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Transcript of First-person Shooting Games
CHAPTER 30
GENRE PROFILE: FIRST-PERSON SHOOTING GAMES
Bob Rehak
Doom, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Halo: among the most popular video
games ever released, these are all examples of the first-person shooter or FPS. Combining
graphic sophistication and violent content for a powerful immersive effect, the FPS also
has been a lightning rod for controversy about the moral and psychological impact of
video games, triggering debates about whether such games function as training simulators
for aggressive and even homicidal behavior, and if so, how they should be regulated. The
roots of the FPS extend back to the mid-1970s, when creators in several different corners
of the game industry began developing computer graphics up to the task of immersing
players in three-dimensional (3-D) space. Throughout the 1980s, these experiments
continued, placing players in ever more detailed and explorable worlds. Along with the
evolution of the Internet, the FPS exploded in the early 1990s as the killer app of
networked personal computers, enabling players to fight each other in arena-style deathmatches
and spawning new forms of team-based gameplay such as Capture the Flag.
Nowadays, high-end shooters, with their steep processing and memory demands, drive
users to upgrade their computers and buy new gaming consoles. Each generation of shooters
has pushed the limits of computer hardware and clever programming to become one of
the most widely recognized and globally lucrative families of interactive electronic play.
First-person shooters are played from a subjective perspectiveas though the player is
embodied in three-dimensional space, directly perceiving a game world that recedes realistically
into the distance. Action unfolds in a more-or-less continuous tracking shot,
mimicking the point-of-view cameras of Hollywood but extending that concept to its
logical extreme: rather than gazing on the players stand-in from the outside, the camera
becomes the avatar and vice versa. With its emphasis on presence, the FPS is highly immersive
and sensorially immediate, and, at its most successful, almost overwhelmingly
visceral. Perhaps more than any other game genre, FPSs address the player at the level of
the body. In this sense they are like the body genres of cinemamelodrama, horror,
pornography, gross-out comedyand have drawn condemnation in equal measure to those stigmatized cultural forms. But the controversial status of the FPS involves more
than immersive graphics. Just as essential is the third term in its nameshooter. In its
purest form, the FPS is relentlessly aggressive, its action driven by shooting and being shot
at. As the primary means of interacting with opponents, ranged weapons provide the
genre with its defining iconography: a gun barrel (as of a shotgun, plasma rifle, or rocket
launcher) jutting from the bottom of the frame and pointing toward a real or implied
crosshairs at the center of the screen. This gun, along with the hand holding it, bridges
the space of the player and the space of the game, combining with 3-D graphics to create
the shooters key illusion: you are here.
The experience of playing an FPS is that of exploring an endlessly unfolding environment
(sometimes a claustrophobic maze, sometimes vast open areas) through the eyes of
another, often enjoying scenery rendered in relatively lush detail. In its visualization of a
detailed world, centered on a player who acts as an embodied agent, the shooter literalizes
a fundamental conceit of computer gamingone present even in games that consist solely
of text, such as the seminal Adventure. Written by William Crowther in 1973 and
subsequently modified by Don Woods at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(SAIL), Adventure allowed players to explore a large space composed of outdoor and
indoor spaces, houses and underground caves populated by creatures, objects, and puzzles.
In a process that might best be described as second person, players type commands and
receive descriptions in order to navigate and interact with the world. The games opening
block of text, for example, reads: You are standing at the end of a road before a small
brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down
a gully.
The you in Adventure is functionally equivalent to the I of the avatar, in that it
designates both the human player and his or her emissary within the game world. More
importantly, it emphasizes the importance of embodiment in video games address to their
players, inviting human beings to imagine themselves as fully present and participatory
inhabitants of a world contained within the machine. Graphics of the mid-1970s were
incapable of representing players visually as anything more than crude blocks of color.
The abstract domain of the all-text Adventure, paradoxically, embodied players in high
mental resolution by drawing on their novelistic training: seeing a personal pronoun on
the page (or the screen), readers equate the literary character with their own.
Early 3-D Gaming
In the years since Adventure, the dream of exploring virtual worlds with virtual bodies
has expanded with advances in computer technology. Associated with high-end equipment
such as specialized hardware for 3-D acceleration, spacious memory, and speedy
processors, as well as elaborately clever software to calculate line-of-sight perspective,
remove hidden walls, paint surfaces with convincing textures, and generate light and
shadow, the FPS epitomizes the cutting edge of video gaming. Each new generation of
releases drives users to upgrade their computers or purchase new systems. The FPS
thus plays a special role within the video game industry, reflecting the significant historical
function of games and their graphics in popularizing and democratizing information
technology.
