I’m just not any good at the FPS genre, which is too bad because there are a lot of impressive FPS titles out there I’ll never get to play. What am I doing wrong? Or, alternately, what is it about the games that make them so challenging to play? I’m really quite curious, and I have been thinking about a solution for several days.

Combat in any real-time game is difficult. Often it’s less about the powers at your command and instead about whether you stay calm enough to use them properly. Since the player is never in any physical danger, normally this doesn’t seem to be a problem. This is a case where immersion, that term that seems to have suddenly warped into the c-blogs, may be a negative factor, since I doubt even the most diehard gamer would remain calm in an actual war zone. Too much of it, and that protective distance that civilians hold from real events vanishes.

FPS games seem to live off immersion in multiple senses. Although plenty of shmups, which are related in concept, have cartoonish or flat-looking graphics, I’ve yet to see an FPS that doesn’t push the system's hardware to the limit. That’s one way to achieve immersion, but it can’t be the sense I’m looking for. Virtually every genre of game has at least one example of a graphics powerhouse, and I’ve managed to handle that.

I also don’t think it’s the large number of enemies, since even the largest FPS can’t generate the number of hostile entities a dedicated RTS can. Admittedly, you have an army at your back in that case, but good RTS players still spend a lot of time manipulating and targeting single units. Neither is it the power of enemies relative to your character, since almost every genre of game has opponents capable of killing you in a single strike.

What is it then?



After watching a large number of trailers, including several for Halo 3, I think I may have identified a potential issue: the first-person aspect. Obvious, huh? But apparently that brings up a whole host of problems. Immersion is probably easiest to achieve when there’s no barrier between the player’s eyes and the character’s surroundings, which is what happens in third-person games. And whether that’s a mark of a game’s success or not, it is guaranteed to disorient the player to a certain extent.

Take perspective, for example. The Battlefield: BC 2 trailer made me jump back a little when the character’s weapon literally leaped up in front of me, blocking my view. Since I’m focusing on a faraway opponent, it’s incredibly irritating to have a massive, nearby object appear out of nowhere. It’s the same experience we get when focusing on the screen and having a younger sibling launch a small object in your face. If you can’t even rely on your own weapon to stay in one place, what can you trust?

I also can’t understand why the camera moves so much. I mean, yes, if something explodes fifteen feet to your side your head is going to shake, but that’s almost a little too real, no? It destroys a certain amount of the immersion as your eyes rapidly attempt to track everything’s new position while the rest of your body stays perfectly still. The Dust 514 trailer doesn’t seem to have this problem: all camera movement looks cohesive even when something does explode fifteen feet to your side. As a result, it doesn’t look nearly as overwhelming.



So it’s the first two letters that get to me, and not the third. Well, I’ve got a few options if I want to practice. Someone was nice enough to recommend Portal, which, while not a conventional shooter as far as I can tell, does have a first-person view. So I have the ability to improve and am not stuck with the third-person viewpoint. Still, it’s possible to have too much immersion.

And make certain to read the manual first. First-person doesn't extend to ducking.