Do first-person-shooters HAVE to be shooters?

Jonathan Bester from ITF Gaming writes: An interesting thought crept in this morning as I was traversing the interwebz. We are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of shooting/violence driven games. Especially First-Person-shooters.

[PopRocks359]

No. Proof? Portal.

[secretcode]

If you want to get technical, you still shot stuff. But instead of enemies, you shot at walls and floors.

[fairyblaster]

Article is onto something. The creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda, is currently working on a 1st person shooter, and surely no guns will be involved. WTF

[The_KELRaTH]

I see no reason why it couldn't be a 1st person platform game of which the majority never fire at anything.
......

There were a few on the Atari 800 so not a new concept.

[PopRocks359]

Portal is not a conventional shooter at all. I figured by "shooters" this article was talking about shooting things with bullets. Portal took that entire concept and warped it. Not to mention it was still in a first person perspective. From where I'm standing, it counts.

EDIT: The first of half of Mirror's Edge counts as well.

[lilbroRx]

If it doesn't have shooting then its not a first person shooter to begin with. Its game of that uses a first person view like King's Field or Pathologic. That would be a First Person "insert genre".

This title makes no sense.

[ssj27]

Or like Driveclub the next gen PS4 evolution racing games.. is all and always in FPview..

But if we get technical to the question, yes a fps need to be a shooter to be a fps.. most stupid question ever.
But to be fair he may not be stupis, I don't think the writer understand what fps means = "first person shooter ".. walla know he knows it and he was just not aware..it's ok, we learn new things ever day.

[admiralvic]

It's a conceptually flawed statement, since you can't be a puzzle game without having a puzzle, nor can you make a hack and slash with no melee based combat. Thats the whole point of having a genre, since it groups similar things together.

Also Portal isn't an FPS, it's a first person puzzle / platformer. While you can make a case for the portal being a shooter over the portal gun, the gun still in fact shoots.

[Agheil]

what about Mirrors edge? Time trials at least show a FPP is a possibility.

[BeZdaBest]

well skyrim is first person.. and you shoot magic..

idk just putting it out there..lol

[PopRocks359]

Skyrim certainly counts. I just listed Portal since it seemed like the most practical choice. Mirror's Edge is also a good option.

[GuyThatPlaysGames]

That's like saying should Madden be a sports game?

[PopRocks359]

I think a better comparison like that would be "Do all sports games need to be Madden games?"

[GribbleGrunger]

Well the short answer would have to be yes, a first person shooter has to contain guns. That is, after all, the nature of the beast. If, on the other hand the question is, 'do first person perspective' games have to contain guns, I'd say absolutely not.

[secretcode]

To be honest, the entire concept of this article to me is basically like "What if you took the racing out of a racing game" or "What if Puzzle games had no puzzles."

[GribbleGrunger]

Without definition genres wouldn't exist. They're just the best option we have to make selection a less painful, time consuming process. Once a genre is identified with one or two particular traits, the traits themselves become the genre ... hence FPS (shooter) which by it's very existence depends upon the inclusion of guns.

... this is an INSANE proposition.

[Hydralysk]

That's still a bit limiting.

There's nothing saying a shooter needs guns, it just needs the ability to shoot. You could make an archery game, a catapult/trebuchet/ballista game. As long firing projectiles is the main gameplay mechanic it doesn't really matter what you are firing.

In terms of genre definition itself though, video games are kind of screwed up as is. We define genres in games by their mechanics, FPS, RPGs, Puzzle Games, and games are the only medium that does this. No one has ever defined movie genres by the cinematography techniques used, or books by the way they structure their paragraphs, rather it's about the tone it's trying to express, drama, action, comedy, horror, romance, ect.

This probably happened because early games had little outside of their gameplay, but it's lead to this situation where we are unsure of how to classify games that buck the common mechanics of it's genre as the gameplay these genres were associated with continues to evolve.

[FragMnTagM]

Eloquent and extremely well put. +Bub.

[Kennytaur]

A first person game does not have to be a shooter, but then it's not a first person shooter is it?

[ExCest]

A First-Person Shooter isn't a First-Person Shooter if it doesn't have shooting and at least a small focus on it. It's like calling a game an RPG while the game has no elements of role playing.

A first person game without a focus on shooting, or shooting at all, would just be a first-person ____.

[Pintheshadows]

This is silly.

