Bit Rant: Guns and Disempowerment

Today I'm going to try something a little different with a new series I call Bit Rant. Basically this will just be a humorous rant against popular mechanics or topics to approach them from a different point of view. As such everything here should be taken as parody rather than literal critique.

With that out of the way, let's talk about how horrible the mechanics in modern FPS games are and how they directly undermine their narrative themes!

Shooters and Empowerment

Let's be realistic - most shooters are macho male power fantasies. What could possibly be more manly than playing as a 400 lb gorilla running straight into oncoming fire and then sawing an enemy in half with a chainsaw attached to the end of a gun? The only way you could add any more patriotic testosterone to that scene is if your hero was grunting the national anthem with an eagle riding on his shoulder.

As a result everything in modern shooters has been carefully crafted to make the player feel empowered, from the oversized chainsaw guns to the massive tanks miraculously operated by a single person. You walk slowly away from explosions, you dodge and soak bullets like you're the manchild of a black hole and sponge, you wield firepower that would put a howitzer to shame, and if your kill count by the end of the game isn't past 4 digits then you are rewarded with the "Pacifist" trophy for your unending mercy.

Modern developers do such a good job of crafting the feeling of player empowerment that nobody even notices that it's all a lie.

External Locus of Power

All the power that is given to the player in shooters is external; your character is able to do all these powerful things because of the gun that is handed to him. In fact there is almost no action that you can take in modern shooters that isn't enabled by what is given to you. The message the game is sending you is clear: the player is actually completely powerless and any degree of empowerment is an illusion at the whim of external forces.

This point is driven home any time a weapon is taken from you in a shooter. Think of that moment in Half-Life 2 toward the end when your weapons get wrenched from your grasp and start to be disintegrated in front of you - not even Amnesia (a game built explicitly around player disempowerment) was able to capture the same level of helplessness you feel at that moment.

Think about that - simply by taking away your gun your average empowering shooter can feel more disempowering than a horror game specifically crafted to remove player power.

At least magikarp eventually learns tackle

To make matters worse shooters tend to be the only genre that regularly has this problem. If Dante from DMC loses his weapon he starts bare knuckle boxing, if a Final Fantasy character gets disarmed they start lobbing magic, Minecraft and Skyrim let you punch up a storm, and there are several games like Mark of the Ninja that have options to actually remove all weapons that you have and you still end up feeling like a badass.

Developers seem to be acutely aware of the issue as well since they always feel the need to compensate it with the overly macho characters and themes that are so common in modern shooter games. Better not have a character emote anything other than aggression and rage lest the player realize just how fragile they really are!

It is a bit unfortunate that modern shooters preclude themselves from any meaningful human interaction because of how dismissive the mechanics are to any source of strength other than weapons, but I think that most players are too busy trying to forget how helpless they really are to notice that either.

________________________________________________________________________________

Well I hope you enjoyed that experiment! If you have some feedback of everything that I did horribly (or well) or if you have an idea for a topic for Bit Rant in the future let me know in a comment below!