User:Ikey1349/Call of Duty

Community
The Call of Duty fan base is extensive; the game is most played in the United States, China, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Germany, respectively. The average consumer is usually males between the ages of 15-26. The Call of Duty community created its own lingo to describe aspects, players and events within the game such as: “camping”, “noob”, “noob-tubing”, “quickscoping”, “sweaty”, “head-glitching”, “quadfeed”, “trickshotting”, “drop-shotting”, “trolling”, “tea-bagging”, “K/D”, “ninja defuse”, “boosting” and “wall-bang”. The jargon used is communicated through microphone headsets as well in game messaging. Players can express themselves through conversation, creation of emblems, and modifying avatars. Status among players can be represented through prestige, weapon camouflage, K/D (Kill to Death Ratio), and clan. The more achievements a player has, the higher their prestige is within the game as well as gun camouflage. A player’s K/D, which is public to all players, is a popular metric used to quantify how good an individual is. Clans are social groups to help gamers find new teammates and friends. Clans such as OpTic and FaZe are exclusive in nature and only allow select individuals to represent them. Celebrities such as Bronny James, Lebron James son, Juju Smith-Schuster, Offset, are all part of the FaZe clan.

Mental Health and Toxicity
The toxicity of the players as well as the realistic nature of the game has brought into question whether or not the game impacts players mental health. Throughout the series of games released by Activision, Treyarch, and Blizzard the multiplayer experience is often times described as toxic because of players foul language and aggression. Aware of the toxicity that plagues the game, the Call of Duty staff put steps together to assuage its players feelings by: banning over 350,000 accounts for racist names or toxic behavior, deploying new in-game filters to catch potentially offensive user-names, implementing new technology to filter potentially offensive text chat, and implementing filters across 11 languages. An article from The New York Daily News remarks "People who spend hours playing action-based video games like "Call of Duty" are more prone to developing mental illnesses". According to NPR, overplaying games such as Call of Duty is associated with the shrinkage of an important part of the brain called the hippocampus, responsible for stress regulation, memory and spacial navigation. In 2013, out of an abundance of caution and curiosity, Former President Barack Obama created a task force that pledged 10 million dollars to conduct new research regarding the relationship between video games and violence in order to protect young minds and future generations.