I dunno if folks from the US know this but while of course in the Engled Land DOOM was a thing for Gamers, when it comes to the layman it never really caught on until the PSX port in 1995. That alone isn't a big deal cos two years of The Cultural Not Know isn't exactly a huge deal all things considered. But if you didn't know PS1 Doom is weird! And honestly to this day THIS is the version of DOOM I think of when thinking about it at all, the vivid memory of being introduced to it at my uncle's bungalow for the first time will always stay with me.
Just some context as to why, despite playing it not too long ago, I booted up this version again recently for nostalgia's sake. Maybe it's being nostalgic itself that caused the thing but it got me in a contemplative mood. Cos FPS are a little bit of a dirty genre, got that grott to iot, that sneaking into your parents room feeling about it like enjoying these things is somehow both incredibly mundane and little wrong. I think it's the guns.
I gotta think about what the first person who programmed a gun in a game was thinking. I can only imagine in such primitive days of game design a man walking back a forth in an office lamenting how the players hitbox and only touch the enemies hurt box when it's so close to YOUR hurt box, if only the hit box could MOVE and touch the enemies hurt box, IF ONLY there was a device in our world which could contextualise that ac-WAIT A MINUTE!!!!
This is all to say, games with guns are both inevitable and not a egregious sin in a vacuum. It's a very practical solution to problem of "How Player do attack without doing the Be Near Enemy and Be Hit And Die?" THE HIT BOX CAN MOVE! Oh how it can move, in many ways actually! But preferably no where near your hurt box, no sire! Especially in a genre like First Person where the PC, your hurt box and your entire means to perceive the world you exist in; the camera, are all in fact the same thing! Like yeah, making your hit box 'Be Over There and Not Here' is an incredibly valuable thing. Especially since needing to be close to an opponent has direct ramifications on your visibility. If you're punching a dude, the dude's covering your screen!
I say all this cos when talking about the games which do guns, I think it's important to establish how Guns In Games wern't like a US military complex plant from the jump and actually make a lot of sense for a player character to have a projectile to engage in combat or as a means to interact with the world in non-violent ways as well (We'll get there)
This was all spurred on by something I notice about people who play games in general, people from my real life who are the sweetest people you could ever hope to meet. People with such overflowing empathy and kindness, who will watch me play REmake 4 and comment how good it sounds when the guns fire and decapitate a man. hahaha. WHAT THE FUCK!?!?
But actually that's not weird all things considered, and that's the realisation I came too when playing this version of DOOM. Let's think about the First-Person-Anything for a second, not as a person immersed in the physical world accepting the context of what you're seeing, I mean as YOU the person sitting down playing the game seeing Thing On Screen. What are you seeing? As in what are you looking at while playing DOOM? Well you're travelling through early 90's PC blocks that represent Mars and Hell, all while taking a sneaky peek at the UI that is ever present on screen for information on ammo and health. But just above that there's something else isn't there?
It's easy to not think about it, right? It's you, of course it's there, it's your means of contextualising your PC's physical presence in the world, it's easy to tune it out as visual noise of the game world. But I mean it IS there you know, DoomGuy's hand, or hand on a pistol or a barrel of his weapon. It's not just there it's ALWAYS there, every hour, every minute, every second of every FRAME of game time it's there. Just peeking out from the GUI.
Maybe this is a hot take, but this it when it dawned being A Little Gun Horny isn't a binary state, it's not the BAD STATE and once you're there, you are a life-time Republican fascist who cannot redeemed. Like is it not just Normal that when a game puts you in this constant close quarters relationship with Literary Anything that is your main means to interact with the world, games that can last for double digit amount of hours, you develop a relationship with the thing and that relationship is gonna be: A little weeiirrdd.
Of course with DOOM as our example this can feel very quaint, with weapons having 2 frames of animation at the least with only the Super Shotgun going OFF THE RAILS with 8. But DOOM has a very literary and no nonsense approach to it's gun design, they look like how it would look using their ironsights as it were. There's no glitz or glamour which leads to some... Shapes. Like remove the context for a second and think about the SHAPES of DOOM's weapons, as a young'un I thought the handgun looked like a little policeman in a hat (I must stress I was playing the PS1 port so the added pixelation didn't help!). This abstraction absolutely helped with developing a weird relationship to the guns, I remembered the OG shotgun vividly has being this incomprehensible shape which means I got a little attached like it was a character, this feels unhinged to type now as a 30 year old lol
This was just a listing of a load of nonsense thoughts I had while replaying DOOM again, but these thoughts have really stuck into my mind hence. I played the Metroid Prime Remaster recently and these same thoughts of your relationship with your arm cannon played through my mind, how much is shifts and transforms, does little beeps and boops to keep this thing you have to always look at organic and interesting. If some people really desire reeling it back on Gun Violence in games, then I do think it's important to think about this very very bizarre dynamic games do encourage with First Person perspectives and how you can apply this to other objects. There are more games doing this out there then you think and the potential for other genre's of things to get in on this dynamic is surprisingly untapped. Do you know no one's done a FPS where you're a magician? Think of the visually fuckery you can do with a little wand?
If nothing else, it's made me FPS in general more appealing for me, even the one's which truly are just guns. If only to notice the weird relationship I'm developing with The Object, it's something only games could make you feel. It's weird! I love computer games!
