[In my latest piece on Motherboard, I draw from Simon Carless’ recent retrospective critique of Modern Warfare 2 to briefly illustrate what’s right and wrong with modern shooting games, and why they’re all still just permutations of a simple mathematical formula]
With all their fanfare, record-breaking sales numbers and accompanying controversy, it’s interesting to ponder what exactly, if anything, has really changed about shooting games in the two decades and change since videogames began to appear in arcades, pizza joints and living rooms across the globe.
According to IGF founder Simon Carless in a recent article, the answer is ‘fundamentally, not much.’ When examining last year’s action blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Carless reveals some striking parallels that make modern shooting games seem confused; a mixed bag of painted set pieces tied together only by the barrel of a virtual gun.
“Beneath the bombast, it has everything in common with gaming’s proto-shooter Space Invaders. You take cover behind walls before peeking out to shoot aliens. Twenty-two years ago the aliens were line-dancing extra terrestrials. In 2009 they were Afghans. The metaphor changed, but the principle remains the same: avoid missing headshot for high score.”
There is a simple explanation for this: Since the earliest days of interactive entertainment, the most common principle to express within a videogame has been the elimination of elements on the screen. Not because we are a horrible and violent race of large-brained mammals who use entertainment to train our young to kill, but because the creation and ‘canceling out’ of something on a screen was one of the simplest operations one could program on an early computer.
