FPSes are neither dumb nor simplistic, even if you want them to be.

[DocSeuss]

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Ten posts to reply to. Let's go!

 

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I don't see how you can say "FPS's are neither dumb nor simplistic". The genre itself has no special protection from dumbness or simplicity. Simplistic, dumb shooters are both simplistic and dumb. Just like simplistic dumb rpg's are.

 

Of course. There are certainly dumb, simplistic FPSes out there. I was talking about the genre whole, and arguing against the point of view that was wonderfully illustrated by Saturnine Tenshi's completely idiotic statement (that I'll be quoting in a second). The idea that "this has a simple mechanic and no learning curve, thus, it is stupid," is utterly foolish and completely full of shit.

 

There are a great many FPS's made these days, as a result there are more simplistic dumb shooters than there are simplistic dumb RPG's even if the % is the same.

 

There are a great many games made these days, not just FPSes. I assume that you're suggesting here that the ratio of great to bad games may be the same, but there's a larger number of FPSes, which means that there are larger numbers of FPSes and RPGs, correct? That certainly makes sense, at least, if you're under the misapprehension that there are more FPSes released than most other genres, which isn't necessarily true.

 

I think I said this earlier, but more Final Fantasy games have been released since FFXIII than there have been modern military FPSes. I'll have to finish going over my numbers, but there may actually be more Final Fantasy games this generation than there are AAA FPSes. They're certainly not as common as you seem to think--just advertised more frequently.

 

It should also be borne in mind that with so many shooters, and the average length of the shooter being far less than an rpg, ideas quickly become stale, while the rpg tends to take longer to build up the mechanics and they often change between iterations.

 

If the ideas become stale, then why have all three Halo games released this generation (which are all different; it's just more subtle) dominated the sales charts? Why is Call of Duty making more money than Avatar within a month of each new title's release? I would argue that they aren't stale.

 

The length of game has absolutely nothing to do with staleness and everything to do with the fact that RPG levels are much, much easier to create than FPS levels, because elements like navigating the 3D environment and scripted events and enemy AI are all significantly less complex. Go find a single level in Dragon Age Origins, for instance, that's anywhere near as intricately designed as a level in Bulletstorm.

 

That kind of content generation takes time (and FPSes don't have grind; they have multiplayer, and the multiplayer component of an FPS can easily eat up more time than an RPG ever could). RPGs don't need that level of design effort.

 

Take for example the FF series where the combat mechanics change greatly from game to game, while Halo has kept the same weapons, enemies, tactics and so forth throughout the 3/4 games in the series. In Halo you used plasma weapons to take down Elite shields, then projectiles to finish them off. You do the same in Halo 3.

 

Well, that's certainly one way to do it, but the point of the game was that you could do it a myriad of ways. My personal preference is to take out Elites with a needler in Halo 3/Reach, while in Combat Evolved my weapon of choice was a shotgun or AR to the face and a bashing for good measure.

 

FPS are seen as dumb because the core mechanics don't change from game to game, there's no (or little) learning curve in a new game. In RPG's the learning curve is more obvious as you start weak and increase from there. You can't start a lvl 1 in an RPG and headshot everything, you can in an FPS.

 

That's not a learning curve, that's a difficulty curve.

 

In both RPGs and FPSes, there's a difficulty curve. In the RPG, it's numerically defined: a level 25 guy is clearly stronger than a level 15 guy. The FPS removes this abstraction and just offers increasingly strong enemies throughout the game. Halo, for instance, gave you increased ranks of Covenant through much of the game, then delivered the Flood, resulting in a sudden increase in difficulty and change in playstyle, and when you got back to fighting the covenant, you were fighting guys with black armor--the toughest Covenant forces in the game. On top of that, as you progressed through the game, the enemies were less likely to use weapons like the plasma pistol and more likely to use weapons like the fuel rod gun.

 

It's there in FPSes, and it's disingenous of you to claim that FPSes haven't got that curve.

 

If you'd actually read the link in the original post, you'd have noticed that I covered this.

 

You're basically saying that "they're not seen as smart because they're really easy to learn." Yeah. I dealt with that already. I wish people would read.

