Why I'll never work on First-Person Shooters again

http://gamasutra.com/blogs/CharlesCox/20130419/190893/Why_Ill_Never_Work_on_FirstPerson_Shooters_Again.php

by MilkoFTW • 13 years ago

94 84 13 years ago

od2m• 13 years ago

Violence, sex, and spectacle have always been used as a crutch for bad storytelling and simply being out of ideas.

All of those things can also be totally valid parts of a well-told story. Not only that, any historically significant factual account of human beings is likely to contain at least one and probably more of those things.

Yes, only using those things, or using them to prop up otherwise poor writing, is most certainly a crutch. But generalizing that too far takes very significant parts of our nature and behavior -- for better or worse -- and casts them in an artificially negative light as invalid literary mechanics.

pfg• 13 years ago

Totally agree. This is what I keep telling people whenever they moan about Game Of Thrones/A Song Of Ice And Fire being porn and/or too violent.

WalterBright2• 13 years ago

If I see a preview for a movie that shows, in slo-mo, the hero running towards the camera with a gigantic fiery explosion behind him, I know for sure it'll be a boring movie.

I far prefer movies with an interesting plot.

alexqgb2• 13 years ago

Aristotle himself lists spectacle as one of the essential components of drama, alongside other indispensables such as a plot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)

That's not to say that writers with poor plots don't resort to amplified spectacle when trying to conceal their failings. But it's a mistake to think that spectacle, in and of itself, has no place in well constructed drama. In many ways, good drama is what justifies a major spectacle, which is the show in show business.

ufo• 13 years ago

The problem with this argument is that most FPS games are multiplayer games first and single player games second. Multiplayer games are kind of like sports in that the story is created by the players (how you outsmarted your friends last round or how they pulled off a big comeback). Its the single player games that need to care about storytelling since its the responsibility of the game to make interesting things happen.

theorique• 13 years ago

Good point.

You can play FPS against bots or campaign style, but many people find the real fun to be the social experience with friends.

In this situation, storytelling is almost completely irrelevant, given that all the game needs is an interesting board or map, and good gameplay and graphics.

jccalhoun• 13 years ago

they've also always been used as scapegoats...

Groxx2• 13 years ago

I think I've tl;dr'd this correctly: "I won't work on FPSes because they're [excessively?] violent and I'm ashamed of contributing to it".

Which is a great reason, I wish them luck! I'd say it's slightly mis-aimed - it's not just FPSes - but it's a start. I'd love to have a whole variety of blockbusters that aren't the standard fare we have now, and more people working on other things makes it more likely to happen.

TillE• 13 years ago

> it's not just FPSes

Quite right. Violence is the simplest form of human conflict, the one we can most easily adapt to games. Even chess is an abstraction of war strategy.

But personally, I'm much more OK with fairly abstract strategy games than I am with games that shove a gun in your hands and shower you with blood. It's exhausting. I have no problem with those games existing on the market, I'm just so very tired of the fact that nearly every big-budget game centers on shooting people in the face. Or stabbing them.

If nothing else, I've been doing that in videogames for the past 20 years now (since Wolf3d and Doom), and it's getting boring.

pms3• 13 years ago

Well, it is damn boring.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

If nothing else, I've been doing that in videogames for the past 20 years now (since Wolf3d and Doom), and it's getting boring.

I've had this problem too for the last several years. I like 3d, and I like hyper-realistic game environments, and I like science fiction. But I am sick to the back teeth of gore, and of being confronted by hideous mutants/ zombies/ creatures that I'm supposed to splatter all over the walls. I play games far less than I used to because I'm tired of this horror element.

What gets me is that even within these genre conventions, there seem to be very few new ideas. How come I don't see survival-horror games based around super-powered alien insects that can walk on the ceiling? Why isn't there a Terminator game that involves fighting giant robots in Shadow-of-the-colossus style as well as FPS? Why not a game set in an abandoned but heavily trapped environment where destructibility is a key game mechanic?

mynameishere• 13 years ago

You want boring?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81JSMr%2BIR6L._SL1500_...

But seriously, there's almost an absurd variety of games out there. No one has to play violent games. One problem is that multiplayer doesn't work well in most other genres.

inopinatus• 13 years ago

Actually the TL;DR is even shorter: "I won't work on FPSs".

If you read it closely you'll see that he talks about someone who shielded his children from violent computer games, then he says that he'll never work a FPS again citing "ethical reasons", but never produces any kind of argument connecting these two points, or stating what those ethical reasons actually are.

