Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Me and My M-4!

This is my M-4. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

And I don’t just mean there are a lot of M-4s out there. There most certainly are. But there are also guns that are an awful lot like the M-4 in how they play: the G-36c, the CM901, and the ACR all play an awful lot like the M-4, with nice, quiet, controlled fire and middling power and range backing them up. But I’ve got a soft spot for the M-4, for both its cultural cache, its contemporary significance and its general well roundedness, so when it unlocks it becomes my gun. I’m here to plumb its depths.

Modern Warfare 3 really wants you to do this. It has its unlockable system set up so that you acquire attachments, exchangeable upgrades, weapon skins and even cosmetic changes for your gunsights based on using weapons so that you can unlock these fancy little features. It really makes you want to sit down with a gun, get to know it and carry it around with you for a few hundred hours. Unfortunately the ability to actually create a class with your weapon of choice, along with the ability to invest time and effort in that weapon, is cordoned off until level 4, which takes around an hour and a half of playing to reach.

Immediately after paying my dues this way I hastily created a class while under severe duress from the constantly ticking clock that counts down the time until the next round. I picked my perks all but at random – something called Stalker, which apparently lets me actually move around while looking down my sights (a savvy balancing move considering the heavy favoritism that Modern Warfare usually gives to perks that eliminate the need for silly things like the ironsights they put the time into balancing in the game), something called Recon, which encourages me to throw grenades at random, and something called Quickdraw, which I think I recall from another Modern Warfare game. This is supposed to help me switch between weapons a little faster, though I’m not sure why I’d ever do that. The clock hits zero before I have a chance to pick anything else, like killstreak or deathstreak items, but since I’m just starting out I don’t really have any options to play with in those arenas just yet, so there’s no biggy.

And I am suddenly and violently transported into a dusty, grey-brown realm, surrounded by gunfire and some kid who won’t stop chanting “gay” into his headset mic. A grenade goes off a short distance away, hurled by some invisible foe, and I’m prompted to sprint forward – it’s an old dance, a familiar dance.

I twirl around aimlessly, painfully aware of how out of practice I am. Dual wielded sub-machine guns have apparently come into fashion, and I’m repeatedly cut down by sustained fire from not one but two barrels as I round corners time and time again. Eventually I see someone just before they see me and open fire, barely (just barely) cutting them down. Red tinges my vision, but I’m back in the swing of things. I’m okay running around, aiming down ironsights and pulling my trigger without flinching. The number to the far right is a lot bigger than the number to its left, but I do my best not to get discouraged – I used to be good at this, and becoming decent at it again can be a meta-game all its own for me.

But after the third or fourth kill something unexpected happens – I’ve been told not only that I leveled up (I’m used to seeing that, thanks) but that my weapon has leveled up. My M-4 is apparently now level 2.

After I endure the rest of the match, which I finish with a kills to deaths ratio that would embarrass any sensible person, I decide to step out of the game for a minute to customize my classes. I see that, to my surprise, something new has been unlocked under my assault rifle tree. Usually I only get a notice about this sort of thing when I’ve got a new weapon to play with or when, in Modern Warfares of old, I racked up enough kills to unlock the latest attachment. But now I learn that I’ve acquired a red dot sight for my M-4, and with it a new “Challenge,” which is what Modern Warfare games like to call their quests in the MMO sense.

Apparently if I shoot sixty people while I’m looking through my fancy new red dot sight, I’ll get additional experience. And, judging by the locks next to all the other rows in this “weapon challenges” display, this experience will go towards leveling up my gun so I can get more stuff to slap on to it to fulfill these other challenges.

With this in mind, I go back to the Create Class menu, make four more classes, and then decide that I’m going to ignore them and pursue unlocking every last element of my M-4 with dogged determination into the night. I last another forty minutes before I log off for the night, a paltry dozen or so kills into my gun-quest’s progress.

The next day I blow through it. I also acquire a silencer, a grenade launcher, an ACOG scope, some holographic sights and a few weird little symbols that modify my gun’s performance slightly, but don’t have any quests associated with them. Although one of them does let me attach two upgrades to one gun, effectively doubly the rate at which I can complete my gun quests, which is pretty nice. And I’ve got to say, I do enjoy using most of the attachments. Even the ACOG sight, worst of the worst in previous Modern Warfare games, is fun and well suited to its purpose in this iteration. And it’s really hard to feel anything but joy with a silencer strapped to the front of your gun.

But of course, it all can’t be joy. The next day, after I blow through a few more gun quests pleasantly enough and unlock a few new toys I end up with something called a “shotgun attachment.” Apparently my gun isn’t gunny enough, so I’ve duct taped a shotgun barrel to it and I am now being encouraged to shoot forty people with it. Forty!

I set to work immediately.

Two days later I hate the M-4. The shotgun attachment is terrible, and having to struggle through it is like pulling teeth. I put round after round into assholes, and it just won’t kill them – a point blank blast won’t a kill make, and I rarely have time for more. I want the M-4 to fucking die. My psyche is so shattered by the experience that I’m tempted to step away from the M-4 altogether and start seeing other guns, but I persevere. I move on to my quest to murder people while using hybrid sights, my modest K-D in tatters, my love of the M-4 eroded.

By the time I finish with hybrid sights and extended mags to wrap up the gun-quest cycle by using the thermal scope, my love of the M-4 is restored. I think the thermal scope is a little ridiculous, sure, but I go through it all the same. People make fun of me for doing it, but in the end I’ve got all of my little M-4 achievements achieved, and I’m happier for it. And a bunch of other guns unlocked in the mean time, guns I can put myself to work unlocking gun quests for. I shelve my completed M-4 for a CM901, which looks enough like an M-4 to keep me from feeling uncomfortable when I use it. I give my monitor a little kiss as I finish the process – it’s been a wild ride.

There’s a downside to this, of course. Now that I’m done with my M-4, it’s unlikely that I’ll come back to it. As enjoyable as Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer is, some of its problems (the aforementioned clutter I brought up in the last essay which, while somewhat reduced, remains an issue, for example) will keep me from ever playing it in the ravenous, compulsive way I played the original Modern Warfare. I reserve that kind of play for games that traditionally fall into an e-sports model, and I think there has to be a sort of essentialism for an e-sports game to work – an essentialism that Modern Warfare 2 and 3 lacked.

But this feedback loop remains compelling – I spent a month of my life letting it distract me from the also very compelling Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the end it leaves you with a list of things you’ve earned and a nice, pretty, full progress bar in the Barracks sub-menu. And it really does make you feel attached to a weapon and make you feel like you know it. For instance, even though they feel very similar I know my CM901 shoots a little harder and a little slower than my M-4 now, which is a really fine distinction considering how fast guns seem to shoot in Modern Warfare 3 as a rule. Still, the M-4 will always have a special place in my heart as my first fully unlocked weapon in Modern Warfare 3.