I'm getting paid to play Call of Duty 4

[Octopod]

I like CoD and I still wouldn't do it. Well, I guess I would but not under their set conditions, I would lie and still play other games as suggested.

[GSZX1337]

honestly, imo they didn't get interesting until modern warfare 1 and 2, and world at war. the rest of them i think are just kinda...eh..

Really? The first CoD is one of my favorite FPSes of the last decade. It's almost as good as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in my opinion.

this thread actually made me wonder about checking out the first game on Gamecube. I don't know. I know nothing about the series.

If you're going to be playing Call of Duty, you should play them on the PC. Except for 3, which was console only.

[Ack]

honestly, imo they didn't get interesting until modern warfare 1 and 2, and world at war. the rest of them i think are just kinda...eh..

Really? The first CoD is one of my favorite FPSes of the last decade. It's almost as good as Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in my opinion.

I agree with GSZX1337, but would go even farther to say I enjoyed Call of Duty a little more than Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. The intro to the Stalingrad level is what convinced me I love that game.

Anyway, seriously though, you never answered my question. Are you allowed to play both single and multiplayer?

[aaron]

oh shoot, sorry. it's just single player. it has to be on this laptop they give me with a timer running in the background so they can verify that i played the game for the right amount of time.

[Ack]

Hrmm...that makes things a little worse, as the single player campaign's not overly long. Shoot for higher difficulty levels.

[J T]

If they are trying to see if playing violent video games is related to violence, and their operational definition for the independent variable of violent video game is Call of Duty 4, then they have a problem because their definition is only one violent video game. Given that they are asking gamers to only play CoD4, then they are effectively subtracting out violent games because presumably, many of the other games you would be playing are also violent. They may have added CoD4 for violence, but they have subtracted many more, so they aren't actually measuring their construct of violent video games in a valid way.

They also have a problem if they don't have some sort of manipulation check to make sure that people only played CoD4. As you can see just from this thread there is a high motivation to lie about that, so they really haven't defined their IV as cleanly as they wanted to.

[CRTGAMER]

Your Government grant impartial tax dollars at work paying people to play video games.
But good you got that aaron, at least a way to get money back from the government.

[gtmtnbiker]

Updating this thread for completeness. Aaron responded in this thread: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... ead#unread with the following:

oh yeah, sorry. forgot to provide updates.

it was a pretty weird experience. basically they had me in there once a week and i did about an hour's worth of memory exercises. they would also give me sheets of paper where i had to go down 5 columns and read aloud the color of the word as fast as i could. the first page had the color corresponding to the word (like BLUE or GREEN), but the they would have me try and do it with another page where the colors were deliberately not matched to the word (like RED or GREEN). it was a LOT harder than it sounds and made me feel kinda stupid, haha.

they then gave me a laptop which i took home and had to play through the single player campaign of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (not the new one). they did not give me a gamepad or a mouse, and it totally fucking sucked trying to play that game with a touchpad and a keyboard. i got used to it though. i also turned on the console and cheated so i could just mess around. i guess they never found out because i got all my checks, haha. they told me they had a time-monitoring program running in the background just to make sure i was playing at least 8 hours a week, so i guess i did okay.

in between visits i also had to track my media viewing habits, like if i watched a movie, or tv, or internet video, or listened to music, and if it contained any depictions of violence or not. i was also told not to play any video games at all other than COD4, including rock band, wii sports, simple things like that. (the sheet explicitly said "do not play rock band" which i thought was pretty funny)

the game does kinda suck, by the way. pretty shallow for all of it's big-budget Hollywood-style storytelling. i did like the stealth sections and the part where you have to snipe the russian guy was sorta neat, but i've never been a big fan of the "run-into-a-warzone-and-shoot-a-swarm-of-dudes" type of FPS.

anyway, the second, third and fourth visits i went to i had to undergo an MRI scan. if you've never had an MRI before, it is pretty claustrophobic. they put these goggles on my eyes so i could see whatever tests they had me try and do within the scanner, like having a series of letters pop up one at a time, and having me push a button for every letter except for "X." here's where it starts to get kinda fucked up...

before the MRI the instructor gave me some demos of what the exercises would be like in the scanner. the last of them was a memory exercise where i'd have to view images in succession and then afterwards be taken to another room with a laptop and identify the images i saw that day vs. the images i didn't see. in the demo i believe there were pictures of a bus, a flower, an old man, some candy, a city... just really neutral, simple images.

when i got into the scanner, the lady supervising the scan came through the headset and said "okay here's the memory exercise you talked about with the instructor." instead of neutral, simple images, i was shown some of the most violent and disturbing pictures i have ever seen in my entire life. people being stabbed, pictures of starving children, a dead baby buried with its face visible, women being beaten, people doing drugs, pictures of weapons... it was really not very cool at all. i felt kinda misled and it almost made me want to not continue with the study but after talking with the instructor and telling him that i could definitely tell the difference between a violent movie or a violent video game, and seriously disturbing pictures of actual violence against actual people; he told me that was a good thing and that a lot of people didn't think that far into it. so i decided to soldier on. it was weird.

but, yeah, i got $750, paid off a credit card, bought some games, and now i have a neat story. haha.

[MrEco]

I'd gladly play any game for 5 weeks if you gave me $750.

Even if that was all you could play?

sure. Five weeks later I could play all the games I wanted and I'd have $750 to buy them with.

/wins thread

I agree.