Interesting article, and I do like the idea relating to control and snap
decision making, though i confess I always am a little suspicious of
evolutionary explanations for behaviour since they can often be something of
a theoretical blackbox and thus come under Karl Poppa's crytique of
falsificationism, ie, an educated guess based on the pet theory of the
psychologist in question which hi/sher subjects cannot refuse because the
psychologist is in the position of possessing prevelidged information about
the subject which the subject cannot access.
Ie, "we are evolved to behave like this because I happen to think this
particular evolutionary story fits this behaviour"
Myself though I'm a little concerned by some of the comments about people
going for essentially a quick fix of control and instant problem solving
rather than partaking in plot and atmosphere.
I enjoyed both swamp and shades of doom, but primarily for the emotional
engagement of exploring an environment full of nasties, getting new places
to go and never knowing when soemthing would leap out and attack, ----
indeed even though both shades of doom and Gma tank commander are loosely
speaking first person shooters, I prefer Shades of doom for it's atmosphere.
likewise, while I've often wanted to play mainstream games in the fps genre
like Silent Hill, Doom 3 or the Metroid Prime series it is primarily for
their atmospheric sense and something like call of duty just doesn't appeal
at all.
Indeed it's interesting that the article referenced doom, since while the
original doom was very much a horror gore fest who's plot was essentially
hard as nales space marine goes to hell to blow up demons, Doom 3 took a
much different approach. With doom 3 (a game a good friend of mine was a
major fan of and which I've seen various bits from), things were much closer
to the investigation of the research base where something bad had happened.
The action sequences were interpspersed with lots of investigation and
wandering around, and a good serving of adventure elements too,you even have
puzzles to solve based on picking up lab reports.
That tendency to disregard plot and go for action is also why there is
largely now very much a polarisation between different groups of gamers in
the mainstream, ie, casual and hard core. Indeed among many hard core
gamers, fans of retro games etc there is sort of a disregard of fps games
essentially because! of this focus of run in and slaughter all your friends
rather than caring about the plot,, indeed when one of the spag magazines
praised the Silent Hill series for it's plot and atmosphere and classified
it in the same category of experience as an interactive fiction game,
(albeit in a visual rather than textual medium), the most common comment was
"but it's an fps!"
While I do agree dissimissing all fps games as lmindless death match action
fests isn't fair, at the same time I can at least to some extent understand
why people do it.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
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