I have been a gamer for quite some time now. I’ve spent the last 16 years gaming. I have owned NES, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2 and I currently own a PS3. It was with this new console that I discovered the wonders of online shooters and the curses they bring. I had played online before, but exclusively on my PC, dedicating a staggering amount of time to the Age of Empires series.

It was with Resistance: Fall of Man, however, that I initially became hooked with online shooters. At the beginning I wasn’t even aware that K/D Ratios even existed. I was just impressed by how much fun it was. One fateful day, while I was looking through my profile, I discovered a little number that safely sitting below – K/D Ratio. Obviously, being my first online shooter, it was a very modest 1.2. I immediately felt kind of bad and decided I had to make it higher. That’s were it all began.

For those of you who don’t know, K/D (Kill/Death) Ratios refers to the amount of players you kill versus the amount of times you die (usually the number of kills you have divided by number of times you were killed) . To some players, this is the best way to guess one’s skill. The higher your K/D Ratio, the better you are.

My lowest low came, without a doubt, when I asked (and not very politely) one of my best friends to get out of my house, because he was getting killed too much on my account (in my defense, he was going 0 to 10… come on! ). I decided to solve this by creating a second account which my less intense friends could happily destroy.

You see, even though I wanted to get my K/D ratio stats up, I still enjoyed the game and I would be disappointed when I got killed. Still, I played and enjoyed the game profoundly. I never really kicked that K/D very high, but I continued to play R:FOM for a long time, seeing as how it was my only game. The game that really prompted me to write about K/D ratio though, was COD4.

Call of Duty 4 immersed me in a world that I wasn’t sure I was happy to be part of – the world of the hardcore gamer. Not hardcore like Game Battles hardcore, but the type of gamer that NEEDS to have a good K/D ratio. The more I played COD4, the more I was cast into that category, forever burying the word casual. I’ve never been a casual gamer per se, but up until now I had not been hardcore either, COD 4 gave me the nudge. I would find myself being disappointed if I killed 20 guys but was killed 12 times.

Anything under 2.0 was bad for me and I would strive to keep it as high as I could. Soon after, whenever I would play poorly (by my “standards”) I would find myself cursing at the guy who killed me and become more and more stressed. Even if I placed first on the game, the fact that I had been killed “too many times” made it a defeat in my book. There is one thing I was happy about – ironically, my K/D ratio. Every time I took a look at my stats I wasproud to see a solid 2.38 beaming back at me. I had even managed to bump it up to 2.55 before I ventured to complete all the gun challenges (damn you Skorpion).

After a long break from COD4 as I experienced the incredible awesomeness that were Bioshock, Dead Space, LBP, and Rock Band, I returned to shooters through Resistance 2, where the frustration has become greater than I would like. I still maintained a very high K/D Ratio of 2.75, but the fact that a very high amount of my deaths come from explosives of some kind (40mm, LAARKs, etc…) made it even worse. I’m ashamed at how many innocent mothers I have insulted and would like to publicly apologize to all of them. After giving it some thought, I have come to the conclusion that it is not worth it. I used to play games to relax (among other things) but now it is absolutely impossible to relax when playing online.

The compromise, then, is between enjoyability and bragging rights, the beauty of the bigger picture or the minusculity of details, the color of the wooden fences or the amount of headshots needed to bring someone down with the carbine. It is a decision that I encourage not to be taken lightly, because once the step towards hardcore is taken, the step back to casual is much, much harder.

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