Sunday, November 26, 2006

PS3 and the Problem of First-Person Shooters

Disclaimer: My folks never banned toy guns from the house, and I've never been adamant about gun control, though I always thought an obsession with guns was creepy in the extreme. Since the post-Thanksgiving advertising season began, the onslaught of ads for PS3, Xbox, and Wii has been narrowly focused on the first-person shooter game. Silly me, I thought that advanced graphics might be useful for three-dimensional virtual worlds (unrelated to blasting everything to kingdom come) and to the next level of John Madden sports spectacular. Instead, we get killing people/robots/animals with weapons of every stripe. Friends tell me Sony et al are simply responding to the college-age male demographic. I say the problem is that too many gamers are morons. Don't give me that "eye-hand dexterity" shit. Shooter experts are being groomed as cannon fodder by the Defense Department. Other than that, the shooter game carries no redeeming social value except proving the idiocy of the player, and showing how many gaming dummies are lackeys for a military-fascist state.

2 comments:

John G said...

As someone who plays video games occasionally I have to say video games that make you think are pretty rare. What's even sadder is that A LOT of people cheat on these types of games. Why even bother?

Brian Santo said...

Every once in a while, I rather like blasting people (and the occasional monster) into giblets and gravy.

But I prefer video games that don't depend entirely on slicing, spattering, or generally reducing animates into bits. And there few of them.

BTW, I have cheated on the occasional installment of Myst because I couldn't figure something out. Several somethings, actually. But in my defense, I did try first.