First Person Shooters - A Boys' Own Paradise? Why does it seem like more men are into first person shooters than women? Kirsten Campbell finds out.
"I was just going to play for 2 minutes, then it was 15 hours later and I was still in my pyjamas." So says Paul, when asked about his love of Quake II. "Why do you like first person shooters so much?" I asked Rory. "Because I like to pretend I'm the leader of the United States Marine Corps, and the hardest Bastard ever, and in Vietnam, and a murder machine destroying all the foes who ever even gave me a funny look. Anyone who tells you they play FPS games for any other reason is a lying slaaaaaaaaaaaag and ought to be shot in the face. In real life," was his (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek response. First person shooters (FPS) have been a staple of the videogames industry since the early 1990s, but have in fact existed since the early 1970s. Almost as soon as we started making games for computer screens, we started firing weapons at enemies. As a player in an FPS you take on the role of a combatant in a hostile environment, generally viewing it through the sights of your unfeasibly massive weapon (hence the ‘first-person’ part of their name). Today, FPSs almost overwhelmingly dominate the bestseller lists. BAFTA’s best videogame of the year has been an FPS for four of the past six years, with the multi-million selling Mass Effect 2 being the most recent (I suppose if we’re being pedantic Mass Effect 2 is a third-person shooter, but having sat through it, I can’t say the shift in perspective made it a radically different sort of game). http://reactionblog.livejournal.com/4274.html _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
