Some of you may have heard of Sarcastic Gamer, those of you who have will know about Rothbart and his famous “rants”. Today he posted about First Person Shooters (FPS’) and asked “What’s the frickin’ point?!“. The primary goal of his rant was too piss people off, but it did get me thinking, why do we buy FPS’, and why is there such a large quantity of them?.

To which I answer:

People, like, to, shoot, stuff. Failing that, they like to feel as though they’re shooting stuff.

With that in mind, some company had the bright idea of putting people in a game where they got to do so.

On screen you have the image of an arm holding a gun, they almost never show you the face of the main character. That way, you have an easier time imagining that the character is actually you.

Developers release new games with new graphics, new story (or lack of), new guns etc, because they know it’s like stealing from the blind. They’ve found something that doesn’t need reason, that doesn’t need justifying. Other than to say “let people shoot things and they will come”.

But the same can be said for any product.

Why do people buy sports/super cars even though the speed limit will always be 50Km/h? Because it makes them feel as though they can go fast.
Why do manufacturers keep releasing new sports/super cars even though the speed limit will always be 50Km/h? Because this new Ferrari will make you feel like you can go even faster!

Why do people like First Person Shooters – because they get to feel as though they’re shooting stuff.
Why do developers keep making First Person Shooters? Because now you get to feel what it’s like to shoot down a helicopter with an RPG!

That being said. Developers these days do try to make their shooters have more of a story behind them, they like to be able to say “we’re bridging the gap between RPG (Role Playing Games) and FPS”. Why?
Because now they’re tapping into two vaults, those who like to shoot stuff, and those who like a story.

Personally I think that for an FPS to be interesting in the long term it does need to take aspects from other genres. Whether it’s a story line like in BioShock, or if it requires a lot of strategy like in Rainbow Six: Vegas. I personally wouldn’t see myself playing any FPS for more than an hour if it didn’t tap into these other areas.

But cmon. Lets face it. They don’t need a story, or new weapons to sell big. Take Unreal for example. There’s no story there, and has anyone else noticed that Unreal Tournament 3 is almost exactly the same as Unreal Tournament 2k4? Of course! But do we care? No! Because now we get to play Capture the Flag with a tank!

I’ve heard people talk about FPS’ as being the lowest rung in gaming, and I think they’re right. Out of all the gaming genres I’d say it’s the one that takes the least effort to make, the least effort to play. But it has it’s purpose. They’re the type of game that you can just pick up and play, and then put back down once you need/want to.

So, really there is no happy ending to this post. There is no grand philosophical reason behind it all. The unfortunate fact is that FPS gamers will buy into whatever crap they sell. We pray that they will give us something of quality that we’ll be able to really get into, but the simple fact is that when we want to shoot something, we have only one place to go (well, only one place to go if we don’t want to end up in jail). We’re at their mercy, not the other way around.

Fanboys. We all know one, and in all probability are one (whether we will admit it or not). We defend our chosen system like it’s our lively-hood. We’re never willing to take a step back and look at something for what it really is.

Why?

Why are we (as fanboys) so willing to overlook the inadequacies of our chosen system(s)?

If we keep blindly defending our system of choice, if we continue to push aside it’s faults, it’s cost, it’s manufacturers laziness (whether it be MS not testing the 360 properly, or Nintendo giving us last gen graphics) we will end up sending those companies one message: “It’s ok, you don’t have to make it perfect, just average”, and in the end, it will be all of us who lose.

Xbox 360 is a great gaming console. The graphics are top-notch. The available games are diverse. But how many people can say theirs lasted more than a year?

Nintendo Wii. They really did break some new ground with their controllers. It’s great fun. I played Zelda through 2 times in a row. But is that enough? Is it ok that Nintendo just took a GC, prettied it up and gave it motion sensors?

So, why is it so hard for us to fight alongside our “rivals” when they are pointing out a manufacturers mistake?

Pride.

We’ve just spent our hard earned cash on something, and then someone has come along and pointed out why we were silly to do so. We feel the need to defend our choice. Are we right to do so? Sure. But that doesn’t mean we should let it go as far as to justify the faults. No fault is justifiable. We as the fans should be the First to paint the picket signs.

So please, gamers, get past your pride. When someone puts down your console, they are not putting you down with it. Separate yourself from emotion and look at things as they really are. We deserve better than what we are getting.

First let me start off by saying: Happy Farther’s Day to any Dads out there!

How did Farther’s Day get it’s start?
This was a question I seriously pondered on my way home from a party last night.
I had always assumed that Mother’s Day was created first, and that Father’s Day came about afterwards just because it would be unfair to have a holiday for only one of the parents.

So I was a bit surprised to find that it was more the opposite.

Mrs. John B. Dodd from Spokane Washington was the creator of this wonderful day. Her farther William Smart fought in the Civil War and was widowed after his wife died giving birth to their sixth child. He raised his six children on his own on a rural farm, and when Mrs. Dodd grew into adulthood, she realised the strength and selflessness of her farther and wanted a way to honour him.

She spoke with the ministers of Spokane and convinced them to hold a special service at the church dedicated to farthers. The year after that the whole state of Washington began to celebrate Farther’s Day.

I guess you could say that started the “snowball effect”, as now more states and organizations wanted an annual Father’s Day celebration for the whole country. They began lobbying Congress to declare such a holiday. The idea of a “Father’s Day” was approved by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, but it was not official until President Calvin Coolidge made it a national event in 1924.

-So there you go. Farther’s Day: a day not to be missed.

I thought I would share an interesting article I read on Veronica Belmont’s Blog. I think we have all developed a relationship with at least one person online. Someone who you have never actually met, but who you have a genuine friendship with.

In this article Veronica touches on the unfortunate mortality of the people behind the other screen:

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about the relationships that we form online, and how they affect our lives. We interact with hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of people online everyday, but rarely do you know more about a person than a first name, handle, or icon. Regardless, oftentimes an emotional attachment is made (for better or for worse) because you know someone through their opinions and words. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for some time, but I don’t know if I can find the right words to express how I feel on the matter, so stick with me.

This past month, two people whom I knew through online communities passed away. The first was Bruce Galloway, a member of my guild. He fell sick very suddenly, and the entire guild banded together to support him. It was a wonderful thing to see at the time, and when he passed away we shared in our grief together. Only a few of us had actually met him in person, but the feelings of sadness and loss were no less painful because of that.

The second person was Ben High, a listener and contributor to ExtraLife Radio, a podcast that I’ve listened to for a long time. He had a great segment that he would send in to those guys almost every week where he would showcase a new indie band. He was only 19, and he also died very suddenly and unexpectedly. When I learned about it, it broke my heart to think that someone so young and with so much potential was gone.

And when James Kim, my good friend and coworker at CNET, passed away this last December it was astonishing to see the outpouring of support from the online community. As the Internet becomes such so intertwined with our daily lives, it seems like we find new ways to share emotion about the loss of someone important to all of us. When someone dies in a community they come together for the wake, to grieve, to discuss the person’s life and accomplishment. Online we do the same thing, but we’re oftentimes separated from one another by thousands of miles.

I’m not really sure what the point of this post was. The internet is a wonderful way to meet new people, but at the same time the reality often hits that there are real people on the other side of the screen who can get sick, or have an accident, or die. Trying to understand how to deal with the feelings of losing someone you know but have never actually met is a task that we’re all going to have to become more familiar with as time goes on, and as we become ever more absorbed in the online world.