The Ontology of the First Person Shooter (FPS) Part 1 – Infancy

Why has the FPS dominated gaming discourse? Some of the biggest names in the gaming business, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, all of these have had incredible impact on game design and even the gaming business. Upcoming games including Titanfall, Bungie’s Destiny, and even the Thief reboot all feature this first person perspective as a primary feature and selling point. As some of you may know, it was not always like this. If we travel back in history to the 16-bit era, what we saw there was not the proliferation of shooters, but of adventure games that either had shooting involved as a combat mechanic, or games that didn’t feature shooting at all but were heavy on platforming or turn-based RPG systems.

To explore properly why the FPS has dominated gaming culture for years now, we need to go back into the past and understand what patterns were emerging and how the FPS contrasted to what was happening in gaming elsewhere.

Ancient History – Space

For a long time, there had been a constant back and forth in gaming between all sorts of different genres. Nintendo had for the most part, dominated its platforms with top quality adventure games and platformers. They sold well and for many people, it was an easy thing to pick up and play. Gaming was primarily about how game designers designed a physical space in their games, and how players navigated that physical space through their own mental space. It’s safe to say that platformers had been the default expression of space in games in the 8 bit and 16-bit era. Which is to say, the easiest way to express space in a game design sense, was to not only make space as a visual feature(platforms, skies, grass, pitholes, spikes) but that the visual style of your game was also its core gaming mechanic. In platformers, the visual expression of space is vital to your understanding of the game, as you learn what jumps you can make and when you have to make them.

This is where space and spacing matters the most. Judge how far you can jump!

The expansion of space became even more pronounced when games starting including maps, or either separate levels that had their own different qualities. Suddenly you could not only move from left to right, but up and down as well.

The only problem is that this space was externalised. As the player, you did not directly experience the space. Your only way to experience space was through the control of a character. Early game design had the majority of games feature a controllable character which you followed visually through the game’s level. This character had a certain appearance, abilities and personality. This opened up an interesting phenomenon in gamers that was to grow both players and game designers alike.

Gamer projection

16-bit era games saw the growth of characterisation in gaming. Characterisation is when you fictionalise the texture of your game to the point where your characters start gaining their own personalities. Characterisation allows empathy from the player. It lets players relate to what is happening on screen. What happened with the era of platformers and RPGs is that gamers related to the screen vicariously. They only related to their characters. The characters represented a part of the player, but never was the player involved directly in the experience of space. Players pressed buttons, but it was the characters who did the actions, not the player.

These are all characters that are external to your perceptive reality. You relate to them, and maybe they represent part of you, but in the end you are looking at something external to yourself.

We can call this phenomenon projection. All this means is that you as the player, are projecting your will and personality into what is happening on screen. But what is happening is that your projection of yourself is landing into a container that is represented by the character on screen. What this meant in ontological terms, is that there was a barrier between the experience of the player, and the expression of character and space. But for those players back in the 16-bit and 8-bit era who did not experience a whole FPS experience (they may have experienced the first person perspective, but not with the same richness that platformers were currently affording), they simply didn’t know any better. For many game players and designers, this externalised representation of space and character was all we had. That is of course, when the gates were blown wide open.

Early FPS

Id software have often been hailed as “the father of FPS.” While I think if id software didn’t do what they had done, someone else would’ve come along and done it anyway. But either way, what they did for their time was extraordinary.

The very first prerequisite of an FPS is 3D space. This doesn’t have to be strictly 3D. Id had found a way to draw 2D sprites onto a screen that would mimic 3D space. The keyword is that it mimicked 3D space and was not actually true 3D. What this proves is that in the earlier eras of gaming, the creation of FPS was largely restricted by technology.  We’ll talk about technology later. First let’s have a look at Wolfenstein and Doom.

Your eyes. Your viewpoint. Your mental space.

This is a transformation of the experience of space. Instead of controlling a character, you are the character. You experience everything through his own eyes. When you turn or move the character, you no longer have an external character as a reference point for space, but rather your own spatial awareness. Through imagination, visualisation and memory, you navigate the space as if you were walking in it yourself.

What’s interesting is the decision game design wise to include the face of the character as part of the display of the game. Maybe the designers felt that simply having a gun on screen didn’t convey the feeling of the character enough, or that there wasn’t enough information. They threw this away later with Quake.

