So What If First Person Shooters Are Repetitive?

Whether you’re shooting zombies, terrorists, aliens, or Nazis it seems that most first person shooters all follow the same simple formula.

Pit a player in an epic environment with a desperate conflict in which his/her faction or side is losing. Then have their respective faction enlist their help to somehow turn the tides of war.

The player then must slaughter their way through countless armies and foes in order to achieve victory and save the world. Now throw in some explosions and engaging firefights throughout the game and you got yourself a FPS.

Predictable? Yes, and many have complained as a result, but will the FPS genre change anytime soon?

Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War are all franchises that are both wildly popular and critically acclaimed. These games are also admittedly following this simple and proven recipe for success.

In the FPS world, a new environment with new enemies, a modified storyline, and new weapons is enough to denote an entirely different game. Many, however, will disagree with this superficial view.

To these people repetition is a characteristic of laziness and a lack of creativity. This may be true, but what these people forget to realize is that they’re judging games.

A good game is one that is enjoyable and fun, and in the end as long as a game does both, does anything else really matter? Most critics (mainstream ones) certainly do not think so. The three titles mentioned earlier were all praised by critics, only fueling their amazing popularity throughout gaming and popular culture.

However, as the industry evolves and become more complex, games will also become more heavily scrutinized. As we know them now, video games are just a simple form of entertainment, but in the future games will likely become more than just that.

In order to draw parallels, let’s look at Hollywood action flicks.

A big explosion there, an intense fight scene here, add some sexy women everywhere and voilà (or cha-ching), you have a formula for a typical money-making Hollywood action film.

Shallow, though it may be, millions of people continue to flood the theaters for these formulaic films because they know they’ll be entertained, but rarely do movie critics ever consider these pieces to be a great work of cinema.

As movies became increasingly popular, a counterculture opposed to “cliché” movies arose, and slowly movies were transformed from a source of entertainment into an art form. As a result, this opened up films to be thoroughly criticized in every aspect despite whatever the director’s or producer’s intentions may have been.

With games becoming an integral part of popular culture, it is more likely that games too will evolve into an art form.

Already, a similar counterculture seen with films has been developing, and many gaming abstractions with unique styles have risen. For example, Katamari Damacy and countless other games with Japanese origins that American audiences are not ready for…yet.

What does this all mean for the FPS genre in the future? Most likely nothing much will change. The same basic formula will be there because it is and will continue provide hours upon hours of fun, which is what a game should do.

Sure, it’ll be nice to have some variation from time to time, but if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it.