If Growing Pains Were a Round of Call of Duty Zombies

After Call of Duty: World at War

Imagine a zombie apocalypse. Imagine Call of Duty. Imagine Der Riese.

Forget, for a moment, real life. Forget university. Forget your part-time job. Forget the good, bad, and problematic parts of this game alike. Forget everything but the zombies — and the way the controller melds to your hands.

Keep moving.

You’ve survived, thus far, thanks to sheer luck. You’re hiding out in a factory — more like an entire industrial complex — at night, alone. Everything is muted, gray. The sky is a swirl of stars. In the quiet between bouts of undead, you spot a clock on the wall. It has no numbers — just dashes for hour markers. It’s 1:15AM.

The second hand ticks forward. The emergency lights around you hum. You check your monkey bombs, your perks. You don’t check your phone, which you’re trying to forget, the screen facedown beside you on the couch, where it’s also gray, also dark. Your old friends went away for college. You, still at home, haven’t made new ones. There’s no one looking for you.

You’re too angry for friendship, anyway — you’ve just quit tennis. You had a national ranking, once. It didn’t mean anything. You don’t even know where to start, now, to figure out who you might be instead.

At least in-game, your goals are clear.

On the catwalk you wait for the horde, shadows vacillating across your hands. Off-screen the zombies howl. IRL someone opens and then closes the garage door. In-game the clock ticks forward again. Somehow it’s still 1:15.

And that’s when you realize you’re stuck. The clock ticks forward and then the hand snaps back. In real life, you’d call the clock broken, but in-game this means something else. Time isn’t passing. Your character is reliving a loop. No matter how many zombies you kill, or how often you visit the Mystery Box for solace, there is no rescue. No one is looking for you. No one is coming. You’re trapped. You have to save yourself.

And the only way out is through.