For its time, it was an incredible feeling. Maybe it was to do with my age, but I often felt scared while playing Wolfenstein and certainly while playing Doom. This is also another way of game designers taking advantage of form. If you think about first person perspective, although you can see in front of you more than ever before, your horizontal viewpoint is restricted. What was done with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake was that the game had horror elements. The environments were extremely claustrophobic and enemies could be anywhere. Level design however, followed platformers where there were lifts, keycards, locked doors, and hidden pathways and rooms to find and explore. It often felt like you were navigating a maze whilst simultaneously killing enemies and trying to stay alive as much as possible.

The issue of Power

Glorification of violence? Is this what we have to do in order to feel powerful?

Quake in particular was pushing the boundries. It moved into true 3D, utilising polygons and true 3D environments. The game was gory like its predecessors but played with horror in a kind of gothic, industrial style. It makes sense initially. The FPS was of course, primarily about killing. Traditionally in games, killing was not really glorified. You simply made some non-human characters disappear in a cartoony, sterile way. Unless you’re shooting targets, FPS games default to killing. When you combine glorified killing with a first person perspective, suddenly power, and the feeling of being powerful becomes significant. These were contained in games before it, where power became commodified, we talk about “power ups” and the invincibility star in Mario are good examples. But in FPS games, power becomes an emotional issue ; a state of being in and of itself,  either through the use of feeling powerful through violence (blood/dismemberment) or the use of feeling powerless (shooting a boss or being surrounded). The clever game designers knew how to juggle between these two states and effectively play tug of war with the player’s mental state. While the commodities of power in 3^rd person games (power ups) are externalised (represented by a controlled character) , power in 1^st person games trickles down into the gamer’s mental space much more immediately, much more potently. Every weapon is a power up in a way, and unless you ran out of ammo, you always had a way to directly impose your feeling of power onto the game. This produced a cathartic effect. We were able to enact brutal violence on these enemies and feel a sense of relief and empowerment for each enemy we disintegrated.

Cartharsis : The purification of emotions

The ontological relationship between player and game, between game and designer, and between player and game designer was still in its infancy. What we mostly see is an arcade style culture of instant gratification. Not only must the game be incredibly fast paced with heavy emphasis on violence, the player has to enjoy the physical sensation of pressing a button and having several layers of consequences to it. You press a button, your gun fires, you hit or miss, you have one less bullet, you must consider reloads, you must consider overall ammunition. All of these consequences happened with the press of one button. What was holding the FPS back from further evolution was technology. It wasn’t until we saw 3D shooters became widespread and when the hardware available matured that the game designers began to experiment and grow up their own way, taking the players along with them.

Why Flappy Bird is brilliant : Case Study

A game that rocketed to the top of app store and google play store in a few days left many people infuriated and entertained, often weirdly at the same time.

For those that aren’t aware, Flappy Bird is a mobile game where you control a bird that flies as you tap the phone screen. Don’t tap at all and the bird will fall to the floor in 0.25 seconds and it’s game over. The game is incredibly similar (one could say ripped off) of Super Mario Bros, and even features identical “green pipes” to the Mario Games.

Where have we seen these pipes before?

1. Simplicity of design – play by doing

The game features an easily recognisable 8-bit style that brings back memories of older games. When you load up the game, you are greeted with only one instruction “tap.” The game does not tell you to tap more than once, infact many people tapped once and found that their bird instantly hit the floor with a splat. From the very first few seconds of the game, you learn the consequence of doing things or not doing things.

Just tap.

Now, the gravity of the game is incredibly harsh. Your bird will hit the ground almost instantly if you don’t keep tapping. But you only learn this by dying multiple times. What this does is teach the player that to stay afloat they have to tap steadily. The game has only one button – yet achieves so much with it. More importantly, it lets you learn by PLAYING. 

2. Humour and irony

Flappy Bird doesn’t really sound heroic or strong. And if you look at the physical appearance of our main character, he looks quite pathetic. Despite the fact that he/she is a bird, the wings are not emphasized at all in the art. Infact, it’s only the face, with the eyes and protruding lips that are emphasized, which tries to lead you to empathy. The only problem is with sound. The “flying” noise that the bird makes sounds like a feeble swipe in the wind.

The designer intentionally seems to be saying, “This is a bird that can’t fly.”

