I have a confession to make: in videogames featuring gunplay, I reload. Excessively.
I’m not sure how or when this became a problem, but in bullet-ridden titles like Call of Duty or Apex Legends, I’d down an enemy and immediately mash the reload button on my console controller before they’ve even hit the floor, no matter my ammo status. Meanwhile, their best friend comes steaming around the corner, catching me like you would your dog with their snout in the biscuit tin, desperately trying to jam my virtual magazine into my virtual firearm. And then sweet revenge is theirs.
Yes, yes, I still hear the advice of the late Gaz from Call of Duty (2007) ringing in my ears: “Remember, switching to your pistol is always faster than reloading.”
But you see, I’m the sort of person who can’t stand the sight of my ammo counter reading 29 when it could and should be 30. So, I reload. And reload. And reload again. The familiar sight of me hemorrhaging barely empty magazines all over the shop is enough to turn John Wick crimson.
Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England, says I’m not the only one: “I can only speak to my experience and a couple of friends who’ve found themselves doing this due to a) time to kill and b) lack of skill where you need most of a mag to kill a player, so you reflexively reload after one burst, which gets you killed if someone is close by when you’re in the middle of the reload animation.
For me, ammo anxiety is very much a real fear. Case in point, when the undead hordes in Resident Evil 2 Remake are bearing down on my tasty brain lobes, and I have the closest creeper’s noggin perfectly lined in my sights, but suddenly, “click.” I’m out. Cue my gratuitously gory demise with that heavily unsubtle “You are Dead” message.
No, I say. I’d never let the lack of a lead projectile accelerated by igniting gunpowder be my untimely demise. So, if I fell an enemy, I reload. If I’m testing a game’s physics by shooting a window out, I reload. If I nudge the R2 trigger mistakenly and let loose a rogue bullet, I reload. In fact, the only time I’m not reloading is when I’m firing. Then, I’ll reload.
Of course, this gets me into all sorts of trouble ‘twixt-gunfight. When you’re a level 1 noob, re-magazining takes an eternity when there are no skill points banked under reload speed. And as I’m unsheathing my next mag before glacially placing it into my firearm with all the grace of a double decker rolling down a cliff, I wonder if my foes die of laughter before I succumb to lead poisoning.
Of course, common sense dictates that the ideal time and place to reload is between bullet trading sessions, in plenty of cover, away from adversaries. When I’m doing it, I’m out in the open and surrounded, so I do the “dance.” An erratic choreography of circling frenziedly across a 3-foot ballroom, optimistically dodging airborne lead and waiting impatiently for my reload to complete. It rarely ends well.
Jonathan has some ideas on how to help counteract this phenomenon: “The only ways I know of to avoid that would be to slow the pace of the game itself, or implement semi-realistic ammunition management. So a reload over half full means you drop a load of ammunition or fully realistic where you end up with a load of half full mags later in the map/mission, which isn’t ideal if you end up in a protracted gunfight.
And despite my damage per second and K:D ratios drastically diminished, there’s almost no reason to reload so compulsively. Except for when your mag isn’t full, and you hit a spare ammo pickup, maxing out your reserve ammo without topping up your mag, losing out on precious bullets in the process. We call that disposophobia, or a fear of waste. So there’s that…
Forgive me, Gaz.
