LITTLE WOBBLING —
A Little Wobbling man who set aside four hours on Sunday afternoon to play a game watched a Call of Duty update download for three hours and fifty-two minutes on his home broadband, leaving him eight minutes to play before dinner.
Tom Hargreaves, 38, said the free time had been “negotiated over several weeks” with his family, and was the first afternoon he had had to himself since August.
“I sat down at two with a cup of tea and a biscuit,” he said. “The screen said ‘update required’. I thought, fine, ten minutes. At four it was on 61%. At five it said ‘installing’. At 5:52 I pressed play and someone said dinner was ready.”
The update added a new seasonal event, two maps and a menu redesign, along with what the patch notes called “various improvements”. Hargreaves did not see any of them. “I saw the loading screen,” he said. “It was very good. They’ve clearly spent a lot on the loading screen.”
Big games now ship updates measured in tens of gigabytes, and players of Call of Duty, Fortnite and most other live-service games know the screen well. “More content means more data,” said a spokesperson for the invented Office for Optional Obligations. “The games get bigger. The afternoons do not.”
Hargreaves has booked his next free afternoon for December.
There is already a patch scheduled.
This article is satire. The people, places, quotes and studies described are fictional.