I know it's just a blog post and all but I saw the length of the text and was therefore hoping for a more reasoned discussion rather than anonymous anecdote and soul-searching.

He seems rather hung up on "protecting children" from something, although what outcome he is afraid of is entirely unstated. I was not shielded from the horrors of the world as a child so it is unclear to me what has changed in the last twenty years, or what makes, specifically, the first-person-shooter genre such a travesty in his eyes.

scott_s• 13 years ago

I was similarly confused. I think I know what his reason is, but he never explicitly stated it. I may not even disagree with his reasons, but it's difficult to know for sure since he never actually stated those reasons. He only alluded to something that caused him to think of those reasons.

Groxx2• 13 years ago

Yeah, it's reading between the lines. But the story is about how a father wouldn't explain the truth about the game, and I got a fairly strong sense of guilt from the article as a whole. I read that as 1 + 1 = 2 in the absence of anything explicit, since why else include it?

tsotha• 13 years ago

There are so many virtually identical FPS out there these days I have to believe the genre is due for a slump in sales. These days as soon as I discover a title is an FPS I pass over it in search of something novel.

incision3• 13 years ago

I was hoping this would be a commentary on the genre being - with the rarest exceptions - a mess of utterly derivative, barely distinguishable dreck.

scottlilly• 13 years ago

I have a similar feeling regarding PvP games. Not so much for any simulated violence, but rather for reinforcing the zero-sum philosophy of, "For me to win, another human being has to lose." However, I don't feel the same about many non-RPG, zero-sum games, like chess or poker.

Maybe because it's easier to be detached from cards and plastic pieces, than from a character in an RPG - who has a name, 'friends', a pet, a history of achievements, etc.

You can call me a "care bear", but I personally don't feel that reinforcing such a limited world-view is how I want to use my time and energy. And it's not something I describe as fun.

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

Chess and Go and Bridge and Ambition (self-plug, why the fuck not: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH... ) aren't truly zero-sum because the hedonic payoff is based on the quality of the game ("the game" meaning the immutable artifact as well as "the game" meaning the specific contest among players) not winning or losing. You still enjoy a truly great game if you lose, just slightly less than if you win. There's an emergent art to the game that is appealing and interesting regardless of the outcome.

Poker is in the middle. I feel like it's more of a zero-sum game because it just sucks to lose. At real stakes, I find losing humiliating. At low stakes or for free, I don't care. The game itself I am not that into.

I see what you mean about PvP. The culture of them (at least, as usually played) makes it hard to enjoy the game for its own sake.

__david__2• 13 years ago

> You still enjoy a truly great game if you lose, just slightly less than if you win. There's an emergent art to the game that is appealing and interesting regardless of the outcome.

Sigh, and that of course applies to PvP games as well. Back when I played a lot of FPS deathmatch I quite enjoyed a good match, even if I didn't come out on top.

millstone• 13 years ago

The FPS mechanic seems like it could be much bigger than Call of Duty style. You can have the gritty style without the violence: Brave Firefighters is an old coin-op game FPS in which you put out fires with your water cannon gun, rescuing people in the process. Or you can keep the violence, but make it silly, like Mario games. Team Fortress 2 sort of points in that direction, and could be taken a lot further.

Instead of abandoning FPS games, why not try to disrupt them by working on non-traditional FPSes? The genre is in a rut, and could use a big dose of innovation.

endgame• 13 years ago

On that note, I though Kreedz Climbing[1] and Grappling Hook[2] were interesting takes.

[1] http://kzmod.com/news.php [2]: http://ghook.speedrungames.com/

archagon• 13 years ago

You can also have first-person games with no shooting at all, like Dear Esther or The Witness.

doktrin2• 13 years ago

>> He had no choice, really -- this industry works people overlong and threatens them with excommunication if they complain, knowing full well that enthusiastic young talent will gladly come fill in at a lower wage.

Having never worked in the gaming industry, just about every 1st hand account I read tends to emphasize its fairly brutal nature. Frankly it sounds like a shit-terrible environment. Is game dev really fun enough to justify this kind of treatment?

>> And this drama -- this tightrope walk between building virtual violence while fashioning a safe space for the next generation -- was forced to live in the same building that received countless letters, forum posts, YouTube videos, and more from angry gamers that threatened us -- and our families -- if we didn’t deliver them the bloodthirsty experience they wanted, the one they demanded.

