Chapter 2 Section 3- FPS: A Brief History of Virtual Mayhem

Airport level, Modern Warfare 2 from
http://freeandopenencounter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/modern-warfare-no-russian.jpg

The term "video game" often brings to mind the image either of the popular puzzle game "Tetris" or the First Person Shooter(FPS) of which Wolfenstein 3D(Id, 1992) was perhaps the earliest example, up to games such as Modern Warfare 2(Infinity Ward, 2009), which currently occupies up to 25 million people playing online, according to the game's community manager, Robert Bowling(1). The popularity of this genre of game has created frequent moral panics as to their effect on players, especially promoting the idea that playing such games will promote bloody shooting sprees(2). More significant is the notion that these games may function as recruiting tools for various militaries, notably the game America's Army.

 The technical execution of these games has increased in sophistication over the preceding two decades, with the quality of the games going from a few polygons that created the forms of the player avatar and other figures, up to the near photo-realistic appearance of MW2. Likewise, the play has become more sophisticated with the scenery appearing to behave as it would in real life, with water rippling, clothes and hair shifting with programmed breezes and blood spattering concrete that shatters with the impact of ordinances modeled on increasingly precise physics (but then calibrated to make gameplay more enjoyable, as multiple head shots are possible in-game, while obviously incapacitating or fatal in real life).

Wolfenstein 3D from http://guestcontroller.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/wolfenstein-3d-micro-review/

Perhaps the most significant change, however is the appearance of on-line play. With this, players can communicate and interact with each others through their avatars, or via chatrooms or headsets. The sociality of on-line combat is a phenomena explored by Maria Frostling-Henningson(3). Her ethnographic study of game players discovered that they valued the social aspects of combat games such as CounterStrike and world of Warcraft and avoided playing solo games.indeed, her account emphasised that the groups of people preferred to play in close physical proximity in internet cafes, rather that via home computers(4). As one of her subjects says "‘‘I cannot do night ‘gibs’ any longer, since I am too tired to go on; before, I could because of the spirit of community— you know, with friends. If you have gaming as an interest, you can exchange experiences. It is a lot, a lot of communication in the games’’ (Cherin, 23-year-old female)".(5) The result of Frostling-Henningsson's research is that it reveals a much more social, and more nuance series of exchanges than is often presupposed. These exchanges are not necessary to the gameplay, as she reveals in the cooperative behavior of two female friends who are nominally counted as adversaries in the game world, but choose to work together communicating both within the game by actions such as shooting into space to identify their position, and covering each other so as to maneuver within the virtual game space.(6)


                                                                            
(1)http://content.usatoday.com/communities/gamehunters/post/2010/03/number-of-modern-warfare-2-online-players-tops-25-million/1. Numerous online gaming portals, such as Blizzard Game's Battlenet post player statistics indicating hundreds of thousands to millions of players on-line at any given time on each different portal.
(2)Power, Marcus. "Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence"
  Security Dialogue 2007 38: 271
(3)Frostling-Henningsson, Maria."First-Person Shooter Games as a Way of Connecting to People: ‘‘Brothers in Blood’’" in CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR Volume 12, Number 5, 2009
(4) ibid p.558
(5) ibid p.558
(6) ibid p.560