Reid McCarter - Shooter

Copyright 2015 SHOOTER (R. McCarter and P. Lindsey). All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without explicit permission is prohibited.

First Edition

http://www.shooterbook.com

Editing by: Reid McCarter and Patrick Lindsey

Illustrations by: Paul Sousa

Interior layout and design by: Oscar Strik

Cover design by: Scott McCarter

Copyediting by: Trish Osuch

Acknowledgements

Reid and Patrick would like to thank Gillian Fizet, Nathan Meunier, Trish Osuch, and Alan Williamson for their advice, assistance, and encouragement.

Foreword:
On Gunplay

By Clint Hocking

Of all the major professional team sportsfootball, soccer, basketball, baseball, and hockeyI believe pretty strongly that hockey is the best. While this is a question of personal taste and preference, hockey, with its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, is the most dynamic of the professional sports. The way all the elements come togetherparticularly at the elite level of playmakes for an exceptionally beautiful game.

While I could discuss at length why I think hockey is better than any of the other major professional sports, thats not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about shootersvideogames wherein the main player activity involves shooting other (virtual or simulated) players. A well-executed competitive shooter, such as Counter-Strike , is also an exceptionally beautiful game, and heres the thing: While I believe that hockey is objectively better than football or basketball, I dont think I can say that hockey is better than Counter-Strike . With its speed, its constant back and forth, its ever-changing match-ups, and its balance of positional team play and individual reflex skill, Counter-Strike is as dynamic as the most popular competitive games in the world. Counter-Strike is an exceptionally beautiful game. Like all great competitive games, it is engaging to watch, enriching to play, and highly demanding of the serious player who can endlessly plumb its depths and range over its enormous strategic terrain in a quest for self-betterment that will never, ever end.

Like hockey, Counter-Strike , and competitive shooters in general, challenge a number of player skills: reflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-making. Because of the dynamic nature of these games, the skills effectively have no ceiling, so the challenge is not to meet some arbitrary, fixed skill bar, but rather to out-perform the opponent. Both Counter-Strike and hockey deliver what I call synthetic meaning: meaning that arises through a ludic dialectic taking place between players constantly proposing and counter-proposing theories of optimal play. Counter-Strike and hockey are ongoing arguments. They are arguments about what it means to be human in the context of the relevant skills.

But if competitive shooters see their meaning synthesized at runtime through a dialectic between players, what does that say about the single-player shooter? Single-player shooters largely challenge the same core player skills as multiplayer shootersreflexes, strategic decision-making, match-up evaluation, positional knowledge and awareness, and local, tactical decision-makingbut because there is no opponent, the challenges are at least broadly (and in some cases quite strictly) authored. The game designers have decided where to fix the skill bar for any given corridor or arenaif the player meets the bar, she continues, if not, she tries again. In this sense the single-player shooter moves away from being a dialogue, and toward being a lecture. More important than that; because the opponent is not another human, but is instead the game itself, the single-player game is not a lecture about what it means to be human, but is instead a lecture about the nature of the game. A single-player game is, in some sense, a prescribed curriculum of drills, gated with tests.

There are a few interesting repercussions that arise from using this framework for thinking about meaning (and this is only one possible framework for thinking about games in general or shooters specificallyyou will encounter others in this book). First, this framework seems to imply that all competitive shooters are necessarily about the same thing; they are about a specific perspective on human existence. It implies that Counter-Strike and Quake are ultimately the same game; they are arguments about the same topic, perhaps being conducted in different languages, but essentially the same conversation. That may sound like a crippling critique of the competitive shooter, but the second repercussion of using this framework implies something equally critical of the single-player shooter: that the authoring of an arbitrary skill bar by a designer makes the skill component of the game only as important to its meaning as any other authored element. In other words, in single-player shooters, the gameplay is only of the same magnitude of importance as the storythe single-player shooters ability to express the specific undermines to some extent its capacity to address the universal.

Simply stated, this framework suggests that all competitive shooters are about one universally important and fundamental thing, while each single-player shooter is about something different. If we want to validate that, we can extrapolate the framework to other games and across different media to see whether it is predictive of things we generally hold to be true. For example, we can look at professional boxing and professional MMA fightingtwo different but similar competitive combat sportsand determine that, yes, they are broadly about the same thing (perhaps the comparative importance of the cerebral cortex and the amygdala). At the same time, we can look at two different films about boxingsuch as Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull and see that they express wildly different ideas. The fighting in these films becomes a motive force for the development of the characters and the plot. As in a typical single-player shooter, the range of player skill (in this case the boxing capability of the characters) has been authored in service of the story.

Curiously, the documentary When We Were Kings is an authored film that directly examines what boxing is about by presenting the idea that the Rumble in the Jungle was essentially an argument between Muhammad Alis theory that the cerebral cortex was more important and George Foremans theory that it was still the amygdala. Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are both excellent films that talk in their own specific ways about human strength and human frailty. When We Were Kings interprets the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire as being a fundamental statement about the triumph of seven million years of human evolution that literally gave rise to everything we know (thankfully Ali won). Million Dollar Baby and Raging Bull are beautiful because I empathize with the things they are about. Boxing is beautiful because I am what it is about.

Back to shooters.

I am not here to throw the single-player shooter under the bus. The best game I ever worked on was a single-player shooter, and while I happily concede that it was not as beautiful a game as Counter-Strike , that does not mean that some theoretical single-player shooter could not be. On the contrary: I think the single-player game is uniquely positioned to leverage the competitive games power. It can use this power to address the universal within the context framed by its more authored and specific meanings. The first step toward achieving this, of course, lies in having something to say.