Gears Of War and badminton have more in common than you might think
It's in the hips
As much as I enjoy your Call Of Dutys and Valorants, I just don’t think any multiplayer shooter will eclipse Gears Of War. For me, at least, it comes down to movement. The way the beefy boys slide into cover and bounce off it with ease. The side-steps and strafes in those tight-knit shotgun battles.
Recently, I wondered if there was more to my connection with Gears and its lovely movement. And then it struck me: badminton. Yes, the racquet sport I’ve played for 19 years and consider an immensely important aspect of my life. Turns out they have quite a lot in common, actually.
This burst of thought came about during a visit to the Xbox Museum, a celebration of 20 years of Xbox and a virtual space where you could view your Xbox stats. I knew I’d played the heck out of Gears in my teens, but oh my days. I mean, just take a look at the image below.
That’s the result of logging into Xbox Live with my mates every day after school at 7pm. At the lockers we’d reaffirm our one and only commitment. “Gears?”, “Yeah, Gears”. Ignorant folks probably thought we were using a code word to mask our love of maths or design tech or something. Hah. Come on. It’s far worse than that. “Gears” only meant – and still means – one thing. Sitting in your bedroom slaying aliens as Marcus Fenix and swooning when he yells, “Eat shit and die!” in that gravelly tone of his. Still gives me tingles.
Admittedly, I haven’t played Gears in a long, long time. But its movement is now ingrained so deeply in me, that I could pick up a controller and wall-bounce like it was 2011. What’s wall-bouncing? Well, it’s cutting your character’s momentum short, so just at that moment where you’re about to slap your backside against a wall and enter cover, you come to a standstill. You then repeat this process, so it looks like you’re literally bouncing between walls. It’s a bit like denying a sequence of magnetic pulls at the last second to outsmart and outmaneuver your opponents.
Wall-bouncing lets you weave and duck out of fire with a strange elegance, a bit like a salmon flailing out of water. The best bouncers can tumble and cartwheel around multiple meatheads. Some go so fast they’re borderline breakdancers. But to succeed, you need to combine this skill with your shotgun blasts. You must sneak these in between bounces. Either plan ahead or rely on instinct. Aim in for accuracy, or hip-fire for speed. Suddenly, Gears morphs from Beefcakes Go Shooty Tooty to something rather technical.
And that’s what I adore about badminton. I’ve played competitively for something like 16 years now, for county, for university, for clubs, at a training camp or two, and even in some some tournaments. By no means am I God’s gift to badminton - far, far from it. I’d get demolished by lots of players on the tournament circuit, no question. But I like to think I still play at a decent level and have good knowledge of the game.
Badminton is a lot of things to me. It’s a way to channel the weight of my worries into a smash. It’s the comradery of a match night. It’s the laughs on the benches between games. The buzz of a tough workout. Swallowing tough losses, celebrating big wins, and hearing the lightning crack of the shuttle. Most of all, you will never stop learning.
Take badminton to a competitive level and it shifts from a quick hit around the garden to an explosive mixture of speed and technicality. No, it isn’t all in the wrist. Power comes through the legs, in the rotation of the hips, in timing, in so many little details. You must know when to be efficient with it; when to crank it up a notch, or when to tone it down. At the highest level, the best players are smart. They know how to ‘construct a rally’ and use their talents to expose gaps in the court. In a weird sort of way, it’s a bit like speed chess.
Aside from practicing your shots and slices and smashes, footwork is absolutely essential. It’s a part of the sport I love, perhaps more than shot-making. There are many different footwork patterns you can stitch together to get around the court optimally. Chassis’, arch-steps, scissor-kicks. LUNGE! Don’t forget to split-step! I’ll always remember what one of my old county coaches taught us: “Pretend you’re sitting on the bog. That’s it, squat”. Like a crab, or someone doing a poo, you load the legs and get ready to explode. Whether that’s sideways or upwards or backwards. The foundations of good movement start with a big old squat.
Watch Kento Momota’s legs in the video below. Look at how low his centre of gravity is and how perfectly in balance he is at all times. Skip to 53 seconds, for a proper look.
I get deep satisfaction from practicing my badminton movement. There’s nothing better than outmaneuvering your opponents and doing it in style. Face-off against someone else who’s trained in the same patterns, though, and it’s even more of a joy. You’re both undoing each other's stitches in ritual dance of drop-shots and lunges and it becomes a battle of who's able to maintain their balance better. Not only balance in movement, but in shot placement, shot quality, and keeping those nerves in check.
Gears shares a similar emphasis on footwork. I’ve spent hours wall-bouncing in ways that suit different environments: between two walls, around columns, downhill. There are ways you can feint and arch your body with a shotgun in hand. You can strafe, of course. And there are different patterns of movement you can use when facing off against someone behind a ledge. You can coax them out like an over eager whack-a-mole with a quick wall-bounce, or engage in a battle of wits as you both bob your heads above cover to smite each other down. Lose your head, or slip-up and you're dead meat.
Perhaps Quake or Doom have captured a similar feeling of fluidity in movement, but Gears gets my pick. There's style and flair in learning the ways of the wall-bounce, and it's rather reminiscent of what's possible when you focus on smooth footwork in badminton. Hey, I bet Marcus Fenix would make for a really good player, to be fair. Gritty, powerful, and a bandana to absorb sweat. I'd partner him in a heartbeat.