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The goal: To play a video game competitively online without throwing the headset down in frustration after 20 minutes, my usual modus operandi, and to report back from the front. Microsoft (Xbox 360) and Sony (PlayStation 3), in North America and Europe, have drawn their battle lines across online battles.

The obstacles: Despite several years of playing games on a weekly basis, my skills are spotty at best, especially in the strategy, sports and first-person shooting games favoured by online crowds. These lapses have drawn hostile reactions from fellow players, often the ones on my team.

The game: Unsuccessful attempts were made to infiltrate new and popular first-person shooters Call of Duty 3 and Rainbow Six: Vegas on the 360, and Resistance: Fall of Man on the PS3. Instant deaths and the taunts of preternaturally skilled teens hastened my retreat. Gears of War, a Mature-rated 360 game, was finally chosen because it has an overhauled control scheme -- third-person, with your hulking onscreen combatant moving from cover point to cover point -- and it is easier to run and hide when things go bad. Also, about two million players, perhaps drawn by an ad with a haunting, now best-selling song (a remake of Tears for Fears' Mad World), have been kicking its tires since its release a month ago.

The report: In ranked multiplayer games, where the big cats play, Gears pits two teams of four against each other in settings known as maps. The teams, one with human characters and the other represented by aliens, begin at opposite ends of the map and then run toward bigger and better weapons before meeting in the middle to blow each other up and get points. There are three types of games with pleasant, illustrative names -- "warzone," "execution" and "assassination" -- but basically the team with the last man standing wins the round. Matches consist of one to 19 rounds and can last from a minute to an hour-plus.

A headset, so you can listen and talk to other players, is not required -- some people justifiably balk at sitting on their couch barking, "You go left, I'll go right" -- but it seems as if 90 per cent of Gears regulars use them. Communication in the game is key, right up there with close-quarters shotgun skills, and teams that talk almost always win. During play and in lobbies, waiting for team members to join and then the host to start the game, I never came across a female voice, but I had some entertaining conversations with players from around the world. One game was even delayed as a comedic Brit played a long clip of Dave Chappelle imitating Howard Dean's "Byaaaah" scream. He then went through a half-hour match yelling "Byaaaah" after each kill.

After your character is blown up -- very often and quickly for me at first, less often now -- you become a spectator as the round continues. You can talk to teammates and opponents who have also been "killed" and flip through different camera views, including following individual players. For such an ugly, violence-obsessed activity, Gears can be a lovely thing to look at and the matches can be as exciting as the final seconds of a basketball game (too exciting if you are the last man left on your team in the deciding round).

One match stands out: a team of four Germans against me, a Texan and two Brits playing in Manchester. We were tied 9-9 in a 10-round match on a map called "mausoleum," which has tombs and grave markers to hide behind. In the final round, I was unceremoniously dispatched while attempting to obtain a weapon called the torque bow -- it shoots exploding arrows and is therefore quite handy -- and it came down to one of the Mancunians against two Germans. My teammate managed to get behind them, "tagged" one with a grenade, which means he stuck a grenade to the poor guy's shoulder, and then rolled away to watch as both opponents blew up. There is something wrong with all this, treating virtual violence like a sporting event, but I admit to being quite happy as we accepted the ritual "Gute game, gute game" signoff from the defeated Germans.

Each player in that ranked game received points, and statistics are kept for all players using the 360's network service, Xbox Live. You get points for kills, for downs, when your opponent sinks to his knees, and for revives, when you get close to a downed teammate and press a button to inexplicably save him. You lose them for taking yourself out -- getting hit by a train on the spectacular Tyro Station map, for example, or spastically shooting a grenade launcher into a nearby wall.

Early on, I came across four players in a corner, two from each team, who were taking turns downing, then reviving, then downing each other -- again and again and again. I blew myself up near them, to make a statement, then powered down and went outside for some fresh air.

The game's top player, according to lobby buzz and the regularly updated leaderboards, calls himself Sinerster. (Many of the gamer tags, or nicknames, are similarly dark: OV3RDOS3 911, Zombieonxbox and Smokin Snoopy are representative.) At midweek, Sinerster had 309,975 points from 775 matches and 9,990 rounds. He had 11,343 kills, 3,091 of them using the grenade tag, compared with 5,176 deaths. Using a rough estimate of three minutes a round, this means he played for 500 hours in one month, or about 16 hours a day.

I had some good times playing Gears of War online, but that is nuts.