After a long day of school one Monday afternoon, Zeeland West Junior Andrew Herber races home to play Call of Duty. He gets a pop and some snacks and goes straight to his XBOX 360. He gets online with all his friends and they play Call of Duty together late into the night.

            Over the past 4 months, Call of Duty has really made its appearance into Zeeland West High School. It has taken ahold of many kids throughout West. Many high schoolers walk through the hallways and tell one another that they will see each other on the battlefield that night.  When they say this they mean that they will be playing Call of Duty with each other via the Internet.  They have begun to call it COD, Call of Duty, for short.  As we looked into this so-called obsession of COD by high schoolers, we found that 9 out of every 10 boys actually play COD on a regular basis. From our survey that we conducted, the boys say that on average they will play COD for 3 or more hours on a weekday after school and 6 or more hours a day on the weekends. You would think that after they play the game for so long they wouldn’t have time to even do their homework.  Based on our research, we found that 3 out of every 5 boys would actually continue to play COD even if it was 10 at night and they realized that they never did their homework. Andrew Herber had this to say to the question, “I continue to play COD even if I have homework that I have to do, but somehow the homework gets finished by the time I have to turn it in the next day."

            Although it seems as though every kid in the school would play COD based on those numbers, we got very different results after we asked the girls.  Only 1 out of every 10 girls play COD that attend our school.  After we got those results we went a little farther and found out that many of the girls we asked didn’t even know what Call of Duty was.  Zeeland West junior Noelle Rauch said this about COD, “I have only played COD a couple of times and the only reason I know about COD is because of my brother.”  So COD seems to only have taken a real hold on the boys that go to Zeeland West.

            Knowing that all of those boys play COD, it would seem as though there would be many interruptions in the classroom due kids talking about what happened the last time they played the game or them trying to make plans with each other to play the game that night. We asked Mr. Minnear if he heard anything about COD in the classroom and he said this, “I do have some kids who talk about it but not that much.”

             Andrew Herber said he plans to continue to head home everyday and play COD with all of his friends and he doesn’t see himself stopping anytime soon. He hopes many more boys will join the “soldiers” that play COD now and maybe we will even see some girls begin to get into the console gaming with the boys at Zeeland West.