This is incredibly funny from a player perspective. When the bird hits the ground and dies, you hear a “punch to the face” sound that you often hear in cartoons. The bird doesn’t even really die, it just freezes there on the ground, looking bored. But these things aren’t done randomly, they’re done to enhance the irony of the game. It serves an important purpose for the actual design of the game. This is video game art at its best – looking good while actually providing gameplay hints/depth.

3. Bravery in game design/skill ceiling

Combine simplicity of design/controls with high skill ceilings. Skill ceilings simply refer to how much skill a player has to learn before they consider themselves a “master.” Although we love to feel powerful. it’s actually far more interesting for a game to be near impossible to master, because it gives us something to look forward to. What happens to people who have mastered a game? They lose interest. They’ve “beaten” it. There is no more gameplay left in it for them.

Flappy bird has a near vertical learning curve. The fast fall speeds coupled with the minimal height that the bird can actually jump means that getting past the pipes is a matter of learning precision, patience and rhythm. A lot of viral responses from Flappy Bird have comments such as “I hate Flappy Bird” and “This makes me want to kill myself.” What’s funny about those responses is they’re not literally true. We’re talking ironically. We hate dying over and over again, but yet we’re strangely drawn to the game by being stubborn and refusing to give up. This is extremely rare in games nowadays.

Under the guise of “accessibility” designers have been spoonfeeding their audience by either dumbing down games, excessive tutorials, drawn out beginning sequences and non existent difficulty curves/skill ceiling. Assassin’s Creed is one of the big offenders here, its “in depth” combat is nothing more than holding block and countering your attacker for an easy hit/kill. Final Fantasy 13 was another incredibly huge offender. You had to play about 10+ hours of the game in narrow corridors and “point A to point B” learning the combat system before the game finally puts you into a free exploration mode. What are designers so afraid of?

I love Flappy Bird because it is one of the few games where its difficulty is its selling point. It’s difficult but fair, which is always important. Some games have also been guilty of being overly difficult without any fair chances given to the player (think Ninja Gaiden series, which pulled some really nasty tricks on its players). It’s the perfect marriage of “easy to learn, hard to master” which I think is the golden ratio of game design.

4. Profitability.

There’s no escaping the fact that games are a commodity to be sold in bulk. It doesn’t matter if a game has brilliant game design, well written stories, excellent graphics and audio, if it isn’t financially viable, you can forget it. Flappy Bird was developed by a single person – this sounds almost as if we’re back in the 1980s! It’s in our interest as gamers and consumers that the games we love sell well, or at the very least, if they obtain “cult classic” status. If a game sells well, we’ll see more of it, which means more for us to play. There is an odd dichotomy in the industry today where you have the Hulking Titans of game design, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, and so on – these huge studios with huge budgets and incredible staff power and resources to craft AAA titles. But this doesn’t reflect the core reality because on the other end you have the small indie developers with small budgets and big ideas. Some incredible indie games came out this generation. (Minecraft, Bastion, Gone Home to name a few). So you’re either playing something with huge production values (rare) or you’re trying out known or unknown indie games made by a few people; and that’s where the true bulk of game designers lie.

What this last decade has shown us is that gamers know the difference between value and price. Free to play games have exploded and micro transactions are becoming hard to ignore. Flappy Bird is part of that free to play legacy. Although now there are adverts when you play, it does not cover the screen or interrupt the gameplay in any way. Companies have to figure out how they can exploit a free to play system without sacrificing the game’s integrity. Ridiculous measures such as limiting inventory space, how much money you can spend, how often you can craft things are all cardinal sins in game design because it shifts the focus onto pay to win.

My curiosity goes out to the game’s maker, Dong Nguyen. With all of this money that he’s getting, where will he turn to next? He could just fade into obscurity having made that one important hit – or he could come up with a sequel and play it safe. Who knows.

Either way, a game’s likeliness to sell is going to affect its future and we are all deeply implied in this. You could even say money is the hidden subtext of gaming interaction.

5. Conclusion

Flappy Bird is a simply designed, well executed, satisfying piece of software that demonstrates how people becoming frustrated and learning from their mistakes isn’t a bad thing. It is full of charm and is hilarious to watch other people playing it. It may not be a God of War or a Bioshock or a Zelda, but these micro-games are going to form the edifice on which the heavier games will stand on – if they continue to exist.

The Grid.

Here are some summaries of game theory and game design. Click to zoom in.

