First Person Shooter Game Designer

Who Made That?

Who Made That First-Person-Shooter Game?

Credit... Illustration by Eboy; Data Source: The NPD Group/Retail Tracking Service

Jan. 31, 2014

"It was like playing with dolls," says the video-game designer and 3-D graphics creator John Carmack, thinking back to the computer entertainments before Call of Duty, Halo, Doom and all the other "first-person-shooter" games. "In a typical game of that time, your character was maybe 16-by-16 pixels in an overhead view. Maybe it did some cute things that made you smile. But you were still controlling a tiny little thing on the screen."

That era ended in November 1991, when Carmack and his colleagues at id Software put out a program called Catacomb 3-D. In many ways, it wasn't that new or different: "You ran around, you shot things at monsters, you picked up health and bonus items, you got to the end of the level and went to the next one with a different layout," Carmack said. But for Catacomb 3-D, they swapped the standard bird's-eye view for one in which the player saw only what his character might see — slime-soaked walls to his left and right, beasties up ahead.

That shift changed the way that people played. "It was more powerful than I expected," Carmack said. "We'd watch people creeping around a corner, turning with the arrow keys, and then a door would open, and there would be a big troll right there, and people would scream. They would literally fall out of their chair or jump away from the keyboard. It was a reaction that we'd never seen in any other form of video-gaming." Still, Catacomb 3-D was not widely distributed. The following year, id Software put out a free demo version of a similar game, Wolfenstein 3-D, in which players fought off Nazi mutants and a cyborg Hitler. The marketing scheme worked perfectly. Wolfenstein became a hit, and the "F.P.S." genre has been popular ever since.

The first-person shooters from id Software built on two traditions in game design. The continuous action came from early flight simulators, in which players drifted slowly through a 3-D world. The maze-and-monster setting came from "dungeon crawls," which had players step their way through wire-frame corridors, one keystroke at a time. The simulators and the dungeon crawls each employed first-person views, but neither had the fast-paced, run-and-shoot aesthetic of Catacomb or Wolfenstein.

Carmack's innovations were significant, but others could just as easily have made them first. "There could have been an arcade game that was an F.P.S., and it could have been really huge," Carmack said. "There were opportunities for people to do these things, but they just didn't."

HEAD GAMES

Daphne Bavelier, a neuroscientist at the University of Geneva, has been studying the long-term effects of playing video games since 2000.

What happens to people who play first-person shooters? They show greater benefits in vision, mental rotation and task-switching.

That's surprising. I can tell you that 10 years ago no one would ever have predicted that playing a first-person-shooter video game would be good for vision. Everybody thought that screen time was bad for vision. Well, it happens that spending a lot of time reading on a computer is bad for your vision, but spending a lot of time playing first-person-shooter games is good for your vision.

So we should all play Call of Duty? It's not an excuse for bingeing. What is most efficient is what we call "distributed practice" — about 40 minutes per day, five days per week, for several weeks.

What about the violence? First-person shooters are violent, but you could have scenarios with exactly the same mechanics that aren't violent. We have created one game where you are a doctor and you need to cure all these animals of diseases. You shoot them to give them medical help.

There must be a lot of parents who don't find your work convincing. People have opinions, but their opinions may need to be put in check by controlled lab studies. We need to go beyond saying, "I know what these games do because I see my son playing them," and try to understand the complexities — that different video games have different effects.