Spray & Pray: The Ludonarrative Significance of First-Person Shooters
Video games have taken repeated beatings by the news media for ostensibly causing violence and morbid psychological behavior. The easiest target in this (misled) conversation is the presumably mindless genre of first-person shooters. As the logic goes, when players spend their time engaging in violent behavior – shooting enemies – their morals, values, and actions will be negatively interrupted and influenced by this content.
Perhaps the question of video games, violence, and causality is misunderstood; perhaps violent people with violent psychological tendencies seek out violent video games as an outlet of expression, rather than the supposition that video games produce violent psychology and therefore behavior.
According to Pew Research’s 2017 “Who Plays Video Games?” study, only 42% of gamers play within the shooter genre. This idea that violent people seek out violent games is also supported by Harvard Medical School’s 2010 study, “Violent video games and young people.” This study suggests that much of the research on violent video games relies on “measures to assess aggression that don’t correlate with real-world violence.” In other words, the violence in video games doesn’t translate into behavior. Finally, federal crime statistics in the United States indicate that serious violent crimes among youths have decreased since 1996, even as video game sales have exploded.
And so we must defer the question of causality to social psychologists and crime bureaus. What we can do, however, is investigate the game mechanics in first-person shooters, find out what makes them popular, and envision how the game mechanic can be used in non-violent ways. And then the question becomes, how can we give the general public a better impression about video games?
Maybe the problem is shooters as a genre, or as a game mechanic? After all, it seems that our current epidemic of gun violence specifically is what’s at stake in the question of whether video games produce violent behavior. But I’m convinced that the game mechanic of a gun isn’t precisely the issue either. Something is going on at a deeper level in society than the meager role that video games are playing.
Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
The Popularity of the FPS Genre
I used to play for a semi-professional Call of Duty team. This team formed in high school, with seven of my friends. On the forums, we called ourselves “The Knights of Columbus.” Don’t know why. I was on a team with friends who graduated in the top of their class. One such friend ended up touring in Russia, working for the US Secret Service. Two other friends became electrical engineers and now work and NASA and SpaceX, respectively. Another became a US Navy SEAL. Another is working on a creative writing career. Another became a doctor. And me? I write for Epilogue.
The point of bringing my former Call of Duty friends into this piece is to underscore how violent video games, even first-person shooters, do not cause violence. There is, generally speaking, no correlation. Young people, especially men, pick up these games out of camaraderie, which is to say that these games become a kind of test. These games aren’t about the violence, they’re about who can out-do who. Like any game, they’re about bragging rights, friendly competition, and developing one’s own sense of competence.
When my friends and I used to play Call of Duty, we would always do it on the phone. Somehow, we’d end up with all eight of us on one line, strategizing in real-time (as though mics didn’t exist). This nightly routine of post-homework virtual violence was a cathartic release that enabled something more important to happen: the development of friendship. I can’t say this about most video games, even the narrative-based ones that I spend all my time writing about.
Even playing first-person shooters alone can be a way to healthily step back from the stressful obligations in everyday life. Again, the violence is not the point. The point is being able to become competent at something that isn’t demanding, that isn’t an obligatory responsibility. It’s not out-of-place to suggest that being able to pick up first-person shooters is the same as picking up a novel before bed.
But, for those who aren’t yet convinced, for those who still persist that shooters as a genre are the problem, I’d ask a moment of open-mindedness. Let’s walk through two “shooters” that aren’t violent.
Non-Violent Shooters
First person shooters are not my favorite kind of game. Anyone who glances through my articles, podcasts, and game library will soon notice that I have a proclivity for the storytelling capacities of games rather than the instant gratification of multiplayer and team deathmatch. But it would be remiss to narrow-mindedly write off first person shooters or, worse, all video games based on the kind of pernicious behaviors that certain games require. Something important is happening within these first person shooters, even if you don’t see the importance while watching someone else play them.
Portal (2007)
Portal is a great example of how the first person shooter mechanic can avoid this confabulated and confused relationship that people (who don’t play video games themselves) mistakenly associate with gaming and violence. Portal is a clever, subtle, nuanced take on the otherwise cliched genre that largely desensitizes its players to the darker shadows of human nature. Video games don’t have to be violent, but they can certainly comment on human violence in a uniquely honest way that even books and film fail to capture, at times.
This game features a first person protagonist who wields a portal-producing gun. This gun looks more like a claw machine that grabs stuffed animals than a proper weapon. (An image that becomes more comical in the potato-powered gun from Portal 2.) But portals produced by the game’s gun brings wonky dimensions into physical relationship. As the name suggests, the gun creates portals between disparate locations. The player then must solve the level’s puzzles, either by object manipulation, or strategically placing portals to launch your character towards the destination.