Speaking of terrible environments, enter the gaming community. There's something about competitive online multi-player games in that they inevitably seem to breed awful. Years ago I gamed competitively at what would be considered "elite" levels, and all too often many of my fellow top-tier gamers were beyond the pale. Rampant racism & misogyny are only the tip of the iceberg, at times.

I suppose I think there's something pretty "off" with both the gaming industry and the community it serves. Wish I had a constructive solution in mind, but for the time being I simply avoid both.

pms3• 13 years ago

I follow Starcraft 2 pro scene and it is not so bad, although, many players are young, so immature behaviors happens sometimes. I guess that competitive strategy games are different from competitive FPS.

doktrin2• 13 years ago

Yeah, I agree. The SC2 community is on average far more civil than those in shooters and even (PvP) MMOs.

geon• 13 years ago

> Is game dev really fun enough to justify this kind of treatment?

By the same first hand accounts, it seems like it's not. The turn over rate is very high, with very few working in the industry more than 5 years.

Young, naive people are attracted by the glamour, then exploited. As they mature, they realize, it is not the life they want, and leave.

incision3• 13 years ago

>I suppose I think there's something pretty "off" with both the gaming industry and the community it serves. Wish I had a constructive solution in mind, but for the time being I simply avoid both.

I have much the same conclusion drawn from essentially the same experience.

Though, I think some of the reasons are fairly evident it's just they're all but impossible to discuss productively in or around the community echo chamber.

pandaman2• 13 years ago

Every time you are reading such an account - check out whose account it is. There is a website called mobygames.com listing most of the credits and searchable by the developer's name.

Basically the working environment depends on the particular place of work much more than on the particular industry.

If you read only people working for Yahoo, you could conclude that web-advertising is a horrible industry. People working for Myspace would give you an impression that working for Facebook is just as bad etc etc.

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

What struck me was the fact that this guy seems to be actually worried about his career. How fucked up is an industry where saying "I don't want to work on [X]" makes you unemployable? I hope the AAA studios (and Zynga + clones) collapse under the weight of their mediocrity. Let's get to making some real fucking games.

pharrington2• 13 years ago

Let's get to making some real fucking games

What kind of games do you like playing?

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

I like the '90s RPGs for their storyline. They weren't on the same level as great literature, but they did an admirable job of creating something fun to play that had a story to it. I also like the fact that, after about 30-60 hours (which is the right amount of time) they're over.

These days, I prefer playing games for the social experience so I'm more into German-style board games.

I also wrote a card game called Ambition (which I linked in this thread) and that's pretty fun.

I can't stand most of the derivative stuff that comes out of the major studios. It's so formulaic.

incision3• 13 years ago

>How fucked up is an industry where saying "I don't want to work on [X]" makes you unemployable?

While I don't agree with the mentality, having your work dictated to some degree by your industry isn't terribly unusual.

How far would a sysadmin who says "I don't want to work on Linux" get in the world of web startups?

michaelochurch5• 13 years ago

We're talking past each other, insofar as I was interpreting him as making a CLM by saying he didn't like first-person-shooters, not choosing not to work on them. Maybe I misinterpreted what he was saying.

tptacek• 13 years ago

This comment makes it sound like you think the problem with the games sector is that it's dominated by companies like EA. That's a problem, but it's dwarfed by the real problem, which is supply and demand.

If you want to see a really "fucked up" industry, try being a tool and die engineer.

rollo_tommasi• 13 years ago

At the risk of derailing this subthread, I'd be interested in knowing what's fucked up about the tool-and-die industry.

rdl• 13 years ago

Actually, I know through guns a tech/developer guy who just moved into tool and die machining (as a job and as a hobby) in Arizona, and he's never been happier, loves his job, loves his coworkers, loves his working environment. Craftsmanship, quality, values, etc. Pretty much everything you'd consider ideal.

Maybe there's a losing part of the industry somewhere?

pandaman2• 13 years ago

He is saying he is limiting his career, not becoming unemployable. Projects like CoD, BF or Halo offer, by far, more money, stability, professional development possibility, sane working environment etc. There are plenty of studios that never have made and never will make an FPS. There are plenty of people who never shipped an FPS in their entire career. However, in the current market, if you are not working on an FPS like mentioned above, chances are high that you are crunching for low pay, over a design made by people who don't even want to play the game themselves, surrounded by peers who hate their job and either having the project canceled and laid-off or shipping a mediocre game and getting laid-off in lieu of completion bonus.

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

Can't help but think that perhaps this post is timed in response to the events of the week.