Three-dimensional perspective has long been a goal of game designers. While the early
days of arcade gaming in the 1970s were dominated by top-down and side-view displays
in blocky resolution and limited color palettes, certain game forms, such as racing games
and flight simulators, placed viewers behind windshields and viewports, gazing out at train
tracks that converged on vanishing points, eye-level horizons, and objects that appeared
small far away but grew larger as they approached. An early experiment in 3-D gaming
was the tank combat simulator Panther, developed in 1975 at Northwestern University
for a multi-user computer system known as PLATO. Many attributes of Panther showed
up five years later in the first commercially successful implementation of 3-D gaming,
Ataris Battlezone (1980). Battlezone placed players behind the controls of a tank on an arid
landscape, firing away at enemy vehicles. When an enemy missile hit, jagged cracks
appeared across the field of view, and many gamers of that generation can recall the reflexive
spasm that would jerk them back from the cabinets periscope and twin joysticks.
Rather than laboriously painting in game space with blocky pixels, Battlezones vector
graphics merely drew lines connecting vertices, resulting in wireframe worlds and models
that moved with the fluidity of pure mathematics. But Battlezones graphics were convincing
only in their smoothness and dimensionality. The obstacles on the battlefield were
primitive pyramids, blocks, and cylinders. All consisted of transparent wireframes; there
were no textures, only a skeletal dance of vectors. Another 3-D game released soon after,
Ataris Tempest, devoted its much more colorful wireframes to a simulation of combat in
terms of abstract art: boomerangs, lightning bolts, and whirling spirals. Tempest was
definitely perspectivalplayers peered into receding tunnels, a well up the walls of which
climbed enemy shapes as superzaps rained down upon them.
Throughout the 1980s, arcade video games continued to extend the boundaries of
subjective-viewpoint graphics. Ataris Pole Position was a fast-moving, visually rich racing
game, butlike earlier racing games such as Vectorbeams Speed Freak, or for that matter,
Tempest with its angular C-shaped figurethese games lacked a visible, organic avatar
with which players could identify better than with a machine or vehicle. Another arcade
game, Nintendos Punch-Out!!, was more effective in this regard, simulating a boxing
match in which players peered through a wireframe body into the eyes of their pugilistic
opponent. But it was in the home, on personal computers, that the groundwork for the
FPS was laid in the form of maze games. A series of releases from Med Systems for the
Apple II and TRS-80 featured simple 3-D renderings of mazes loaded with secret doors,
puzzles, treasures, and perils. These included Rats Revenge (1980), Deathmaze 5000
(1980), Labyrinth (1980), Asylum (1981), and Asylum II (1982). In 1984, a version of
Asylum II came out for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64.Many of these titles were coded
by William F. Denman, Jr., making him something of a pioneer in first-person gaming. In
1986, Lucasfilm Games released Rescue on Fractalus!, which represented a high-water mark
in the fluid animation of 3-D space of the time. Another 3-D game for home computers
that enjoyed great popularity was Acornsoft/Firebirds Elite (1984), a spaceflight-andtrading
simulation.
First-Person Shooters: The First Wave
But it was not until the early 1990s that the FPS exploded onto the scene, bringing
together several new developments in game design and hardware. Powerful new
processors, expanded memory capacity, and storage media, and the nascent World Wide
Web, made possible the 3-D graphics, spacious yet labyrinthine game spaces, and
networked multiplayer action that quickly came to define the genre. During this
periodin a story as old as the technology itselfmultiple inventors working independently
of each other were pursuing the same goal of an immersive 3-D maze exploration
game. Only one company, id Software, would emerge as the breakthrough originator.
But there was competition.
Developed by Looking Glass Technologies and published by Origin Systems in 1992,
Ultima Underworld grew out of Richard Garriotts long-running Ultima series, a franchise
of role-playing games whose first incarnationAkallabeth, released for the Apple II in
1980actually featured rudimentary first-person graphics, providing players with a
window through which they gazed at a simple wireframe maze in 3-D. Twelve years later,
Ultima Underworld texture-mapped colorful patterns of stone and wood onto walls, floors,
and ceilings, a substantial leap forward in the creation of immersive environments. At the
other end of the first-person spectrum, Robyn and Rand Millers Myst plunged players
into an interactive puzzle-mystery set on a mysterious island. Mysts near-photorealistic
rendered artwork unfolded as a series of still frames, accented with subtle animation and
a rich envelope of sound effects; playing it was like clicking through a slide show.
