There are a lot of urban spaces in any map list in a Call of Duty game. Frequent killboxes (a term to denote a room with multiple entrances with no cover) can be living rooms, kitchens. Loft bedrooms.
As the type of person who’s no stranger to first person shooters, Call of Duty: Black Ops III in particular has me re-evaluating my own furniture placement.

Personally, the idea of murdering someone in their own home for me is a pretty foreign one. Even if Hotline Miami re-textured the idea of a home as a place meant to be invaded, where every door was a bludgeon and the items we covet for home defense are turned against us, Call of Dut- (let’s just call it BLOPS III from here, ok) BLOPS III turns every space into a killing space.

Usually something like BLOPS III would stay pretty foreign to me. I was lured in by the promise of a free game on Playstation Plus in a month where I have no cash to spend. My wallet is filled with dust and my stomach is empty this month in particular because I’m not only jobless, I’m losing my house.

(rarely will you survive long enough to see this)

If you’ve never been forced to leave a place with nowhere to go afterwards, I’m not even sure how to describe it. I’ve been looking over all of the shit I’ve piled up from comic-conventions and online stores over the last two years. All of it gets boxed up, but to go nowhere in particular. It could all end up landfill, most of it is going to end up in other peoples hands. In a month, the new owners of the place I’m living in won’t even know I was ever here.

COD: BLOPS III beckoned me on a night just after I’d lost my job. This isn’t the distant memory or me recollecting on how a videogame helped me through a rough place. It was the eleventh of this month, June 2018. Just a day after my hours at my job were cut so badly I had to plead with an indifferent manager who knew I’d be trying to support myself on my own. I knew I couldn’t afford to keep living where I was at, only a few days later I was let go.

Videogames can be an interactive comfort food, but those are always the ones I have some kind of emotional connection to. I wasn’t drawn to BLOPS III because of the gruffness of the space marines, or the undercut of the gentle-but masculine lady marines.

Specifically, BLOPS III got me because of the ability to put me in a kind of murder-meditation. Quick rounds of multiplayer with very little frills. 56% of the entire community of the game can generally be found in team deathmatch. No goalposts or objectives except one: kill the other team as much as possible.

Ideally, a multiplayer shooter should get you in that meditative trance I was talking about earlier. The first multiplayer modes in first person shooters did it with relatively simple mechanics and aesthetics. BLOPS III has all of the weight of todays giant-budget games. People were probably displaced from their homes to make a game this large. Who knows: maybe the empty interiors of urban maps echo with ghosts of people displaced from homes used as reference art.

Boxes and boxes of my stuff are starting to line the walls. When my roommate left out, maybe a week of this month was spent just selling his belongings so I’d have money to get by. I’m chasing this dream of getting a deposit back on a relatively slum-like apartment that I’ve lived sloppily in for two years. Every piece of furniture sold or videogame traded leaves another rectangle-outline of dust somewhere.

Weeknights, I’ve been returning to BLOPS III for several hours at a time. Sometimes I’ll slip into a haze where the lights of my house slowly turn off in my unconscious moments. More often then not, I’ll look up at the clock and realize yes, yes, I still have a roof over my head and keep playing.

There’s a cycle for me, even though my years of playing Quake III as a boy have faded into distant muscle memory. Something in my brain will twitch in that cycle, and I’ll remember to look around a corner before I enter a room. Or maybe I’ll be satisfied with mowing down a row of players with a heavy machine gun and letting the last one alive follow me around a corner into controlled explosive. Sometimes I’ll activate a killstrike: more often then not, the guy who just spawned three feet away kills me.

Most rounds I join in the middle, my team loses. There’s a difficulty curve to coming into a years-old game with players that murder more efficiently than you can breath. When one of them kills me I try fastidiously to study my death. I’m not to the point of saving footage of my own murder yet, but soon I think I’ll crawl into that rabbit hole.

There are no skills in BLOPS III that I can apply to my day to day life. There’s no lesson to be learned (except: don’t walk into the explosive) that I could apply to selling my belongings or trying to find a job. In the haze of the morning sunset, when the gunfire rolls out of my speakers and into the room, there’s peace from the stress. My own urban space becomes just like one in the game: a killbox with nowhere to hide.