A People's History of the FPS @ RPS

    I've written a 3 essay series for Rock Paper Shotgun. It argues that the perception that "FPSes are generic and the same" accepts the premise that the mainstream AAA game industry dominates FPS design, which is wrong, because the story of the FPS is also the story of modders. It also excludes the many other games that use first person, but we don't think of them as "real" first person games for some reason.

    http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09 ... 1-the-wad/

    It's kinda inflammatory / anti-industry in some places -- I think my personal opinion is more nuanced, that the industry is great sometimes and the industry isn't great sometimes -- but right now, I think history is heavily on the industry's side, so I'm going to write from a non-industry perspective to try to balance things out. The "truth" is somewhere in the middle, as always.

    Would love to hear your comments and thoughts.

    indie dev quotes

    genre harping

    the word pretentious in quotes

    and wtf is a manshooter. is it another derisive in-crowd term like dudebro for games with guns and killing or was I asleep during the 90's?

    I was actually pretty serious, what is that term. I can only see it as either that or some typo.

    edit: it appears more than once. Guess I'm just supposed to know what that shit means.

    It's an interesting article especialy in regard to the modding stuff.

    Two things tho. I wouldn't lump in any other first person games with fps'es. Fps is a very distinct genre where people shoot you know. It's in the name.

    There are some overlaps with other genres that's true but considering say adventure games, rpg's and fps's all the same genre just because of the camera perspective i think that's wrong. It's like arguing that hip hop and techno are the same kind of music just because they losely had some common roots and involve electronic equipment in the making.

    Second thing there were plenty of first person games before Doom and Myst. So in this sense the article is a bit like "History of human civilization" but no mentioning of anything before the Italian Rennaisance.

    Erratic: I was being serious too! "Manshooter" is used almost always in a critical / sly / wink-wink sort of way.

    Steppenwolf: I kind of agree, but also kind of not... I think sometimes it's useful to be specific about an FPS having shooter mechanics, like when you're designing a first person shooter... and then sometimes it makes more sense to be more holistic about genre, like when we're talking about history and all these first person puzzle games are firmly in FPS geneology and use the same engines, controls, and art styles but take their game systems from first person adventures / RPGs / Myst. But the acronym is FPS, not FPRPG or FPA.

    The series is also NOT about the history of the FPS, it's about the non-industry presence that formed in response, and I started it where the first FPS mod scene sprung up, which was more or less Doom. You're right, there were first person games before Doom, but that's not what I'm talking about, if that's not too much of a cop-out for you.

    Quote

    To give it a place in first-person history would be to highlight the lack of diversity and subtlety endemic to commercial practice in the genre today, and first-person history must remain the story of how a nascent manshooter empire became the hypermasculinized captain of the football team

    I now have cancer.

    - I totally do not get the opening gambit fawning over Myst. Myst and Riven have aged terribly because they had bad, shallow gameplay and charmed us with now-appalling graphics. And they clearly are not first person shooters, nor do I see their influence in FPS design, so lamenting about them being dubbed a “graphical adventure” is bizarre.

    - Conversely Doom is still amazing fun to play and indisputably one of the biggest milestones in gaming, even before you even get started discussing the other major milestone of strong user-created content and modification communities.

    - Everyone knows the genre is over saturated without you having to name drop someone. If you’re going to include his taunt maybe you should also include the 7DFPS games that prove his point?

    - Inventing and using the derogatory term “manshooter” seems rather unproductive, equivalent to writing an article about RTS and calling them “nerd games.”

    - This clearly is not about first person shooters at all, which is your title and stated premise, it's about how indie games from the "cultural elite and avant-garde" (not even going there) are using the first person camera in non-games where you walk around not doing anything.

    A little too pretentious an article for me personally.

    But grats on getting more of your articles published, looks like you could make a career out of games journalism.

    Quote from Vilham

    looks like you could make a career out of games journalism.

    woah there, i know it's an inflammatory article but there's no need to start throwing insults around

    I agree "manshooter" is derogatory but it's still so... accurate? The controllers have triggers in them. 99% of your interactions involve shooting men. There are few women in these games, they're very masculinized games built on notions of manliness and all caps block sans-serif fonts and dirt. Manshooter. (RPS writers coined it btw, not me.) I don't know what an RTS equivalent would be. "Strip mine and murder"? If you get to abuse and misuse a word like "pretentious" all the time, then we get to make our own words too.

    ***

    The first line of each article in the series reads: "A People’s History” is a three part essay series that argues for a long-standing but suppressed tradition of amateur involvement in the first person genre -- It's not about Ultima, System Shock vs. Doom (which is what my editor brought up), the Doom clones, Wolf3D, or any of these other important and lovely games -- that's the industry history that people already know, and it's already on Wikipedia.

    ***

    A question: given the importance of FPS mods to the FPS genre, shouldn't modding have a place in history, on the wikipedia page? Now, once you answer "yes, OF COURSE," you have to wonder what that history is, and what that story is.

    To me, it's how the first FPS mods -- the Doom WAD scene was so hacker-y and "fuck the man" and everything, but then Quake 1 comes along, and it's eminently more moddable with QuakeC and everything, but a lot of those hackers are gone -- it's people with shitty jobs who play Quake in their lunch hour, or teenagers who play Quake during and after school.

