Action Games

I was thinking about first person shooter games recently - I really like the Infinity Ward Call of Duty games and I was wondering how something like that can evolve.  Perhaps the fallout from IW and Activision came from the conflict of wanting to continue to advance the genre at the risk of loosing the lucrative player base.


Anyway, that's not what I wanted to write about.  What I was thinking is that we are often asking how games can get more critical praise outside of gaming press.  Basically, most non-gamers simply view games as mindless shooting rampages, which isn't terribly off base.  Perhaps a good analogy is that if most current games are like action movies now.  Then I would say, the best way to advance the art of games is not to try to reinvent them as dramas, but to just migrate them slightly over to the 'war movie' category. 


War movies have no trouble earning critical praise, as war is a great setting to place characters and develop them from a storytelling point of view.  Games can take a similar approach - keep the action, the setting, the characters, but add in those elements which distinguish the war film genre from action films.  Character development, inner conflict, emotion and consequences.  I think that last element is one of the most important.  Actions have to have consequences, which means that players can't be the unstoppable hero anymore.  What the player does can be exciting, but must be grounded too.


If you remember when Medal of Honour first came out, the first mission had you on the Normandy beaches.  I remember that being such an amazing experience, but gradually that memory was tarnished when the game turned into a largely linear one many army campaign of the unstoppable hero.  That's why I was so excited for Call of Duty, I think the early tag line was 'no one fought alone'.  This opened the door to much more drama by creating other characters on your side who participated in all the events - giving them more realism, and more weight when allied characters were lost.  There was a long way to go, but it was a great start.  Gradually, the Call of Duty series seems to be shifting back to a one man army mode again.


I think action games could move back in this direction - shifting the focus off the player, and adding more plausibility to the events.  Give enemies the power to surrender or retreat when the tide turns against them, have the player deal with supporting teammates or tending to wounded or scared allies not as a quick time event but as a equal component of any scenario.  If  the game was structured to limit the player to only shooting few enemies per level, would actions start to carry more weight?  What if the loss of allied teammates was a permanent loss?  What if there was down time where you could talk or interact with teammates between action sequences?  I think these are interesting questions to consider.


Anyway, its not about changing the most popular games - we still have action movies.  Its just about expanding into new areas that might offer new experiences.

Put Captain Price in here and let's see what happens.




J