And it reminds me of a thought I had in the midst of the madness: that is, we invade countries for apparently no reason, maiming thousands of our own troops and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. We celebrate violence in movies, music, TV, and games. We have been in a pressure-cooker since 9/11, with a constant, ever-present anxiety about terrorism. We have had a tanked economy for nearly 5 years with massive unemployment and near-constant financial stress for many.

On top of all of this, we have a media that lives for opportunities to incite fear and endlessly highlight the actions of the worst human beings on the planet.

Then, when someone loses it, everyone looks around and asks "what's the matter with that guy?"

It can certainly be argued that FPSes are a drop in the bucket, reflection of society, etc. as some comments on this thread have stated. But, I don't blame the OP for not wanting to risk being a contributor to the problem.

It starts with one.

philwelch2• 13 years ago

Have we ever had a single era in history without violent entertainment? The most enduring sports in human history are various forms of fighting. The world's literature has always portrayed violence, war, and death.

Violence is also a constant presence in world history. No society has ever fully eradicated violent crime, and no era has ever fully eradicated warfare.

The news media is popular entertainment. Yellow journalism has also been a constant. It's far more cost-effective than honest journalism.

As I've gotten older I've found it's nice from time to time to disengage from the darker parts of reality and enjoy innocent things. But the appeal of violence is an essential part of the human condition.

loup-vaillant2• 13 years ago

> Violence is also a constant presence in world history

Actually, it's not constant. It's decreasing.

Check for Steven Pinker on violence. The further into the past you look, the more violence you find —of any kind. Go back to the period where we lived as hunter-gatherers, in Harmony with Nature, and suddenly nearly 2 men in 3 die at the hand of fellow humans.

So, while History does show an everlasting presence of violence, it also shows that this is not hopeless: slowly, steadily, we are making progress. I'd keep an eye out, though: we're not there yet, and each death still is one death too much.

Deregibus2• 13 years ago

He originally wrote it back in December: http://www.charlesncox.com/blog/2012/12/why-ill-never-work-o...

unclebucknasty2• 13 years ago

Interesting. Perhaps it was in part motivated by Sandy Hook a couple weeks prior, then reposted in response to this week's incident.

Shame. You can almost pick a motivating tragedy.

nikster2• 13 years ago

I think the actual violence committed for whatever reason - invading countries, blowing up weddings and children with remote drone strikes, keeping prisoners without legal framework in gitmo - these things are several orders of magnitude worse than violent games and movies

Games and movies are merely ways of processing these real world events - all violence begets violence. Those kids we blow up today with drones, one of their brothers, sisters, or even just friends will eventually come back to us. For example, to senselessly kill innocent people at a marathon.

Boston bombings are a good example - the chechen war / rebellion was a bloodbath, fought ruthlessly and largely off the cameras. It just came back to us.

Violence begets violence, throughout the history of humanity. Its up to us to stop the cycle. We cant do much about conflicts in faraway countries - except maybe to stay out of them. But we can do things we are directly responsible for - CIA operations come to mind, and of course the drone war.

nikster2• 13 years ago

I forgot to say - the violence we commit on others affects us just as much as them, the perpetrator is as much a victim as the victim.

I recently read the story of the most efficient sniper in the US military, a man who killed well over 200 people in various US wars around the world. Who shot and killed two armed would be carjackers in Texas in a way that would be fit for a dirty harry movie (shot them with his back turned to them). The cycle was complete when he was himself shot and killed while taking friends shooting. Could it ever have ended another way?

But most of these cycles are much longer, spanning generations.

Snoptic5• 13 years ago

You are jumping to massive conclusions on the chechen analysis. There is no evidence those kids weremore

than columbine-style depressed.

cool-RR• 13 years ago

Fabulously written.

WayneDB• 13 years ago

Good for you! Good for me too...I've always liked third person shooters and side-scrollers better anyway.

Dewie• 13 years ago

This article makes a big fanfare and all, but until I see some data that violent video games actually leads to antisocial behaviour (on average), then I'm not inclined to believe that it is necessarily destructive. For all we know, it could be mostly about letting off steam.

Just because something seems to be destructive, intuitively, doesn't mean that it actually is so. Human nature is far too complicated to assume that something that seems destructive intuitively really is so (since most people seem to get by just fine).

Tichy• 13 years ago

I worry a lot about what my kid will learn, but exposure to violent video games is really low on the list. Much more worried that he will be lied to and exploited by "the system", for example schools only teaching how to be a docile wage slave.

I am not keen on violence in games, but sometimes I think there also is some honesty in those games. The world can be a cruel place.

