In January, I visited a cousin and witnessed something awkward, yet fascinating. There was a power outage in the house, yet her younger brother my cousin too was enjoying his pastime. “Check those guys, clear them, shoot on sight,” he kept urging his online partners. Then I asked his sister, “Who is he talking to?”
The sister revealed he was playing ‘Call of Duty Mobile’ on his mobile device. “He completely forgets we are here when he starts playing that game,” she said.
This was not my first time learning of ‘Call of Duty Mobile,’ but until then, I never realised how strong the hold this mobile game had on young Nigerians.
Call of Duty Mobile (CoDM) is a military shooting game played on smartphones. It is free to download, free to play, and brutally competitive. Players form squads of strangers from anywhere in the world, drop into a virtual battlefield, and fight to be the last team standing.
Communication is everything during gaming time. Trust is survival. Somewhere under that pressure, something unexpected happens: players build a digital community under ‘gunfire’.
According to Google Play Store, the game has over 100 million downloads and a rating of 4.2, while Nigeria ranks 11th among countries with the most downloads. Countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico lead the chart.
Racing hearts, sweaty palms
Adesogan Greatman, a final-year mathematics student at the Federal University of Lokoja, could spend at least six hours a day, 21 hours a week, depending on his schedule, playing the game. He started playing in 2021, two years after the game was released on mobile devices.
“I mainly play Battle Royale,” he said, adding, “Which is a mode where players compete against each other on a large map, collect weapons and equipment, survive, and try to be the last player or team standing.” According to him, a typical gaming session involves choosing a landing spot, gathering supplies, fighting opponents, and improving ranks and skills.
While Mr Greatman describes the mechanics of the game, Yusuf Jonga, a lawyer, throws light on what happens after gaming time.
Mr Jonga, who plays under the moniker Soul_Brotha, picked up the game when it was released in 2019. He describes the multiplayer experience as his most preferred gaming mode – the short and intense matches. “Racing heart, sweaty palms and hoping to get the next kill or hope not to be killed,” he said.
He commits about five to six hours a day and 35 hours a week to the game.
Just like Mr Jonga, Leo Tarbunde, a medical doctor, prefers the multi-player mode. He joins online to play with his teammates for a “long time”. When asked how many hours he plays a week, he paused, sighed, and said, “about 21 hours give or take.”
Part of what keeps players glued to the game is not only the thrill of a firefight but also the way the game is designed to pull you back. Joseph Igoanua, who plays as CJEX but has now changed his moniker to “Bandit,” started in 2022 and explained how the ranking system works. Players climb from Rookie to Veteran, Elite, Pro, Master, Grand Master, and finally Legendary.
According to “Bandit”, no player stays at the top for long. He explained that at the start of a new season, the game automatically resets every player’s profile two ranks below. What this means is that if a player finishes at Legendary at the end of a season, the game will automatically start the player at Master level at the start of a new season.
It is a small design decision with a big effect. “It makes people want to come online and enter Legendary again,” Mr Igoanua said. He now plays far less than he used to, since work took most of his time, but he still logs in most seasons to chase that badge before it resets. When he plays, it is mostly Hardpoint and Domination, “because most times the chaos happens” there.
Friendships beyond the battlefield
Beyond the ranks and the ratings, something else keeps happening inside CoDM. Strangers become friends. Mr Greatman said he has made genuine friends through the game, including people from different countries, some of whom invited him to join their clans. Mr Jonga said the same, adding that his gaming friendships crossed gender lines.
“Yes, I have [friends], both male and female,” Mr Jonga said when asked if he had made friends who started out as strangers in the game.
For Mr Igoanua, making friends through the game is a routine. When asked about his CoDM-inspired friendship experience, he laughed and said, “For sure, almost every time.” He said he makes new friends almost every season he plays.
Everyone does not have the same story. Mr Tarbunde, who plays as KillaBrotha, gave a blunter answer. “Honestly? Not really,” he said. “I know most of my friends from real life. I don’t always have my microphone on so I’m not that social.”
