Why Do We Like Guns So Much?

 

        Hello! I tried to do this before but I ran into a problem right out of the gate. My original question was “why are the most popular competitive games FPS’?” and my initial quick research showed that they aren’t. FPS’ make about half of the top multiplayer games when you look at Twitch or highest pay out eSports games or whatever, it’s about 50/50, even less than that because some of the games on the list are things like PlayerUnknown’s Battleground and then PUBG mobile. So my original post on this was rather short and not great to be honest so I thought I’d try again. And I’ll try not to put too much of my political opinions in here, I’m sure you can already guess where I stand if you’ve read other things I’ve written and it’s not like I have any regular readers to offend :P But there have been some YouTubers I’ve stopped watching because they’ve gotten away from their initial channel purpose and have gone more political and all it does is get me mad. I’m not trying to be “ignorance is bliss” but at the same time, it kind of is. I’m just trying to limit the information I take in and sift through the fear mongering. There was a line I really enjoyed in Durarara! from the otaku kids that went something like “Reality is such a pain. And for those of us who get fed up with that kind of reality, we simply choose to make a new one. We create little walls, and separate the trash from the stuff we like, and when that's all done we keep the things we care about and kick the rest to the curb. You'd be amazed how well it works! A whole world made out of just moe, tsundere, and BL, it's the best discovery ever! If you ask me, that really is the best way to separate reality, from fiction.” So keep that in mind with this post and anything else to do with me.

            So if my question of “why are the most popular games shooters?” isn’t valid, what IS my question? Why are we so intrigued by shooters? Why do developers decide on shooters? Why is killing someone in an FPS so rewarding/considered competitive? Could just be it’s the most straight forward thing there is. You’re dead, on the ground, I’m still standing, I win. I think Blisk says something like that in Titanfall 2. “You kill me, you’re better. I kill you, I’m better.” Simple as that. So then what is it that intrigues ME about these games? Why do I play them? You know where this is going. I’m gonna start with the lowest hanging fruit I’ve got; Tom Clancy. The original Splinter Cell games; why do I like those? It’s like a story. I know that should go without saying but this is where Ubisoft has kind of fallen off lately. When I play Splinter Cell it feels like a Tom Clancy book come to life. Now I can’t actually attest to that because I don’t know if there is, in fact, a Splinter Cell book that the game is based on nor can I say I’ve read a Tom Clancy book. My mum had bought me one for Christmas once, a big one, called Dead or Alive and I just haven’t been able to read it. I have tried to read a Division novel but I haven’t finished it. I have read several Halo books though! So, yeah, anyways. Splinter Cell follows Sam Fisher who is a spy. He goes into places he’s not supposed to and can get in and out without anyone knowing he was there. I remember in Chaos Theory, I believe, where there’s a point in a mission where you need to access a computer and there’s some joker at said computer. Well I’m in the vent behind him just aiming at his head thinking “I need this computer bro, sorry.” but just then another guard comes up and they both leave. Like this man was seconds away from death and he didn’t even know it. But it’s things like that that intrigue me about Splinter Cell. The locations, the missions, the tension of “I hope this dude doesn’t see me.” The first three were very good for this, I never finished Double Agent but Conviction and Blacklist haven’t quite had the same feeling. Blacklist was closer but it’s missing something.

            I started my Rainbow Six journey with Vegas. Rainbow Six follows a Special Forces group that is more like a SWAT team then a military unit and that’s what I like about Rainbow. I really like the SWAT aesthetic versus a military look. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s the black versus green camo, I think part of it is balaclavas and masks. I really like masks for some reason. But no, like, I use to work at a shoe store and before I left I bought a pair of Bates boots because I really liked them. I believe they’re a typical cop shoe/boot. I did wear them for paintball and airsoft but now I’ll typically wear them when my wife makes me help with her gardening because I don’t want my normal shoes to get so muddy and they’re good for the ankle support when I’m pounding a shovel into the ground but I really like the look of SWAT gear. As I said in another post that’s what I really like about most of the characters base look in Siege is that they look ready to breach a house. I think part of what I like too is the idea that they can wear more armor, in game anyway, then a typical soldier because they’re breaching and clearing a building typically, not sprinting across a battlefield or whatever. My character in Vegas 2 had armor maxed out. In a game where you’re trying to eliminate a dangerous terrorist threat with unknown variables why would you not want as much armor as possible?