TheSilentMan• 13 years ago

If he was in the movie industry would he refuse to work on anything that wasn't G rated(and even a good number of those) because it would be inappropriate to show to 4 year olds?

Most of the movies on the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies list would be tough for an editor to explain to his kid if they were sitting there while he was cutting, splicing, and reviewing. Does that somehow make them unethical?

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

A rather conveniently timed blog post...

My point-of-view is: if people are worried about kids growing up with violent games that allow you to shoot people "in the face" or wherever you should be more concerned your kid is growing up in a politically and economically unstable world instead where a Government is cheered for killing a wanted terrorist (Osama Bin Laden or cheers for the death of the Boston Bombing suspects). What kind of world are we living in where it's considered okay to cheer because a criminal died, but it's a moral dilemma making first person shooters because they might make some people think it's okay to shoot people in real life? Regardless of what someone did or who they hurt, cheering any death is sick in my opinion.

Sure computer games send mixed messages to some, but having grown up in the 90's when first person shooters were in full swing (Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem) I never once had the urge to go and do it in real life, neither did my friends and trust me I remember spending a large chunk of my youth playing Golden Eye 64 when it came out with friends on the Nintendo 64. I wonder if studies have been performed on people likely to commit violent crimes and whether or not games actually help take the urge away to do it in real life?

If people don't get their violent entertainment from games, they'll just get it from; movies, highly publicised sporting events (MMA, Boxing, BJJ), the news or in real life. The art of violent entertainment was well in full-swing before the home gaming revolution took place. Since anyone can remember, people have been using weapons as a means to cause harm to one another. We can blame games and we can blame easy targets like Eminem or Marilyn Manson, we should be blaming ourselves. We are responsible for our own actions and when we're not, it's because we convince ourselves it's because of someone or something else.

It sounds to me like this guy is in the wrong industry. If he doesn't want to make violent games and violent games sell as Battlefield and Grand Theft Auto have proven, then what does he want to do? Sounds like he should be working for a smaller struggling developer who specialise in family friendly games instead or even considering a career move entirely. This is not an insult, it's an observation. If you have a problem with the kind of work you're doing, find a new job and someone who can and wants to do your job, will.

Developers don't make FPS games because they love to praise and glorify violence, it's because FPS' sell. As a keen player of Battlefield 3, I can see why they sell. They're a good escape from the busy day or week you had. Mindless entertainment you can mash the buttons on your controller and relieve some stress, not to mention have fun.

I think anyone who can go out and commit an act of violence and blame it on a game is a mental health issue, not an issue attributed to playing games. Violent games activate and induce violent behaviour in real life no more than drugs or alcohol have been doing for centuries. I know there have been stories over the years, but the number of crimes committed supposedly because of games is rather small compared to deaths via firearms, dangerous driving, drugs or alcohol.

Thought for the day: A drug addict kills someone with a gun for money to get their next hit, what aspect of the story does the media focus on? The fact he was a drug addict who needed help, the fact he had nobody to turn to for help, the fact he obtained access to an illegal firearm or the fact that he played a lot of Grand Theft Auto?

potatolicious• 13 years ago

> "but it's a moral dilemma making first person shooters because they might make some people think it's okay to shoot people in real life?"

I don't think any non-crackpot really believes that video games cause people to pick up guns and shoot people. No one has ever played a video game and gone "hey you know what'd be cool, if I went and shot up a mall".

The moral dilemma is not about directly causing someone to become violent, but rather about creating a culture where violence is celebrated rather than abhorred, and the consequences of all of this violence in aggregate. No single video game would drive someone to violence, but the aggregation of thousands of video games, tens of thousands of movies, and a government that glorifies war, certainly doesn't help anything.

I think the moral dilemma isn't about any real, measurable harm, but rather about whether you're creating a pop culture that reflects the world you want to live in, or you're contributing to a pop culture that is the antithesis of your own principles.

> "Thought for the day: A drug addict kills someone with a gun for money to get their next hit, what aspect of the story does the media focus on?"

The fact that they're an addict. Seriously, I have not seen any major case pinned of video games for years. Jack Thompson and Columbine was a long time ago, before the mass-marketization of shooters. With games like COD and Halo being so mainstream your grandma has played it, the "video game causes deadly shootout!" angle is no longer tenable.

And we as gamers need to stop pretending the world is still like the bad old days of the 90s when every evil was pinned on us. Only the most extreme, the least credible news sources are still hanging onto this angle, and it's disingenuous to pretend that this is still a mainstay of modern news reporting today.

dchichkov• 13 years ago

I fail to see how FPS games contribute to "creating a culture where violence is celebrated rather than abhorred". Do you have any references to research that supports that claim?

