First Person Shooter Stories Matter: Modern Warfare 3
Military first person shooters are only allowed to be so smart by the marketplace, but that doesn't mean they have to be, or are, stupid by default
This may be the most self-indulgent thing I've written in a long time, but I really care about first person shooters, and I can't stand it when they aren't taken seriously whether it's by developers, critics, or fans. First person shooters do not have to be exercises in meatheadedness. Valve and Irrational Games have proven that first person shooters are perfectly valid vehicles for solid narrative.
The military-FPS sub-genre takes a beating by critics for playing host to stupid stories, and that grates on me as well. Developers have tried to plan for more serious mil-FPS tales and had their projects altered or shut down (look up Six Days in Fallujah). Attempts at serious consideration of the nature of war in mil-FPS games don't seem viable in the marketplace for the time being. Mil-FPS games are therefore limited either to historical reference, or Tom Clancy-esque plotlines.
The Call of Duty franchise has done the latter quite well since the fourth game in the series, and considering all the talk I hear from video game journalists and pundits about wanting more criticism in their game reviews, I’m plenty disappointed that no one called out Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s campaign for the banal exercise in stupidity that it was.
I like my peanut butter and my zombies chunky
Bitmob community writer Jonas Jurgens had an article promoted today entitled "Dead Island and indiscriminate violence." Jurgens talks about how he is made to feel uncomfortable by video games which make gore and violence the focal point of the design.
The kind of outrageous video game gore and violence that Jurgens writes about serves me as a release. It's an opportunity to do something which is verboten in civilized society, and therefore has an innate attractiveness like many other taboos. The virtuality of the experience makes it acceptable, or even humorous, which is one of the points Leigh Alexander makes in her Gamasutra opinion piece "On Making Game Violence Work."