Reality and Terror, the First-Person Shooter in Current Day Settings

Abstract

The first-person shooter (FPS), with its subjective view point and relentless action, gives its players an intense, often violent, virtual experience. There has been considerable debate about the effects of this mediated experience. Of particular concern is whether these games stage a propaganda campaign for the interests of governments and the military-industrial complex. Some fear that these games are leading us toward a perpetual state of war. However, such discussions have usually focussed on a very narrow selection from the FPS genre. This article examines a large sample, over 160 individual titles, of FPSs with a contemporary setting. The enemies presented by these games are analyzed and found to be far wider than a narrow examination of games based on topical conflicts would suggest, being instead inspired by a range of political, cultural, and literary sources. Any analysis of FPS games needs to take this diversity into account.

Establishing Video Game Genres Using Data-Driven Modeling and Product Databases

“…Klevjer (2005) points out that there is very little research that would generalize on the typical characteristics of game categories in comparison to each other. A look at recent textual and empirical research on video game genres confirms this assertion: The bulk of the studies concentrate on analyzing a single genre (e.g., Black, 2012;Carter, Gibbs, & Harrop, 2014;Chess, 2014;Gillespie & Crouse, 2012;Goetz, 2012;Hitchens, Patrickson, & Young, 2014;Lennon, 2010;MacCallum-Stewart, 2010;Paavilainen, Hamari, Stenros, & Kinnunen, 2013;Patterson, 2014;Thin, Hansen, & McEachen, 2011). Therefore, this body of work has not so far taken on the task of finding ways to assign genre to a large corpus of games but has concentrated on analyzing games typical to each genre more or less in isolation.…”

The politics of consuming war: video games, the military-entertainment complex and the spectacle of violence

“…As computer processing power increased and the associated costs declined, we see, by the 1990s, the rise of the video gaming market as we know it today and as each new international security threat and conflict broke out, so it was re-imaged and re-imagined on the computer screen for consumer pleasure, with shorter and shorter lead times such that real-war and consumer-war became increasingly blurred. For example, the first Gulf War of 1991, often dubbed the first video game war, was quickly rendered into pixelated pleasure through games such as Sega's Desert Strike (1992), which was released just one year after those events and became the publisher's biggest selling game to date, spending several months in the best-seller charts (Hitchens et al 2014). Perhaps the most extreme example of the blurring of boundaries between real war and virtual war is the online game, Kuma/War.…”

“…First released in 2004, the game is regularly updated with new missions that reflect real world events. Thus, in 2011, less than a week after the killing of Osama Bin Laden by US Navy Seals in Pakistan, gamers were able to 'relive' the experience in Episode 107 of the game, called 'Osama 2011' (Hitchens et al 2014). In 2013, episode 108 Fall of Sirte, included the death of Muammar Gaddafi.…”

Ambivalent Violence in Contemporary Game Design

“…To give a few key examples relevant to this discussion, Bertozzi’s (2014) analysis of “shooting games” identifies a number of “positive potentialities,” from the capacity to foster strategic thinking, to the increasing tendency of game designers to confront players with moral choice. Bioshock has been the focus of much work, most notably Aldred and Greenspan’s (2011) discussion of the game’s “ambivalence toward technology” and Hocking’s (2009) critique of its “ludonarrative dissonance.” Also, Hitchens, Patrickson, and Young (2013) provide a wide-ranging survey of the FPS in order to highlight the often overlooked diversity of narrative contexts in this enduringly popular yet much maligned genre. However, the tendency in such studies is to view violent gameplay as a basic setting in which other, more worthwhile aspects of design are seen to emerge.…”