1. Games are art

We could argue forever about what art and what isn’t. But to boil the debate down to its essence, art is about using representation in a creative way in order to make yourself, or someone else feel a certain way. All the different aspects of a game (Graphics, music/audio, story elements, architecture/level design, voice acting, narrative, and so on) are artforms in themselves. Games combine elements from fine art, film, literature, music, and technology in order to make a unified coherent whole. Anyone who says games isn’t art is missing the glaringly obvious point that the components of games are bits and pieces of art in themselves.

2. Good game design is about teaching without a word.

We’ll go into depths about this later. But what is the first thing that you do when starting a game? You learn its controls. You learn its world. You learn the logic, what is permissible and what isn’t. You find out about how to combine different controls together to create effects. In some games, learning patterns is a requirement. All of this learning has to effectively be done through experience of playing the game itself. Unfortunately, game designers seem to have forgotten about the power of experience and experimentation in teaching a player how to play their game. The best way to learn is to do it! Not go through hours of tutorials and text just to gain an understanding. The best games make learning their world not feel like learning at all and instead they make it feel like a natural extension of your will.

3. Press X to escape reality.

Games simulate reality. Other games create their own realities. The “suspension of disbelief” in films, or devices such as the fourth wall in theatre, literature and so on. These are all things to maintain the illusion of reality and experience. Games take this a step further. They create a kind of trance. They create a temporal space. In games it isn’t “the suspension of disbelief” but the opposite, “the creation of belief.”

4. A better word for player would be controller

What art form has control as the central part of the viewer experience? When you look at a painting, read a book, or watch a film, you passively receive the image into your mind. In some senses, you control your reaction to these mediums, but within gaming, the element of control is so vital and so central to the experience that it becomes an active process. One of the great words of our 21st century is interactivity. You aren’t a passive observer, you are the controller of the game’s reality. This virtual element of response, of instant gratification, of manipulated time is what makes games unique in comparison to other traditional art forms.

5. Imagine a 12 hour film where you essentially become God.

This is where games have more in common with books than anything. Films are a slave to a time limit. We may see 3 hour films, or series and boxsets that deliver a 12-24 hour experience in one hour chunks. Books inherently have more longevity because of content. Games can be anywhere from a few seconds to hundreds of hours. And within this time, whether short or long, you become a God like figure in the sense that you control life and death of characters, their fates, in some cases you control their sense of morality. Games feature control on the “micro” level (pressing buttons to perform an action) and “macro” control (controlling the flow of the game, objectives, narrative choices). When we play, we transcend.

6. Games as a state of being.

When playing a game, you enter a mentally created space that dampens the sense of time passing, your own thoughts, and even your behaviour towards others. This is not as different to films for example, but rather than dissolve into the anonymous mass of “the audience” a gamer becomes an individual. They assume the role of a character, like an actor on stage. They behave in ways that fulfils their fantasies or behave in ways that they wouldn’t normally do in reality. Obvious examples of the GTA series with people becoming senseless drivers, stealing and killing people as they wish. RPG’s make players assume the role of someone or something. In essence, the “being” of a game is personal, reactive and dynamic. It is constantly changing according to what we do and what variables the designers choose to put. More analysis on this later.

So those were some thoughts to get the ball rolling in terms of how we can think about games in an intelligent way. To take them more seriously is to appreciate the work and the craftsmanship of the product.

Introduction.

Games have widely been regarded as entertainment devices. That is to say, you plug it in, you have a good time, you take it out and then you get back to work. Between those processes, a lot of people have argued that there isn’t much thought involved. But for something so emotionally involving, something that takes years to create, and being one of the largest industries in entertainment, it can’t simply be thoughtless. I argue that there is a lot of thought involved – but like a hidden stage or item, it’s done in such a way where it emotionally pushes you first.

This is a blog that is dedicated to the analysis and discussion of video games. If you are looking for detailed discussions about games, game design and the more philosophical side of games, this is the place.

Why has this image captured us?

Is it really that simple though? Our emotions and our thinking is constantly being updated and shifted while we watch a film, watch a sports game, or while we’re in class or reading books. I want to unravel that process that causes us to press buttons with passion. My argument is that it isn’t that simple and we can reverse engineer, or deconstruct our gaming experiences and our perceptions . 

In some specific posts, we’ll deal with a case study, a particular game and the way it works. Other posts we’ll go more broadly into genres, styles, content using many different examples. Gaming is representation. It is art. It is more involved than you think.