"Our Recon Plane is Fueled and Ready"

As some of you may know, I just turned 32. There comes a time in a man's life when he stops and takes inventory of his situation. Birthdays seem to pull that out of me. So away we go...

I bought Call of Duty: World at War in the middle of December and started playing online sometime around Christmas. I really sucked when I started out. Most players on there had been playing the prequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for over a year by then and other first person shooter games like Halo etc. Not me. Quake, Perfect Dark and 007 on the Nintendo 64 back in the mid/late 90’s was my only previous experience with first person shooter. BTW, “first person shooter” is a style of game where you only see a hand holding a gun and the perspective being shown on the television is supposed to be you in the “first person”.
Video games have come along way in the last dozen years. The speed of the games has increased tremendously coupled with being online versus other people and not just playing the computer. People can be unpredictable and random and therefore more challenging. Online play is a whole level of difficulty above the alternative.
Now, I’m not a complete retard although that is probably debatable. Bottom line: I suck at this game. No, no, it’s true. I really do suck at the game and it’s taken me several months to realize it. If you compare my play time versus other players, I should be ahead of them by leaps and bounds in the amounts of kills, wins, points etc. But I’m not. I’m neck and neck with some people who have spent half the time playing this game. What does that mean? It means I spend a lot of the time wandering around in some World War 2 video game battle field, not killing people, not scoring points and not winning team matches. And for what? I don’t know! Why am I playing this gawd forsaken game? Why don’t I just put it down and walk away? The game is absolutely fun to play and I’m 200% better than when I started playing. BUT, (big but) I’m not great and I don’t know if I ever will be. I don’t know if I should keep pursuing something if I can’t achieve a desired level of skill. I think this is the beginning of the end for me on this game but don’t quote me on it.

[BTW, don’t you wish you had my problems…then you’d have nothing to worry about. :-) ]