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.