Reverend Ames in the novel, Gilead, as he watches his young son pretend garden vegetables are tanks and submarines and explosives. “All of them make those sounds of airplanes and bombs and crashing and exploding. We did the same things, playing at cannon fire and bayonet charges.” He …