I can see that good action movies can contribute to the culture where good action movies are celebrated. But that doesn't have anything to do with celebrating violence.

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

A more interesting moral dilemma is whether you support giving the weapon manufacturers money through videogame developers who pay them for a license to use their weapons in-game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeIHH0XEs6E.

Poyeyo2• 13 years ago

Actually, that level of detail makes the moral dilemma simpler.

tekacs2• 13 years ago

Living in the UK with our (IMHO) wonderful, sane gun control laws, the idea of a shooting seems surreal... and the jump from playing an FPS to the visceral horror of actually stabbing someone seems unlikely to be manageable without substantial help. Whilst a bat or other blunt object of some description is an alternative weapon, the environment around us seems to provide the feeling that the law does a good job of discouraging wanton violence and bringing things as close as possible to homicides committed out of the interaction simple frustration[1] and a little psychopathy (which it may be impossible to stop?)

(for reference's sake, 0.07 per 100,000 intentional gun homicides 2011)

Similarly, when I see the people out and about that actually seem like they could be dangerous... they don't appear to be particularly interested in video games. It makes me wonder where the connection arose from and whether it's the case that the furore is just that or if it is motivated by any particular group's personal distaste for FPSs.

(Caveat: I'm quite aware that I haven't quite covered the implication both ways around, but... tired. stalks away)

[1]: I really, really want to avoid writing 'crimes of passion'... but shrug

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

I don't know about games, but cheering when murderers die is right and just, IMO, especially on the scale of OBL.

Snoptic5• 13 years ago

Yes, research sbows tbat fantasy violence is a safe outlet for people with violent inclinations, partially

kmfrk2• 13 years ago

I think we need to come up with another term than first-person shooter. There may have been a time where all games in first person were games like Duke Nukem, Quake, Doom, and so on, but I think it cheapens and trivializes what can be accomplished in the medium - not genre - of first-person-based videogames.

Games like "Call of Duty", "Battlefield", "Halo", and so on definitely rot the soul of a lot of developers, but I personally think the first-person medium is one of the best way to do something immersive and interactive.

I don't think Elisabeth in Bioshock Infinite - or a game like Portal - would have been possible under any other circumstances, and to use the term "first-person shooter" for a game like B:I is to misrepresent it to people inside and outside the videogame community.

ak217• 13 years ago

Notwithstanding the idea that working on something inappropriate for a 6 year old is somehow a moral issue, the FPS genre is much bigger than just "realistic" titles like CS/CoD, and it is regrettable that they are being mixed up in the public's imagination. While the CoD:MW series has artistic merit despite being in the "realistic" category, there are legendary titles with deep artistic value like Half-Life, Unreal, and Crysis where (to me anyway) violence is not really the point of the game.

tekacs2• 13 years ago

This reminds me rather of a Google+ post I read recently:

https://plus.google.com/105363132599081141035/posts/W3ys5fKn...

Deregibus2• 13 years ago

It's a career limiting move in the same sense that my career as a doctor is limited by the fact that I didn't choose to go to medical school. There's no evidence that any of his opportunities outside of making violent shooters have been limited. If he wants to turn down those opportunities then props to him for standing up for something in a way that actually impacts his bottom line. Whether you agree or disagree with his reasons for doing it, this should be applauded. We just shouldn't pretend that he's being persecuted for his choice. He's not a whistle blower that's exposing a conspiracy. People like violent FPS games, they buy them, studios make more of them. That's all there is to it.

Now if you want a conspiracy, you should be looking at gaming addiction and how studios are explicitly engineering games to keep people coming back and spending money. That's where you'll find the real shady stuff.

gnu8• 13 years ago

You stole this idea from Mad Men. I hope it gets you a job.

Snoptic5• 13 years ago

Mad Men stole it from Jerry Maquire.

"It's not a manifesto. It's a mission statement."

Poyeyo2• 13 years ago

Why I don't think parents know how to parent anymore.

For those parents, the problem is videogames, or Marilyn Manson's music, or bicycles, or movies, or obscene writing but never, never, it is something remotely related with their parenting skills.

However, when years later their kids now grown to adulthood have to go to a psychologist, what's what they talk about? Videogames? Music? Obscene books?

No. They talk with the psychologist about their parents and their awful lack of parenting skills.

Why I'll never work on First-Person Shooters again

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