Clearly there was an idea floating around in the first part of that decade, waiting to be
plucked from the ether: a vernacular virtual reality (VR), employing sophisticated
audiovisual aesthetics to embed real human beings in unreal spaces. The advent of
the first-person shooter turned home computers and consoles into pint-sized reality
simulators, delivering on speculative technologies of science fiction that ranged from the
nightmarish nursery in Ray Bradburys short story The Veldt (1951) to the neural
recordings in Brainstorm (1983), cyberspace in William Gibsons Neuromancer (1984),
and the holodeck in various incarnations of Star Trek from Star Trek: The Next Generation
(1987) onward.
But it was the novel Snow Crash, published in 1992, that most directly foreshadowed
the shooters emergence both as practical technology and cultural fantasy. Author Neal
Stephensons Metaverse, a networked virtual environment populated by computer users
wearing digital bodies called avatars, evoked the FPS as well as later evolutions of graphically
intensivethough not necessarily first-personvideo gaming like the massively
multiplayer online role-playing games EverQuest (1999) and World of Warcraft (2004).
The Metaverse portrayed virtual reality as fun, full of action, conflict, contest, and
masquerade. Rejecting the abstract data structures and sterile visualizations that had up
till then characterized VR research in science and business, Snow Crash recast VR as an
essentially playful space, implementable on personal computers and a perfectly worthwhile
use of technology.
This combination of pop irreverence and flamboyant invention was precisely the spark
missing from Ultima Underworld, with its Dungeons & Dragons nerdiness, and Myst, with
its chill and cryptic air of the museum. In order to win a wide audience, desktop VR had
to be not just technically proficient but a bit vulgar: fast-moving, carnivalesque, accessible.
id Softwares profane products were all three. A small software company based in Texas, id
Software brought together two talented young men who, like John Lennon and Paul
McCartney, achieved in their partnership a magic that neither has quite been able to
reproduce in later solo work. John Carmack was a programming genius with impressive
technical skills; John Romero, a designer and conceptual artist whose tastes tended toward
heavy metal music, twisted humor, explicit gore, and potent firepower. The pair grew up
in the 1980s playing arcade games like Asteroids and Defender, games whose instantly
graspable rule set (shoot anything that moves) formed the kernel of their first forays into 3-D gaming, Hovertank 3D and Catacombs 3D, both released in 1991. These were not just
games but technology teststrial runs for Carmacks specialized code for rapidly and
fluidly rendering 3-D spaces. Both were basically maze-navigation puzzles: rolling down
corridors, players would round a corner to find a monster or evil machine ready to attack.
Even in these proto-shooters, with what now seem like absurdly limited graphics, the
basic appeal of embodied combat simulation shines through. By virtue of its perspective,
even the most rudimentary shooter generates ongoing suspense and surprise from the simple
fact that players can see nothing that is not directly in front of them, or at least nearby:
the radius of visible action shrinks literally to ones line of sight. Shooters thus mark a profound
change in the relationship among perception, knowledge, and strategy in game
play. While a game like Stern Electronicss Berzerk presents the same basic situation as that
faced in Hovertank 3Dthe player guns his or way through a maze, pursued by a converging
swarm of enemiesBerzerks screen is a combination of top-down and side views.
One can take in, at a glance, the entire space of a given screen, including the robots
waiting in other areas of the room which would, to an embodied viewpoint, be blocked
by walls. (Exiting one side of the screen, of course, would bring up a new map, populated
with new opponents.) By contrast, id Softwares early shooters radically reined in player
knowledge, so that nearly every step forward carried with it the thrill of the unexpected.
This certainly was true of ids Wolfenstein 3D, released in 1992an update of Castle
Wolfenstein (1981), an Apple II game by Muse Software in which the player explores a
castle populated with Nazi soldiers, growling attack dogs, and treasure chests full of loot
and ammunition. Again, the 2-D graphics of the original game, in which multiple rooms
were visible to the player, gave way to a ground-level view of receding hallways and shut
doors. No longer was there a split between what the player could see and what the avatar
could (in theory) perceive; the two points of view merged to create a fully inhabited
avatar, and by the same token a more fully immersive game world.