    What does this change in modder politics do to mods? What motivates it? As a forum full of modders who are now industry pros, e.g. exactly the people I'm talking about, I think you knew what you were doing -- you were getting a career. Even now, in Polycount and here, full of smart self-taught people, you see the advice for breaking in is "join a mod and get noticed."

    But what about the modders who don't want or need jobs? Now there's this split in motivation and goals. What did that do to modding?

    It's okay if you disagree with my answers / conclusions, in fact maybe it's healthy to do so... but I think I'm asking the right questions.

    enjoyed second article but i think you are a little bit romantic about indie development, and a little naive about the studio system.

    but i agree with your take on mods: competing with AAA is a recipe for disaster.

    I have honestly never seen “manshooter” before and it seems a no-go in Google.. Oh well. As for the “first person genre” quote... it says that in the second article but not in the first. And they both still mention "FPS" in the title (and in the first's opening). FPS obviously does not include Myst, Riven, Dear Esther or The Witness. Perhaps this needs an amendment?

    I agree completely with the second article. People in their bedrooms trying to replicate the quality made by teams 50-200 big (plus generous amounts of outsourcing) is pretty much suicide. I remember mods on Quake 2 that didn’t replace any of the original assets, except maybe maps to support the new game-type, but from Half-Life onwards even if you were doing a mechanics tweak to regular DM you had to replace every model and texture so it all looked different.

    The “indie look” of large chunky pixels or polygons mixed with epilepsy is chosen predominately (though I won’t say only) because it cuts down the amount of work required substantially. Outside from a few examples like the obscure Buzzbots not many attempted a stylised approach as far as I remember.

    Of course the other side of the coin here is people expected modifications to come out looking like Valve had spent 5 years on them.

    Though, I also think this reason is why “get some mod experience” isn’t fantastic advise for people getting in the industry anymore. It seems more common for people to be told to download UDK and do something abstract in that based on their chosen discipline.

    Quote from Campaignjunkie

    A question: given the importance of FPS mods to the FPS genre, shouldn't modding have a place in history, on the wikipedia page? Now, once you answer "yes, OF COURSE," you have to wonder what that history is, and what that story is. To me, it's how the first FPS mods -- the Doom WAD scene was so hacker-y and "fuck the man" and everything, but then Quake 1 comes along, and it's eminently more moddable with QuakeC and everything, but a lot of those hackers are gone -- it's people with shitty jobs who play Quake in their lunch hour, or teenagers who play Quake during and after school.

    What does this change in modder politics do to mods? What motivates it? As a forum full of modders who are now industry pros, e.g. exactly the people I'm talking about, I think you knew what you were doing -- you were getting a career. Even now, in Polycount and here, full of smart self-taught people, you see the advice for breaking in is "join a mod and get noticed."

    But what about the modders who don't want or need jobs? Now there's this split in motivation and goals. What did that do to modding?

    It's okay if you disagree with my answers / conclusions, in fact maybe it's healthy to do so... but I think I'm asking the right questions.

    Okay so for someone who appears so concerned about the history of FPS modding ... where is the coverage of Team Fortress and Counter-Strike? You know, the FPS mods who defined a decade of top-tier FPS titles ?. Somewhat lacking, it appears. Considering the 43k players who are playing an 11 year old FPS mod (more than Borderlands 2 on release day, I might add - and close to double that of MW3 (source: steam stats)) right now, I think you do these seminal games a disservice.

    marks:

    I had a few paragraphs in part 2 talking about waves of mods (e.g. CS, Urban Terror, Tactical Intervention... or Front Line Force, Hostile Intent, and Firearms... or The Opera, Action Half-Life, and Specialists) but I deleted them because I decided the series wasn't about documenting mods, it was to explain how modders think / why we modded.

    I make a gesture to TF in the beginning of part 2, but only for its power in portraying modding as a path to industry ascension.

    You're right, this is an omission, but it's a conscious one.

    I'm sure it's possible to write 1000 insightful words about CS or TF. I won't be writing it. The closest I've gotten, and maybe will ever get, is an essay about the bridge in de_aztec.

    Don't get me wrong -- I played a lot of CS, and I originally got into modding / level design because I wanted to make CS maps -- I just think it's already well-represented in the canon of game history. Everyone knows Minh Le but no one knows Justin Fisher. I felt I didn't need to waste words on telling people that CS is popular and influential.

    I do think, though, that CS mods are interesting -- like, surf maps in CS really fascinate me.

    One funny thing about that Jan quote is the game he made (which was the poster-boy game for 7DFPS and VenusPatrol) is GunGodz.

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    Interesting read. I would argue that there is a whole new generation of indie-only gamers who have no idea who Minh Le is. I would also argue that a large amount of them read RPS. EDIT: Albeit Justin Fisher is definitely less known overall.

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    But what about the modders who don't want or need jobs? Now there's this split in motivation and goals. What did that do to modding?

    Not sure I understand the question. I think I possibly fit the criteria though. I still just mod/make games for fun and work in a mostly unrelated industry. I do certainly have point in my life where I forget why I'm doing it and lose motivation. It comes and goes like any other hobby.

    If you’re working on modifications to build a portfolio you will make generic, mainstream, brown and jam war shooters because the evil tendrils of the AAA games industry have ruined everything. Otherwise you make pure unadulterated art.

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