[ZodTheRipper]

I don't even ...why is an article with such a title getting approved?

[BattleAxe]

If there was no shooting, then what would you do? Nature walks? Cooking simulators? A game of life where you do the same things as you do in reality?

Mirrors Edge was a cool concept, although I didn't like being constantly shot at in that game. Someone mentioned Portal, which was more of a puzzle game, and Q.U.B.E. would be another one. Theres also that Surgeon Simulator 2013. I suppose Minecraft would be another take on first person perspective games.

I would love to see either a Srar Wars or Star Trek FPS game using either the Call of duty engine or Frostbite 2. DICE would make an awesome Star Wars game. Now, if only we can get Disney to actually do something smart with their Star Wars IP.

[fattyuk]

NO.

First person shooters do not have to be shooters to be a first person shooter.

/retards.

[ape007]

i like fps with some decent jumping mechanics like turok, metroid, crysis and mirror's edge

the platforming sections in turok 1 (N64) was really good

[Soldierone]

A better title would have been "First Person Without The Shooter"

An FPS is always an FPS. You take the S out and its just first person.

Mirrors Edge did a great job of demonstrating different things to do beyond shooting. You also have games like Oblivion that used Swords instead. The problem is, these take creativity and real gamers to sell. With how expensive games have become due to visuals, publishers rather just make shooters. Shooters sell. There are plenty of new gamers that won't touch a game unless it has a gun in it.

[-Gespenst-]

Of course they don't, but they still largely are. It's an oversaturated market- the industry is in serious creative doldrums at the moment because they've become money crazy- they try as best they can to eliminate the financial risk, and innovation and creativity falter because of it. Games these days are largely safe and convervative relatively speaking- they completely feed into all the expectations of what games should be rather than shifting the paradigm and experimenting. This manifests itself in the ubiquity of mindless violence in videogames, the sexist stereotyping of women not to mention the stereotyping of numerous other groups. Also on the level of videogame mechanics and gameplay too. Videogames aren't moving beyond all these juvenile things because to make money from a game, you need to give people what they expect- not something that they'll recoil from and not buy out of fear of the unknown. Because videogames have become a pricey enterprise, less risks are taken with creativity, but this has also to do with the nature of people (consumers) living within a capitalist, consumer society. We're trained to follow the whims of corporations, we lap everything up. By fixing ideas of what's good through the media and representation, you get a fixed platform for the generation of wealth, which in turn generates more power and control over consumers. Consumers come to expect what you've defined as good despite the fact that that definition is provisional, and are mesmerised by your advertisement. We can't act entitled and demand more creative games- these things are luxuries - but what we CAN do is protest the profiteering that big companies are doing off of false cultural representation- that is to say, lying to us that things should be, or are, a certain way and lying to us about what's "good" to disguise a greedy profit motive.

First person games don't need to have guns or weapons of any kind, nor do they need to have violence. These things only make us more rabid as a consumer culture, and encourage us to lap up even more stagnated shit that's churned out. Portal didn't have violence, nor will The Witness, and both games are (will be) infinitely better than most FPS'. Not to mention the culture that's generated around fetishized and rewarding depictions of violence, as well as stereotypes. Reality is far more than what 99% of your entertainment and non-entertainment media would have you believe.

[DangerouslyJack]

#ZzzZZZzzz

[CapsLocke]

It's like asking "should the right arm be right?"

[KillrateOmega]

Yes, obviously. If they weren't SHOOTERS, then they couldn't exactly be called first-person SHOOTERS... :P

A better title for this article would be:
"Do first-person games HAVE to be shooters?"

[Pintheshadows]

Agreed. It is like the author d wasn't actually aware of the nonsense he was spouting.

[SephirothX21]

That's like asking do third person shooters have to be in third person.

[Kevlar009]

I could easily play Metroid Prime without shooting. Sure it adds fun factor in a lot of situations, but I would still have a lot of admiration for it if it was purely platforming and puzzle solving. Quite a few people wouldn't even call it an FPS, moreso a First Person Adventure with shooting mechanics

If you could remove the shooting aspect from an FPS and have the game still be a great piece of work, then you know you have something special (Bioshock 1 comes to mind as a game that would be admirable even if you didn't shoot stuff)

[ironfist92]

Thats the problem I had with Infinite. It wouldve been better without the shooting imo.

[AceOfCakez]

Hexen64. Lawlz.