For Tarbunde, the game is less a social space than a contest. In his own words, “just a cog in the machine to win the game.”
From squad chats to WhatsApp
For those who make friends in the game, the relationship rarely ends inside it. Mr Jonga said his in-game friendships eventually moved to WhatsApp. “Communication was mostly in game but later became WhatsApp chats,” he said.
He used to be part of a WhatsApp group created specifically for gaming schedules. Members would notify each other when they were about to go online, and who was free to play. “These were mostly my close friends and some people we befriended online,” he added.
Mr Greatman has something similar, a small community, as he called it, where players interact and share things about the game. But he was careful to separate that community from deep friendship. “Most of our communication was through gaming,” he said.
Still, Mr Igoanua’s world is bigger. “A lot of WhatsApp groups and Telegram communities exist,” he said. “Even on Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, name the app, there’s probably a CoDM group.” Mr Tarbunde, on the other hand, said he belongs to none of them. He does not need to; his gaming does not depend on a wider community to feel complete.
But are they really friends?
The word “friend” does a lot of work in these conversations, and not everyone uses it the same way. When Mr Greatman was asked whether the people he met through the game remained close friends, he said no. Not because the friendships were never real, but because he lost his game account, and with it, connections with most of the people he had played with. “Because I lost contact with them, I wouldn’t call them close friends today.” The friends he has met in person were people he already knew before he ever picked up the game.
Mr Jonga’s gaming friends are active and reachable. Some are even a WhatsApp message away, but he draws a similarly cautionary line. He has never met any of them physically; they live in different states, he said. When asked if a gaming friend had ever turned up for him when he needed help, Mr Jonga was cautious, he said, “Not that close.”
Asked directly if he would call them close friends, his answer was short: “Just friends, I wouldn’t say close.”
Mr Igoanua’s answer carried the same hesitation. The people he had met in person, he explained, were mostly people he already knew before he realised they also played CoDM, not friends made in the game.
As for anyone he has met purely through playing, “No, I’ve not met anyone physically, but I probably could if I wanted to.” He has not needed a gaming friend to bail him out personally, but he has watched it happen to others. CoDM has a public chat where players sometimes beg for money or data, and, in his words, “some people actually turn up for them.”
What follows a lost account
For Mr Greatman, the game gave him friends across borders, and then took most of them away the day his account disappeared. For Mr Jonga, it gave him people to talk to who eventually became WhatsApp contacts, but never quite close enough to call on. For Mr Igoanua, it gave him a Twitter and Telegram community and strangers who occasionally hand out data to other strangers in a public chat. For Mr Tarbunde, it gave him nothing significant. He said the friends who mattered to him were already his friends before he started playing the game.
Whether Call of Duty Mobile makes “best friends” out of strangers or not, depends on who you ask and what they are willing to call a “friend”. What the game reliably does is put people in a room together, night after night, under gunfire pressure that they have to communicate to survive.
What happens after that is entirely up to the players.
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Is are there hidden costs, risks
According to CoDM players I spoke with, they spend an average of five hours a day engaging with his fellow compadre online. This leaves us with an unanswered question. Beyond the time costs, is there a hidden health risk?
Mr Igoanua admitted used to be addicted to playing as a fresh gamer,
but not so much anymore as he got older. However, when he sets a target to meet, he can procrastinate on chores to play.
The World Health Organisation (WHO), in its 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), recognises “gaming disorder” as a diagnosable condition.
This is described as a gaming pattern in which a person loses control over how much they spend they play games or let gaming take priority over other parts of their life. For it to count as a disorder, the pattern must be severe enough to significantly disrupt someone’s personal, family, social, or work life and have persisted for at least 12 months.
WHO carefully notes that this affects only a small portion of gamers. They warn that gamers should pay attention to the time given to gaming and how it affects their physical and mental health.
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