The Importance of Movement

On Movement

            Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing games, First Person Shooter games, Third person Shooter games, Real Time Strategy games, Turn Based Strategy games, Sports games, Donkey Kong, Mario, Sonic, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 for the Nintendo Entertainment System, and any other games you can think of are all dominated by one thing: Your ability to move.

            The Call of Duty Franchise helped bring the FPS genre to a household level of acceptance. It did so by following a formula similar to the ever-popular Counter-Strike. Give the end user a gun, specialty and lethal grenades, and pit them against one another. The wonderful thing about this formula is its simplicity and playability. Anyone with an ounce of hand-eye coordination can point the center of their screen towards an enemy and pull the technological trigger. While this skill can be indefinitely refined, the basics of it are perfectly intuitive. Also, though each Call of Duty game seems simple on your first play, its complexity is as deeply set as a game such as chess. Counter-Strike (and CS Source) is a testament to a good First Person Shooter’s replayability.

            With the invention of distracting elements to games such as new guns, maps, perks, kill streak rewards, and voice communication between teammates, the focus on the use of hand-eye coordination has decreased significantly. The release of Modern Warfare 2 brought measurable evidence that given ideal circumstances, even a person with terrible hand-eye coordination and next to no awareness or game knowledge can succeed. This is by no means a bad thing, but it can frustrate players that have honed the basic FPS skills to be killed by so called “noobs”.

            This analysis has so far eliminated all distracting elements of FPS games to focus on hand-eye coordination or, in essence, aim. However, aim is actually the biggest deceiver of all. While an exceptional aim may serve to assist you in winning gunfight after gunfight, it may also betray you into unknowingly worsening your gameplay. To understand why this is we must examine the most important aspect of any game ever invented: movement.

            Tactical movement wins wars. If you are to harness everything you have at your disposal to win the wars that are constantly occurring in your living room/man cave/bedroom/garage or anywhere else you choose to play your games, you will need to master your movement. As stated before, near perfect aim while playing an FPS can get you out of some extremely stick situations. But imagine if you were never in that situation in the first place. Tactical movement can keep you out of trouble and put you in a position to succeed. The following is a short list of things you can do to improve your movement in Call of Duty: (Yes, I realize that I just said movement applies to all games and am now focusing on one. If you’d like me to describe movement in detail with regards to another game, please ask me. However, just like rules in economics, these basic principles apply across the gaming horizon.)

1. The beginning: In an ideal world you will start each match fully aware of where your teammates, your enemies, and you are going. When considering which path to take towards your destination, you should consider a few things: The relative safety of the path (available lines of fire/grenade spots against to you), the length of the path (how long will it take you/one of your enemies to get there), the relative importance of the position to winning the game (more on positioning later), and how likely it is for you to successfully complete your journey (without being overly sidetracked, killed, or in some cases, seen).  While your enemies’ choices can never be mapped out perfectly, you should have a pretty good idea as to where they can be and when they can be there. This knowledge can give you a tremendous advantage at the start of a match, especially if you can identify tactical/lethal grenade spots and pre-fire zones.

You should be aware of any perks/equipment/guns that can affect the beginning of a match and be able to defend against their use as well as use them to your full advantage. Knowing the previously stated information will put you in a position to begin to understand the importance of movement in the opening moments of a match.

In the first stages of any game of Call of Duty, movements are very predictable. The game at this stage is very reminiscent of chess, if each piece could make separate and simultaneous decisions. If you remember nothing else from this section, remember this: How you choose to move in the first twenty to fifty seconds of the game can often determine the outcome the match.

2. Positioning: When I was still playing World of Warcraft consistently, I had a team that did Pvp together basically every day. In every one of our losses it was possible to find a positional error that led to our demise. Similarly, each time you die (and have died) in Call of Duty it is because of positing. (Yes, there are other uncontrollable issues like lag, hackers, and random acts of GOD, but generally speaking when you die its your own dang fault). I’ll give you some examples:

a.     You’re sprinting around a corner when WAIT! Never sprint around corners. Ever. Unless you know with 100% accuracy that sprinting around a corner will not get you killed (or is your only option to live), don’t do it. It puts you at an extreme tactical disadvantage partially because of your reaction time but mostly because of the time it takes your character to bring up his weapon to fire after sprinting.

b.     You’re in a firefight at a medium distance. You get out gunned. It happens. It happens much less when you use every feasible piece of cover that you can. If you ever watch big time commentators on Youtube play, you’ll see that guys like Xcalizorz and SandyRavage are masters at this. They would wipe the floor with most of the commentating pubstars, and they would do it because of the way they move.

c.      You’re capturing a point in domination. You die from anything but a dangerclose noobtube in Modern Warfare 2. There are many positional plays that you can use to prevent this, but the two simplest ones are clearing the area in question before attempting to cap and flag tagging. Flag tagging is when you run across the point just long enough for the announcer to tell the other team “Hey, some fool is trying to take your domination point away from you. Go kill that bitch!” This is an effective way to bait your enemies into the open, or at the very least give away their positions.

d.    You’re clipping (the phenomenon caused by what is shown on your screen coming from a camera located on the top of your character’s head) behind a box in a strategic position that flanks your enemy’s spawn. You’re doing great so far, but you decide to shoot at the first enemy you see with an un-silenced weapon, giving away part of your tactical advantage. This is an example that shows how you can screw up good tactical positioning. This type of play generally leads to failed opportunities at triples or quads.

Again, if you don’t remember anything else from this section, remember to observe how your movement and positioning before and during firefights affects your gameplay. If you can analyze what you did wrong and fix it in the future, you’re on your way to becoming a much better player.

3. Defensive play: This type of play is often belittled on Youtube as ‘camping’. In my opinion, holding a significantly sized and relatively important portion of the map (say a multi-story building or a domination point or a balcony) through the use of claymores and tactical play is not camping. That’s what I call playing to win. You see many commentators on Youtube play this way because it is the EASIEST way to ensure your movements are tactical. Also, you can make many more mistakes while in an area with ample cover and multiple claymores than you can while running around with akimbo Mini-Uzis. (Side note: This is why Xcalizorz is my favorite COD player of all time. He has enough skill and understanding of movement that he can play wherever he wants to in any game type on any map with any gun).

In short, know the difference between sitting in a corner Aiming Down Sights and playing defensively. One of them can make you seem like a better player than you really are. The other pisses everyone off and won’t net you very many kills.

In summery, movement is your primary tool for destruction when playing Call of Duty, or any other game. Stop overlooking it and you will improve your gameplay noticeably.