3, 2, 1. The round starts and the barriers in front of me disappear. I pull out my virtual “Vandal,” a rifle based on the real-life AK-47, and immediately run forward into A-site, where defenders are patiently waiting for this exact, extremely illogical play.  

“Tiffany, don’t peek!” My friend says frantically. “You’re going to die.”

“Don’t worry. I got this!” I run into the open, and before I even see the red outlines denoting the enemy team, I get shot once in the head and watch my sad virtual agent topple to the ground. I press tab and look at the kill leaderboard: 0 kills, 3 deaths.

Over the summer, I finally hopped on the “Valorant” bandwagon all my friends were riding and downloaded the game: a first-person shooter game developed by Riot Games and released in 2020.

The game has a big learning curve, especially since I have never played a FPS game before. I had to learn all the basic mechanics, including controlling movement through the WASD keys, aiming with my mouse and getting used to the 3-D perspective. In addition, I needed to learn my way around the different maps and the different agents’ abilities.

For my first game, I played with the character Sage and walked around healing my teammates while trying to not get killed. It was a complete failure: I got maybe one kill in 20 rounds and died basically every round. Even after getting the hang of moving around the map and using the agent abilities, I somehow always managed to die to the enemy team’s fire.

Worst of all, I was stuck playing on my 5-year-old Lenovo laptop that turns on the fan when I open one too many Chrome tabs. My game only runs at 20 frames per second, always lagging and moving slowly, further hindering my experience. Even my keyboard and mouse were the generic office ones, so when I tried to jiggle peek, it did not work.

This ended up with me being placed in Iron 1, the lowest tier in competitive ranks. 

Currently, I don’t have much time to play now that school has started and college applications are taking up most of my time. Hopefully, when second semester starts, I can grind “Valorant” again and maybe hit Bronze.