Wolfenstein 3D was popular, but it was ids next game, Doom, that launched the FPS
craze and came to define the genre (for better or worse) in the public mind. Certainly its
storylinea space marine facing down hordes of demonic beasts unleashed on a Martian
base by a transdimensional portalwas not particularly groundbreaking, echoing the
flamboyantly pulpy science-fiction setups of countless games that had come before.
Dooms most profound innovation, apart from its graphics, had to do with its exploitation
of an increasingly interlinked computing environment (modem-to-modem connections,
local area networks or LANs, the emerging architecture of the World Wide Web).
Released online, Doom became an immensely popular shareware download, its handful
of demo levels serving as an invitation to buy the full version of the game.
A second way in which Doom exploited connectivity was in allowing players to meet in
networked deathmatches, firing at and dodging each other rather than computergenerated
opponents. The idea of networked environments as playspaces dates back at
least to the multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of the 1970s. Like the early Adventure, the
MUDs were text-based, their interactions involving words rather than graphics, and play
within them was a sophisticated collective spinning of fantasy identities serving as a matrix
for interaction: social interaction as gaming. A more direct ancestor of the networked FPS
was the 3-D game Mazewar and its numerous variants. Developed for the IMSAI PDP
computer in 1974, and realized thereafter on a host of different networked platforms,
Mazewar let players face off against each other (or alternatively against computercontrolled
robots) in a wireframe labyrinth. The graphics were in one sense extremely simple: players appeared to each other as a single disembodied eyeball. But in another
sense, that of an inhabited environment in which seeing involved being seen and thus
risking enemy fire, Mazewar stands as the most direct prefiguration of the shooters that
would follow 20 years later.
Doom also made history through changes to the underlying architecture of video game
softwarechanges that affected how games would from then on be conceived, designed,
and marketed. The amount of code devoted to rendering a 3-D world, populating it with
objects and characters, and animating it all in response to player actions, was substantial
enough that it split off conceptually from the rest of game content. The game engine, consisting
of that world-creating code and its various components (sub-engines for physics,
sound, lighting, artificial intelligence [AI], and so on), became as much a product as the
game itself. Carmacks work at id consisted of crafting ever more sophisticated engines,
while Romero created data to plug into those engines. Hence id was able to license the
Wolfenstein 3D engine to Apogee Software, also known as 3D Realms, to produce Rise of
the Triad in 1994, while Dooms engine went into Raven Softwares Heretic (1994).
The advent of the engine/data architecture, and the potential for world creation that
came with it, also opened up new possibilities for building franchises. Sequels or expansion
packs such as Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994) consisted of new data for the existing
engine. Engines contributed to what might be called the levelization of gaming, dividing
large game experiences into discrete chapters, each taking place on a different map, which
in theory could be crafted by multiple designers (one reason for the tonal shifts between
demonic medieval imagery and chromed science-fiction surfaces in ids output). Another
important outgrowth of the shooters architecture was the involvement of playerprogrammers
in producing their own levels and modifications (or mods), customizing
the game to their own ends.
The Shooter Matures
Throughout the 1990s, id Software dominated the first-person shooter market, both
with its genre-defining flagship titles and with the successively more complex 3-D engines
it licensed to other software developers. Doom and Doom II were followed by Quake
(1996) and Quake II (1997), each of which featured an improved generation of engine
and several mission-pack expansions (Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity
for Quake in 1997; The Reckoning and Ground Zero for Quake II in 1998). All of these
shooters and their offshoots were bound to straightforward narrative framesgenerally
involving dimensional gates and battle scenarios merging cyborgs and satanic beasts
but with Quake III: Arena in 1999, id largely did away with story. Arena, true to its name,
was more or less a virtual coliseum in which players fought each other, or computercontrolled
bots. The commercial viability of Arena reflected the importance of the
deathmatch within the FPS genre, which by that point had separated into two distinct
modes: single-player story-dominated play, and networked multiplayer team-based play
(exemplified in game subgenres like Capture the Flag).
id Software, from which Romero departed in the late 1990s, continues to produce
shooters that grab media attention and market share, but Carmacks remarkable technical
innovation seems to come at the cost of narrative sophistication. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
(2001) was basically a remake ofWolfenstein 3D using the Quake III engine; similarly,
Doom 3 (2004) and Quake 4 (2005) revisited the pleasures of previous id titles with updated graphics. For the most part, it has fallen to ids competitors to use the first-person
mode as an interface for more cognitively and emotionally involving game experiences.
