Donovan Wilson – Reporter
In an effort to digitally bring students together in a socially distanced world, a Call of Duty competition was held.
The Programs Council held a Call of Duty gaming competition on Tuesday Sept. 22. The competition ran from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. and was helmed by Christopher Caron and Luke Sampson, members of the ProCon night-time council.
The game was played by students in teams. The game mode used was domination and using the professional rules of the Call of Duty esports league. All of the students had gamer tags that displayed their screen names, which helped to connect teammates to each other through the world of video games.
“I finally got the whole set up,” stated Sampson during the stream.
Sampson and Caron ran the stream entirely with their own equipment. There have been streams before, such as last year’s FIFA stream.
“This was not based around the hype from Cold War, but we do hope the new game is fun,” said Christopher Caron.
Call of Duty is a war based first-person shooter game series that started in 2005 with a long standing history of having annual new releases. In November of this year, they will be releasing the new title “Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.” This one has excited fans as the last few titles have suffered from immense criticism. This title continues to use many of the concepts that made the older titles so popular amongst fans.
The event was not in-person, as many events tended to be in the past due to the current COVID-19 landscape and was instead streamed online. It was uniquely streamed through YouTube, unlike other events that use WebEx and was run through Sampson’s personal YouTube channel titled “__Sampsonzz__.”
The main competing teams in the event were called Coalition and Allegiance. Both teams gun of choice seemed to mostly be the MP5, which is a submachine gun, the entire Allegiance team ran MP5’s at one point. Coalition ended up beating Allegiance three times during the event.
There were a total of nine players who participated in the competition itself. This is something that is normally done among specific friend groups, but this event helped to link some on-campus groups and introduce people to each other.
“We are trying to do a mixture of in-person and online events during this semester even though the online ones are still pretty difficult,” said a member of ProCon, Kimberly Roig.