 

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It seems to me like you're approaching this topic from a myopic view. At first, you seem to temper it with mention of playing role-playing titles while watching television. Then I read quotes like "Again, I think FPSes are under harsher criticism than RPGs in this regard." These things tell me you are removed from a critical part of your argument: the other side. Role-playing affairs receive ample criticism.

 

As someone who got into gaming through the RPGs and someone who has actually designed a few functioning RPGs, some of which are still around, I resent that remark.

 

It's frustrating to me that you start off saying "at first..." and proceed to talk about me in this thread, rather than in the blog post that set this whole thing off, so maybe you should shut up, read that first and come back in with fresh eyes. Or don't, because I'm going to be tweaking it to make some stuff more clear to people.

 

That stuff is this: if you go around looking at previews for various games, you'll discover a rather frequent complaint about FPSes: they're common, stupid, generic, and unoriginal games. This complaint is often attached to a remark about how RPGs or Action Adventure games are not, or it's said by people who often champion RPGs elsewhere.

 

I am interested in addressing that complaint. I'm not here to say "boo, everything you like sucks, FPSes are the best." I'm simply stating that calling FPSes puerile, stupid things is as intelligent as shitting in your pants and eating them.

 

Additionally, you don't seem to touch titles like Digital Devil Saga, the bountiful strategy RPGs that will friggin' garrote anyone who disregards strategy or strategy games as a whole.

 

See, you're looking at this backwards.

 

First-person shooters are largely dumb, simplistic things. Deal with it.

 

...no. They aren't. Go read the blog post and get back to me. Just because they're easy to learn doesn't mean in any way that they're dumb or simplistic. They're requiring a different intelligence of your brain. Seriously, don't enter a discussion without bothering to read what started the discussion.

 

That doesn't make them bad games. They're created chiefly for the shoot-fuck-kill and forget everything else market, and that's fine. I like it; they like it. Let's not fool ourselves. It is what it is.

 

I'm not trying to claim any genre, especially those mentioned in counter-argument, is faultless. They can all be condemned in some "fatal" way. What is ultimately important is whether or not you enjoy a video game. Not some arbitrary intelligence rating.

 

I don't want to condemn genres. I merely want to suggest that FPSes are not as dumb as people seem to think they are. I don't give a shit whether you don't enjoy FPSes or not--the entire point of the discussion was to say "hey, listen, if you don't like it, that's okay, but you've got absolutely no ground to argue that it's stupid."

 

Let me make this clear: I was out to say "people who are insulting FPSes, please stop, because they're not as dumb as you seem to think. Nowhere in there was I intending to insult other genres. I pick on RPGs the most because they're often held up against FPSes as more intelligent, when they're really not. Both genres are on roughly the same grounding.

 

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RPGs had their turn now FPS get their shot.

 

The Department of Punology has decreed that you will be punished.

 

Yes.

 

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Saying FPS are dumb is like saying Shmups are dumb. Neither require much intellect and rely on your reflexes and wits. Honestly I'd say shmups have better story-lines most of the time.

 

Can you name any game that truly requires much intellect? Because strategy games aside, I certainly can't. I seriously have no idea how I'm going to beat this level of RUSE. I think I just ragequit it.

 

Actually, as I think about it, here are a few games that taxed me: Human Revolution did, seeing as how it used gesticulation and facial expressions for conversation. That discussion system was awesome. STALKER did, because it made me plan for survival. It remains, to this day, the only game where I honestly had to think about my inventory because of the limitations imposed on me by the game. SWAT 4 required a lot of tactical planning to ace the missions.

 

You know what? All of those games, the ones that I truly found intellectually stimulating, are FPSes.

 

Other games, like RPGs (and I don't say this to hate on RPGs; I love them to death. It's just that most people claim that RPGs are the most cerebral games out there, and as a former designer, I have to say that this is bullshit.), honestly don't require that much from me unless they're real-time with a lot of characters, like Dragon Age or something.

 

Generally, though, most games do not really require that much intelligence.

