The Myth of the Gun - Why America Loves FPS Games So Much - Extra Credits

We've often been asked why the US produces so many more first-person shooters than Japan. In the past, I've always given the standard industry answer. The first-person shooter originated in the US with companies like id and engine creators like Epic based in the states. It's simply always been easier to recruit the talent needed and get the support required to build a first-person shooter here than anywhere else. But that answer has always left me a little unsatisfied. Is the answer true? Well, yeah. Does it explain why we create more first-person shooters in the US than the rest of the world combined? Sure. But it doesn't answer the fundamental question. Why did we invent the first-person shooter in the first place? What caused game creators in the United States to look to first-person shooting while the game makers in other countries were looking elsewhere? To find the answer, we have to go back to the nativity of the first-person shooter and take a good hard look at the two great game developing nations of the time, Japan and the United States. Because the answer lies in how each culture sees warfare, conflict, and the gun. In the Hagakure, Yamamoto

Tsunetomo, a samurai turned monk, quotes Lord Shononori saying, "In the midst of a single breath, where perversity cannot be held, is the way of the samurai." Thomas Paine, revolutionary pamphleteer and inventor, said in his Crisis series, "Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it." These quotes show us a contrast. The martial philosophy of Japan comes out of Shinto and Buddhist traditions and so is focused on spiritual attainment and mastery. This philosophy is the legacy of a warrior culture which greatly predates the advent of the gun and is itself intimately tied with the spiritual life of the nation. The martial ideals of the United States, on the other hand, are the product of enlightenment philosophy and thus focus on personal freedom. The nation itself was born by the gun in support of just such principles. But what do these varying cultural outlooks mean for gaming? Quite a lot, really, because whether they realize it or not, the cultures in which these developers grew up often influence their games. In Japanese games, the gun isn't so much a gun as an extension of the self. The gun is a part of the person, the suit, or the vehicle, and is a representation of

internal force rather than a mere firearm. When an actual gun is given to a person, it's often a tool for survival whose use indicates that everything else has gone wrong. Of course, there will always be exceptions, though interestingly, these exceptions usually star American heroes rather than Japanese ones. This idea of the weapon as an extension of the self, of channeling inner force rather than relying on external power, is distinctly a Shinto and Buddhist conceptualization. It allows for concepts like mega man's internalization of new powers and his need to become a unified whole before he can put the world back to the way it was and restore peace. It even allows for games about martial artists who can project fireballs due to their mastery of their art. What it doesn't facilitate is the first-person shooter. For the FPS, you need a different conceptualization of the gun. First, you need to see the gun as a symbol of independence. You need to be able to view the gun as a tool that enables its owner to ensure that the expression of their will is not unduly constrained. Here, the gun empowers the man rather than is a part of the man. This is the American conceptualization of the gun, hammered home from our revolutionary origins to our pioneer expansion. It's what lets us put the gun in the hands of

the player, but have that gun be infinitely replaceable. In this case, an individual weapon is meaningless. All that has meaning is what that weapon lets you do. Second, for the FPS, you need the idea that anyone can be a warrior, that it's not limited by training or by cast, but rather simply by determination and the weapons available. Even though it's been almost 50 years since the last US draft, in the states, we have the heroic concept of the citizen soldier, the everyman who will rise up and fight for his ideals, needing only a weapon and a cause. This conceptualization of what the true warrior is is what allowed US developers to get rid of surrogate heroes like Solid Snake and instead have the player jump in and be the hero, acting directly from the hero's perspective. Third, we need a deeply instilled idea of personal freedoms and the value of individuality as a justification for violence. If you look at early first-person shooters, you never see another person on your side. Most of these games had human characters available, but never used them as anything but enemies. Now, having actual teammates or even writing rudimentary AI might have been more than what developers wanted to deal with at the time, but they never have you so much as talk to other characters or see a captured prisoner. Why? Because first-person shooters were about the

individual versus the world. They were the rawest expression of the cowboy ideal of personal liberty. Unfortunately, many of the bad aspects of first-person shooters come from the perversion of these ideals. Personal liberty used as a shield for the irresponsible lack of consideration for others, the ability to do violence as justification for doing violence, the universal right to bear arms as an excuse to not learn to respect weapons to use them and so on and so forth. The list goes on, we don't really need to flush it out. All we have to do is look at the cultural context for these games to reveal ways to make better first-person shooters and how to avoid many of the low points of the genre. So, why did the US begin building first-person shooters before the rest of the world? Because of the way we see conflict and the cultural mythology we've built up around the gun. But if you look closely, even today, you can see the effects of these cultural ideals on first- and third-person shooters. I'll leave you guys to find some good examples from the US, but I'm going to highly recommend checking out Vanquish. We came really close to putting it in our games you might not have tried list. Not only is the gameplay interesting, but it's a fantastic modern example of the shooter through another cultural lens. All of the powers are an extension of the character's being through a suit.

Guns aren't really guns, but rather the conceptualization of guns manifested out of the self through the understanding of guns. Yeah, and and to top it off they still felt the need to make the protagonist American, though that's probably just for marketing reasons. Anyway, thanks for watching and I hope that's given you guys something to chew on while you shoot stuff. See you next week. You're beautiful. You're beautiful.