            I’m not going to talk about Ghost Recon, don’t worry, I’ll just skip over that and if this is your first post of mine you’re reading then just scroll on through my other posts, every other one is about Ghost Recon. I really like The Division right now. I remember playing the first one and I must’ve been doing something wrong because on the first mission I was out of ammo like the entire time. People weren’t dying in one shot to the head, nor from grenades at their feet, I wasn’t having any of it. It just wasn’t what I was used to in terms of shooter video games but I’ve come around on The Division 2. I’m not even sure what prompted me to pick it up but it’s fun. It’s more of a video game in that you have guns, it’s set in the real world more or less but you have skills, talents, armor sets, it’s interesting. At the time of writing there’s an event going on called “polarity” where the enemies all have either a blue negative sign or positive yellow sign over their heads. Your arm glows with either a blue or yellow and every time you swap weapons or reload your arm changes color. When it’s yellow you do damage to blue enemies and significantly less damage to yellow enemies. It’s interesting, it’s different, I’m sure this is something they’ve done before but this is my first time actually being apart of it. It just forces you to go about encounters in a different way and slows the pace down.

            So what about other shooters? Well Apex Legends is sci-fi and it’s a little goofy. There’s some plot that seems like characters hate each other, want to kill each other but these “games” seem to be non-lethal. Everything else too seems to be just a little goofy or like the developers are going out of their way to be like “this is a video game.” It’s almost like that’s the intention. There was a time when developers were trying to make everything super realistic but they seem to have toned it down. Sure you have your Call of Duty’s but things are so over the top that it’s like an action movie more than anything. I guess what I’m getting at is games don’t cause violence. I’ve been gaming since I was in diapers and I’m not a raging homicidal maniac. Granted I haven’t been playing GTA and CoD since I was a child and that might not be the best thing for young kids to be playing but still. Penn & Teller did an episode on this topic on their show Bullshit where there was a kid who played these kinds of games for years at the time and they arranged for him to fire a real gun. Everyone was completely safe, there were several professionals around at the range and the kid fired the gun once, put it down, walked to his mom and cried. People know the difference between a game and real life. I know that hasn’t been brought up yet in the current circumstances that have been going on at the moment and maybe it won’t. Maybe all the politicians have wised up to the research or just moved their focus on something else. I might be losing you at this point. I think that’s fine. I’m kind of straying off topic I guess.

            Point is; why do we gravitate towards games about hunting each other down to be number one? Why the violence? Isn’t there a better form of competition we can have? I think it’s just ingrained in our DNA. Most sports are you know, semi-violent. Full contact, shit can go wrong. Boxing, MMA are pretty brutal at times, why do we watch that? Why do people put their bodies through that? To push themselves. To see who’s better. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Guy from Predators quoting Hemingway. I don’t know, what do you think? Why do you think us humans as a species are so interested in violence in our media? Proxy and I were talking and he was telling me how there’s things in horror games that he thinks is really cool or like, if something awful happens to a character he’s thinks “man that was brutal” but in a cool kind of way you know? But when he sees something similar in a movie it grosses him out. I’ve seen this many times myself. Something will happen on screen and he’ll squirm and make “blecking” noises. It’s kind of funny. I, myself, remember in Black Ops 3, I believe, there were woman enemy NPCs and it kind of threw me off. I’m not sure why, I just really didn’t want to shoot them or I felt bad. I don’t have this feeling in The Division 2, or any other game I can think of really. I don’t know, it’s weird. So again, what do you think? Do you play violent games? What about it intrigues you? Is it just the fact that these sorts of things shouldn’t happen in our everyday life? Or that we don’t want to see it in our everyday life so we find a safe way to engage with it? I don’t know if my questions are coming out right. I feel like I’m not conveying what I want to say properly. What else is new huh? Okay, bye bye for now. Be safe.

        P.S. I also like this from someone on Twitter I just didn't know how to fit it in: "i always found it interesting how things like mortal kombat brutalities where someone's getting eviscerated with semi-realistic visuals are considered fine but a female character in a skimpy outfit can cause controversy."

               @AztecSauce