 

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I don't play FPS games because I got bored of them when Half Life came out. Really, the genre has shot its load. It's not fun to me. I could go and say that it's the genre for man-babies who do nothing but eat Slim Jims and drink Mountain Dew all day but that's just fueling a stereotype. I don't like FPS so I don't buy them. If you like them, then buy them and leave my JRPGs and platformers alone.

 

...other than the "shot its load" bit, which, judging by the wide variety of FPSes I've played over the past couple of years, isn't true, I can totally respect that you don't enjoy the genre. If it's not your thing, it's not your thing. I don't really like pixel hunting games, but I don't go around calling the genre fucking stupid.

 

Again, that's my point. The blog post was addressed to the people who insult games for no good reason, nothing more, nothing less.

 

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I like FPSes - somewhat. There's some I like (Mass Effect series, TF2, Killing Floor, Space Marine), and some I detest (CoD and BF. In my defense, I loved BF2 and 2142, but all the Bad Company stuff is awful). You could classify Deus Ex as a RPG/FPS I suppose, but the best parts of that game involved not shooting at all.

 

Mass Effect is a TPS and Space Marine is a cross between action and TPS... a first person shooter is where you're looking through the camera. It's like in literature: first person is "I do" and third person is "he does."

 

I think most FPSes are called dumb or simplistic because... well, they are. In campaigns, it's essentially going from Point A to Point B and killing enemies that spawn at pre-determined spots. In multiplayer, it's fulfilling a single objective, like "get more points/kills than the other team" or "take this thing from the other guys", and TF2 largely seems like the only one to have broken out of that, if only because of how mod-friendly it can be. Try finding prophunt or dodgeball in another game. But that's actually okay! That's what makes them so accessible to so many people. If you've played one shooter, you've essentially played them all - you might miss some of the little tricks specific to each game, but for the most part, you already know what you're doing.

 

But simple mechanics (I wrote a whole section on how simple is not simplistic, ffs. Did no one read the actual blog post?) are... well, the FPS is a lot more like chess. You're using spatial intelligence to play FPSes, rather than logical/mathematical that you do in other games.

 

That's funny Battra because I'm the exact opposite. I can't play JRPGs or platformers anymore because I feel like they're always the same thing over and over. I know FPS games are the same thing over and over too but for whatever reason I still find them fun. Go figure. Anything that is popular will be criticized and the level of the criticism is directly proportional to the popularity of said thing. Case in point would be Twilight. Nobody cared until the movies came out. I think it has to do a bit with other people discussing things you're uninterested in. The more people talk about Halo around you when you are disinterested in Halo makes you resent Halo all the more.

 

That's a pretty good summary of it. My blog post (damn, it's becoming a recurring theme in this post) was basically saying "look, here's the data, actual psychology, etc etc, that shows that FPSes aren't stupid, so please stop insulting them, because you don't have a leg to stand on."

 

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Man, a lot of talking here. Unfortunately, I am wasted from shifting bricks around since 8:30 this morning (!) and had to skim a lot of it.

 

I read that as shitting bricks.

 

It may sound like fanboyism but I think BioWare know their audience and write to them. I also like to think there is a separation between story and story-telling. Stories are easy to identify but the medium of games opens up the way they're told.

 

I wish that was true, but Bioware actually doesn't. They know their sycophants and write for them. For instance, when Dragon Age 2 sold like crap (like... Dead Island sold better than Dragon Age 2; a new IP from an unknown developer with a shit ton of bugs was more appealing to people than a Bioware game) and got a lot of negative reviews, Bioware called it a 4chan raid and totally defended it. Having spent most of the day on 4chan that day (not really sure why...), I can say I don't remember seeing one. People just honestly hated the game.