The gun in Portal is not used for violence, although the portals can produce violent outcomes for the artificially intelligent and sometimes sentient robot creatures lurking throughout the game, ready to incinerate and riddle you with bullet holes. The game is, despite these realities, largely peaceful. The game is about finding solutions to otherwise violent problems, rather than producing them.
The gun in Portal is also unique in that it functions identically (on the controller) to most shooters in the genre, but yet the gun mechanically functions as a puzzle-solving device. It’s almost as though the “gun” is something like a multitool, like a survival kit. The gun literally opens new doors that weren’t there before. It’s just up to the player to open their minds enough to find the doors, no violence involved.
Fracture (2008)
Beyond Portal, many first-person shooters defer to literal weaponry involving bullets. But certainly not all. There’s an entirely obscure game from the PlayStation 3 era that broke innovative ground within the same genre: Fracture. Fracture is one of those games that was bundled in with the PS3 when you bought the Black Friday package. It’s the kind of game that no one really loves, but that you’re satisfied with when you get it for no additional cost. And yet, it does something unique that I’ve never seen replicated in the shooter genre.
Fracture’s gun mechanic manipulates your terrain rather than sending out bullets. One trigger button will raise a hill out of the ground, shielding you from enemy fire, while the other trigger button will sink the ground, allowing you to sneak underneath into a trench. In both cases, as simple as the mechanic of terrain shifting (“fracturing”) is, the gun becomes an entirely defensive mechanism.
Throughout Fracture, the game’s campaign is not altogether out of line with classic first person shooters like Halo and Call of Duty. There are high stakes with violence, technological threats of destruction, and strategically placed enemy troops. But the game isn’t about these things; in fact, these stakes, threats, and enemies function as obstacles rather than objectives. In most first person shooters, killing is the only and primary goal.
This game isn’t in any way less fun because of the reduced violence. In fact, by stripping the player of the direct ability to wreak havoc on enemy characters, the stakes seem to raise of their own accord. Rather, I think Fracture demonstrates that it is more intense to play a game feeling relatively defenseless, rather than turbocharging your way through it, guns blazing. The necessity of the player to strategize in terms of malleable terrain instead of hiding behind scattered barrels and pre-placed cars is what makes this game stand out from its more financially successful peers.
Guns as Game Mechanics
Taking Portal and Fracture together as a whole demonstrates the limited vision that not only critics of video games have, but the limited vision of developers and players themselves. A gun doesn’t always mean bullets, violence, and death. A gun can be a creative force within the digital confines of a video game. And these two games are hardly the only examples that play with the shooter genre.
In an era of horrific and regular mass shootings, it’s entirely understandable that people, politicians, and parents everywhere would readily scapegoat any visible violence in society. Television, magazines, adult fiction, the internet, and of course video games are easy targets. Beyond the anecdotal, it’s not easy to levy the numbers up against the continual violent tragedies that this country faces. But the numbers don’t begin to suggest any remote correlation between video games, even deadly first person shooters, and violence. It would be wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater; it would be wrong to blame video games and expect societal problems to go away.
I went paintballing for the first time a few weeks ago. I’m a non-violent person, so I was terrified. The anxiety and nerves plagued me in a way that I hadn’t felt since my first jiu jitsu class. But I stuck it out, through my nervousness, because I had good friends with me who wanted to bring everybody in our group a bit closer. It was a bonding experience, so to speak. So I’ve never owned a gun. I’ve never fired a trigger, except as a young kid at my redneck cousin’s ranch. And I had to figure out how to navigate a battlefield, aim and shoot paintballs, and survive varying rounds and game styles. There’s no way I even had a shot.
But, throughout the day playing paintball, I noticed my accuracy increase, I noticed my bravery increase, and I noticed my adrenaline blend from terrified to exhilarated. It wasn’t war (though it felt like it). But as I noticed my skill incrementally increase, it became clear that this violent exercise was a demonstration is what psychological value the first person shooter has: teambuilding, eye-hand coordination, strategizing, psychologizing, and most importantly, putting yourself in contention with difficulty.
The conclusions I reached about paintball led me to start thinking more about these positive aspects of first person shooters. Some games are undeniably violent beyond what any of us players would do in real life. And everyone out playing paintball on the course is there to have a good time, shake hands, and improve. Like playing paintball, you’re testing what’s possible when you’re playing a violent video game like a shooter. To borrow from the great psychologist, Carl Jung, you’re on the boundary between order and chaos, or the known and the unknown.
Clearly, not all video games are violent. In fact, some of the best are not. But even the games that look violent shouldn’t be locked away, hidden like clutched pearls. These games serve a role. These games help us prepare for the worst in human nature. These games help us understand ourselves.
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