Dual wield

In gaming, to dual wield is to hold a weapon in each hand. Dual wield may be called akimbo style. This most commonly refers to matched pairs of handguns but can refer to any other weapon that can be held in one hand such as machine pistols and even melee weapons, although this is more common in role-playing games, where it is usually termed dual wielding. The term is largely slang now and has little to no consistency with the original meaning.

Historical development

In real life

Historically, the use of two guns at once, one in each hand, originated in the American Old West, where revolvers holding only six rounds of ammunition were the highest capacity handguns available and reloading was a slow process. Being single action weapons, they needed to be cocked for each shot, so the rate of fire was also low, and while a shooter could fan his gun, this expended all his shots even faster and made him even more inaccurate than normal. Use of two guns was therefore a reasonable compromise, as this allowed one gun to be cocked as the other is being fired, in practical terms doubling the rate of fire and the available number of bullets.

There is some evidence that gunfighters of the Old West did not actually shoot two-handed. They would draw and fire with their strong hand, and when they had emptied the first gun, they drew the second gun with their weak hand and passed it over to their strong hand. In modern firearms terminology this is often called a "New York reload" after the practice of New York Police Department officers carrying second (and even third) guns as backup.

A possible example of actual use of two guns firing at the same time is "Macedonian Shooting", practiced by Russian special forces. This also evolved as a method of increasing rate of fire, more in order to force the enemy to take cover than to try to accurately hit them, and was generally practiced by NKVD officers issued a pair of revolvers. However, the invention of smaller, cheaper submachineguns around the 1950s rendered the tactic largely obsolete and it fell into relative obscurity.

With modern shooting techniques, there is very little value to shooting with a weapon in each hand. Using modern high-capacity firearms, a shooter can fire more shots with greater accuracy using a single gun in a two-handed grip than two guns with one-handed grips. At best, the technique is only effective at extremely close ranges of five to ten feet. Among the majority of professional firearms instructors, this practice is dismissed as extremely ineffective.

Advantages and Disadvantages

In both games and real life, using one weapon in each hand has a number of potential advantages:

• an easy and practical upgrade using weapons salvaged from the surroundings;
• the ability to shoot in two directions at once;
• the ability to use two weapon types at once.
• the potential ability to target two enemies at once;
• for semiautomatic guns, an entirely analogue rate of fire allowing any speed from single shots to virtually submachinegun rates of fire;
• a doubling of available ammunition (assuming identical guns are used together) before reloading is necessary;
• for melee weapons, the potential ability to strike a single enemy from two directions at once, making defence much harder;
• for melee weapons, the ability to use weapons effective against more than one type of armour, for example a warhammer (more effective against plate armour) and a poniard (particularly effective against chain mail).

However, there are also numerous disadvantages to using two weapons simultaneously:

• many shooters believe it is not possible to effectively aim in two different directions at once, rendering many types of gun ineffective (the ability to aim in two different directions simultaneously is extremely rare in games);
• similarly, due to the added complication of controlling two weapons compared to one, styles and practitioners of melee combat that use two weapons simultaneously are rare in reality, although like most combat this is usually simplified in games;
• the handedness of the wielder may affect the weapon in the off-hand, causing the direction and/or power of a melee strike or the aim and/or recoil control of a gun to suffer;
• for ranged weapons, the lack of stability caused by a single-handed grip is likely to further impact ability to aim, and may cause jamming;
• for melee weapons, a single-handed grip may be too loose to deliver a sufficiently strong blow;
• if using diverse types of ranged and/or melee weapon simutaneously, the potential for confusion becomes much higher;
• ammunition is depleted twice as fast if using two guns rather than one;
• reloading two guns is much more complex and takes significantly longer than reloading one.

Integration into media

Most famously, Hong Kong action cinema, most notably films directed by John Woo, is known for use of twin pistols to contribute to a more balletic and stylized form of gun combat – referred as gun fu – than contemporary Western films, and it is from this source that modern action films have integrated akimbo guns as a stylistic institution. The use of this tactic was initially a rarity in Western films, as up till then it was thought to look cumbersome. The use of akimbo became more acceptable and achieved somewhat of a cult status after much influence from Hong Kong action cinema.

Naturally, action films have been a major influence on action gaming. Rise of the Triad and Marathon, both released on December 21, 1994, were the earliest first-person shooters to integrate akimbo pistols. In Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.², this tactic was developed further, allowing the player to wield two dissimilar weapons at once, firing each one independently.

Etymology

There is some confusion over the origin of this usage of the word akimbo. Technically, it is inaccurate, since the word literally refers to a stance where a person stands with their elbows bent and their hands on their hips - not a posture well suited to shooting. While this does bear some similarity with the classic posture of cowboys firing their twin revolvers from the hip, in games this posture is almost never reflected, with almost all game characters firing twin guns at shoulder level, straight-armed. Counter-Strike is a notable exception, in that the player models are seen externally to fire akimbo Berettas from the hip, but appear to be firing from shoulder level from the first-person perspective. Also interesting is that there is no consensus on whether the word should precede or follow the name of the object it describes: "akimbo pistols" is generally just as acceptable in usage as "pistols akimbo".

The book Hong Kong Action Cinema (ISBN 0-87951-663-1) by Bey Logan suggests the word originated in Hong Kong action movies and eventually migrated to the gaming lexicon.

Also worthy of consideration is the possibility that the phrase predates both of these and refers instead to Cowboy action shooting techniques.

See also

• Hyoho Niten Ichi-ryu
• Gun fu
• New York reload
• Gun Kata
• Main-gauche

External links

• Mok, Herman (2001-10-03). "Guide to airsoft akimbo combat". Arnie's Airsoft.co.uk. Retrieved 2007-08-14. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)