 

Some insider thing I was reading the other day said that basically, the guys running Bioware feel entitled because of all the praise they've got. They expect better sales than they have previously gotten, which is why Mass Effect 2 was targeted at the Call of Duty crowd (and failed miserably in those terms, because the Call of Duty crowd is kind of a multiplayer crowd; it still sold well). Plus, they hire writers like Jennifer Hepler who don't even care about playing games. Brent Knowles, the lead designer of Dragon Age Origins who quit because of Dragon Age 2, said that Bioware began hiring people who didn't care about games a long time ago (did you know they're the guys who invented Project $10 for EA? Bioware Social Network is a large part of the reason we have Origin as it is now. Basically, it's because of them that the amazing, Mirror's Edge-making EA of 2010 is now the money grubbing bastards that they are. Bioware ruined EA, as hard as that is to believe), and heavily implied in an email to me that because of what Bioware became, he wouldn't be making games again.

 

Ever.

 

Bioware's honestly just writing to an ever-shrinking group of people who will praise them no matter what they do, and it's starting to bite them in the ass.

 

I did write a whole massive article on ways Mass Effect could've been improved (mostly focusing on 2) but I think BioWare set out to tell a silly space opera story where you can pick and choose your favourite party members and romance whichever one you want (well, most of them) while going off to shoot the baddies and save the galaxy. It is pure empowerment and unashamedly so.

 

I would like to read this article!

 

Also, if they set out to tell a silly space opera story, then why do they take the series so seriously, and talk about how it's got this great legacy from movies like Aliens (wat.)? I think they honestly believe that it's good. So do a lot of other people. The industry at large takes this derivative, unoriginal games using the exact same character archetypes as previous Bioware games that pulls scenes from things like Star Trek 2009, and says "wow. Game of the Year, guys. This was superb. It had amazing writing! Blah Blah Blah!"

 

Nothing about the game says "I'm a silly space opera story!" the way a film like Pirates of the Caribbean says "I'm a silly pirate movie!" It's taken seriously by everyone in gaming... and makes a good argument for why people say games aren't art. It's too trite.

 

I will say, I absolutely agree on the Deus Ex: Human Revolution conversation thing, DocSeuss. I loved that, although I have been reading that there seem to be many 'ways' through them (besides the augment for it). I would love to see a bit more of the conversational stuff from The Witcher 2 as well; where people are putting questions to you. Even if I can't recall whether what information you choose to reveal does affect anything I think that'd be an interesting element to include.

 

That's what's so fascinating to me: I forgot to purchase the conversation aug and managed to "beat" a conversation purely by reading the guy's actions. That was really cool. I've never actually felt invested in a conversation before. I never had to work for a result like that in a game.

 

And also, I think a lot of people get the impression you have some real beef with a lot of games, even if that's not the case. It's great that you're passionate about things and you're an educated guy, but I think a little tact helps. There's a way of making a point without making an enemy, that's all.

 

When I look at my blog posts, I don't see an absence of tact anywhere. I do realize here that I've been less tactful, and that's in part due to an infuriating week (weeklong headache that keeps trying to go migraine on me, sleeping funny and messing up my back so it hurts to move my arms, not having any food in the house to eat, being told that I won't be getting a birthday present I want because it has a picture of a snake on it, being told I am going to my mom's favorite restaraunt for breakfast on my birthday, even though that restaraunt isn't a place I can eat many foods at due to food allergies which I was recently diagnosed with, no ice cream because I have to avoid milk until November...) and to a bunch of people utterly failing to read the source material and seemingly basing their entire arguments on the thread title.

 

What's the point of writing a dissertation on why FPSes are disarmingly simple and why people should do them the courtesy of not being insulting when nobody wants to read it? So that's frustrating too.

 

You, I like. You actually had relevant things to say.

 

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From what I've seen, some of the conversations in DX:HR are actually slightly randomized. For instance,

 

I failed the conversation with Hugh Darrow towards the end, so I reloaded an earlier save and tried again. Only thing was, it was different. I had to completely rethink my choices, instead of simply going "Those didn't work, I'll use this instead".

 

Huh. I hadn't noticed that. I replayed a conversation about five times once to get the result I wanted, and I could have sworn it was different than when I'd beaten it previously, but I thought that was just me.

 

So walkthroughs for some of the conversations actually won't work for everyone. Also, I actually LIKE that I can "fail" conversations. I like that I have to actually pay attention and tell the other person what they want to hear.

