First Person Shooters
First-Person Shooters are a genre of video game where the player’s character is seen through the first person perspective and centers on using shooting weapons to defeat enemies and advance through levels. These games typically use single or co-operative story modes, and in recent years have seen the expansion of multiplayer aspects, where a player can play against others online. Since their rise to popularity with the games Doom and Wolfenstein, first-person shooters have become the most popular video game genre. This success on such a large scale has also brought ethical implications for first-person shooting video games, such as their focus on violence, their bias towards genders in game design, and the issues of online communication methods.
History
While the earliest versions of first person shooting games can be accredited to the game Maze War and Spasim in the year 1994 [1], the main rise to popularity of the genre was coined with Wolfenstein and Doom [1]. These games were the first to employ modern graphics and mechanics and were followed by numerous other successful first-person shooting games like Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Counter Strike.
While the earliest version of first-person shooters would be limited to PC, the expansion of the genre to console gaming opened an entirely new audience to first-person shooting games. Halo: Combat Evolved released in 2001, and displayed the powers of FPS games using an Xbox. Halo’s success paved the groundwork for the development and focus of game companies of producing first-person shooters for console gaming.