The earliest of these was the company Bungie, whose Marathon series for the Macintosh
[Marathon (1994), Marathon 2: Durendal (1995), and Marathon Infinity (1996)] blended
sober science fiction with innovative deathmatch modes. Even darker in its sci-fi stylings
was Looking Glasss System Shock (1994), which, like its sequel, Electronic Artss System
Shock 2 (1999), hybridized RPG and FPS elements with horror. Other generic blendings
included Duke Nukeem 3D (1996) and Shadow Warrior (1997), both from 3D Realms.
The FPS also proved adaptable to media and gaming franchises such as Star Wars (Dark
Forces in 1995, Jedi Knight in 1997, and a host of Jedi Knight expansions and sequels from
1998 to the present) and Star Trek (Elite Force in 2000 and Elite Force 2 in 2003).
If 1992 marked the birth of the FPS, 1998 saw its maturation, with the release of several
watershed games that redefined the shooter experience: Epic Games/GT Interactives
Unreal and Valve Software/Sierra Studioss Half-Life. Both had complex storylines, while
Looking Glass StudiossThief: The Dark Project substituted sneaking for shooting. In each,
objectives could be accomplished through multiple paths, encouraging player agency and
a sense of realism within the game world. Shooters set inWorldWar II proved particularly
popular, with series such as DreamWorks Interactive/Electronic Artss Medal of Honor
(1999) and Digital Illusions CE/Electronic Artss Battlefield 1942 (2002). Finally, a string
of games preserved the spirit of the original id shooters, like Croteams Serious Sam
(2001), People Can Fly/DreamCatcher Interactives Painkiller (2004), and Monolith
Productions/Vivendis F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon) (2005).
Recent years have seen the emergence of superstar gamesreleased amid much
fanfare, trumpeted for their technical achievements in graphic and sound, and quickly
becoming the core of devoted gaming communities. The first of these was probably Halo
(2001), a return to prominence by Bungie and the heart of the Xbox console line.
Offering a sci-fi adventure drawn in equal parts from James Camerons Aliens (1986)
and Larry Nivens novel Ringworld (1974), and rumored to be a sequel to Bungies own
Marathon (1994), Halo successfully bridged single- and multiplayer gaming. In 2004,
Valves Half-Life 2 and ids Doom 3 demonstrated contrasting poles of shooter play, with
HL2s bleak and complex play versus Doom 3s extremely simplified creep-and-shoot
gameplay. Both, however, were showcases of graphics, Doom 3 in particular receiving
attention for the engine developed by John Carmackfor the first time rendering all
lighting from within the game, calculating it on the fly rather than relying on pre-set
lightmaps.
But it should also be noted that the same characteristics that make shooters stand out
their graphical sophistication, immersive power, and visceral you are here impactare
what have brought the form in for much criticism over the years. In large part because
of id Softwares early influence on the form, shooters are often associated with the worst
and most culturally corrosive effects of gameplay: desensitization to violence, inability to
tell fantasy from reality, and training and drilling in combat perception and reflexes. Some
critics have gone so far as to call the FPS a murder simulator, and this charge is perhaps
not far off. Certainly it is hard to deny in light of school shootings in which the killers
reportedly were heavy players of first-person shooter video games. But as critics of this
view have pointed out, there are other explanations for the correlation: the social ostracism
experienced by tormented teenagers coincides with a number of suspect subcultural affiliations,
including goth, heavy metal, comic books, and horror movies. (There is also the incontrovertible evidence that most people who play violent video games do not commit
such crimes.)
Nevertheless, cultural responses to the FPS are interesting for what they reveal about
our reactions to our own recreational technologies, a way of measuring our suspicions
about simulation and immersionthe dark side to the hyperbolic and exhilarating fantasies
of the virtual. This quintessentially state of the art genre, then, actually builds on
several trends that have characterized video games from the very start. The medium has
always relied on a certain first-personness to involve players in dynamic environments
whose moment-to-moment action depends on input from keyboard, mouse, or controller.
Taken with other aspects of digital entertainmentbranching narratives, iterative or
looping formal structures, and the adaptive behaviors known as artificial intelligence,
video games inherent responsiveness and distinctly personal address anchor a host of
criteriaimmersion, interactivity, presence, and flowby which we sort new media
from ancestors like print, film, and television.