 

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that makes Human Revolution a step up in games design. It really is one of the best RPGs I've ever played because it removes a few more layers of abstraction between game and gamer. It lets me be Adam Jensen that much more.

 

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A possible reason for this stance is the fact that the market is saturated with FPSs. The genre has kinda been swung around like a dead cat, thus making it an easy target for hate.

 

I've lost track how many times I or someone else have uttered the phrase "Ugh, not another WWII shooter."

 

No it isn't.

 

You may think it's saturated, because they're heavily marketed, but until 2008, we really didn't have that many FPSes. In fact, as I've said previously, if I remember the numbers right, there have been more Final Fantasy games released since FFXIII than there have been modern military FPSes of the grey and brown variety.

 

There are certainly people who complain "ugh, not another WWII shooter." There are also people who complain "ugh, not another RPG with androgenous girlymen." Just because you've heard the complaint doesn't exactly mean it's true. There have been, this generation, EIGHT brown and grey regenerating health modern military FPSes. Eight. That's it. That's an average of less than two a year every year since 2005. That's really not that much in terms of the dozens of action or sports games that come out every year.

 

Well, then, because Dragon Age is generally accepted to be good storytelling... Wouldn't that make you wrong?

 

No, it would not. Here's why:

 

You're looking at a small subset of people... gamers. Within certain subsets of people, you'll find a lot of things that are totally loved. I mean, within a subset of Justin Bieber fandom, there are a lot of people who really like 'Baby.'

 

You've got to look at a bigger picture than that, which is culture at large. Most game reviewers and critics aren't... really reviewers or critics. They don't have the necessary background to really write about good narrative and whatnot, because generally they're just bloggers or journalists. Very few of them have a background in film or literature that would equip them to discuss why a story is good, much less characterization or anything. Kieron Gillen is one of the few people who actually has the background required to criticize game writing. Look at Alan Wake: a metric shit ton of people criticized the writing, comparing it to Silent Hill 2. They failed to realize that the game wasn't even in the same genre (it's not survival horror in any way, shape, or form) and, worse yet, failed to realize that the game was written to be sort of this gestalt portrait of the psychological thriller genre, the way Max Payne was for crime noir storytelling. For them, "oh, he narrates and the dialog is a bit weird and it's dark and there are monsters, so I guess this is survival horror" was their thought process. That shows a heavy immaturity in the way game storytelling is received.

 

Also, people tend to like a thing more if they participate in it. On the whole, game writing is pretty bad. It's definitely well below other mediums. People who have been gaming for a long, long time would tell you that the proposal scene in Metal Gear Solid 4 was absolutely amazing. To someone who isn't a hardcore gamer, but instead has been involved in other mediums for quite some time, the scene looked like absolute shit, and it was. It only had meaning to the player who had participated in it. Outside of that experience, it holds little merit. On the flip side, I could show someone a sequence from, say, Leon/The Professional and most people would call it good storytelling.

 

This sort of brings us back to that original statement. Most gamers will say that certain games have storytelling. Most people, particularly those who were more involved with older, more mature mediums are more likely to say "um, that's derivative, those characters are two dimensional, that plot has little structure or pacing, that scene was cliche," and so on and so forth. By participating in a game, especially if you're not very big into all the other storytelling mediums (and as a guy with a big background in literature and film and a former job as a comic/film critic, I am a bit more qualified to comment than some guy who just likes to play games; I realize this sounds arrogant, but I've got qualifications that most people simply do not possess), you're more likely to be blinded to the failings of those games.

 

One part of the reason that game narrative doesn't really have many people qualified to discuss it is because academic discourse on game narrative doesn't actually exist. It's only just being birthed, while, in contrast, one can get a degree in literary or film criticism. I'm actually one of the people helping that birth--at my school, the department head has given me the okay to begin work on a course proposal for next semester (or perhaps the one after that; not sure about the deadlines yet; I've heard last week and mid-October) on a games narrative course.

[Hot Heart]

I would like to read this article!

 

I'm sure I linked it to you before, and you were going to link me yours when you were done.

 

http://pressxordie.com/2011/01/20/leading-the-shepard/

[DocSeuss]

So you did! I remember that.