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Shooter Games

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This article is about the video game genre. For electro-mechanical shooting games, see Arcade game.

For carnival shooting gallery games, see Carnival game.

Shooter video games, or shooters, are a subgenre of action video games where the focus is on the defeat of the character's enemies using ranged weapons given to the player.

Usually these weapons are firearms or some other long-range weapons, and can be used in combination with other tools such as grenades for indirect offense, armor for additional defense, or accessories such as telescopic sights to modify the behavior of the weapons.

A common resource found in many shooter games is ammunition, armor or health, or upgrades which augment the player character's weapons.

Gunfire in the first-person shooter Blood Frontier

Shooter games test the player's spatial awareness, reflexes, and speed in both isolated single player or networked multiplayer environments.

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Shooter games encompass many subgenres that have the commonality of focusing on the actions of the avatar engaging in combat with a weapon against both code-driven NPC enemies or other avatars controlled by other players.

Shoot 'em up

Main article: Shoot 'em up
See also: Side-scrolling video game and Vertically scrolling video game

Space Invaders (1978), an arcade video game that defined the shoot 'em up genre

1930s, following the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes.

It was not long before the technology began appearing in mechanical shooting arcade games, dating back to the Seeburg Ray-O-Lite in 1936. These early mechanical gun games evolved into shooting electro-mechanical games around the mid-20th century, and in turn evolved into light gun shooter video games in the 1970s.

Early mechanical light gun games used small targets (usually moving) onto which a light-sensing tube was mounted; the player used a gun (usually a rifle) that emitted a beam of light when the trigger was pulled. If the beam struck the target, a "hit" was scored.

Modern screen-based video game light guns work on the opposite principle—the sensor is built into the gun itself, and the on-screen target(s) emit light rather than the gun.

The first light gun of this type was used on the MIT Whirlwind computer, which used a similar light pen. Like rail shooters, movement is typically limited in light-gun games.

Notable games of this category include the 1974 and 1984 versions of Wild Gunman, Duck Hunt for the NES, Operation Wolf, Lethal Enforcers, the Virtua Cop series, Time Crisis series, The House of the Dead series, and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles & Darkside Chronicles.

First-person shooter (FPS)

Main article: First-person shooter

Doom (1993), a PC game which defined the first-person shooter (FPS) subgenre

First-person shooters are characterized by an on-screen representation of the player character's perspective within a three-dimensional space, with the player having control and agency over the character's movement and action within that space.

While many rail shooters and light-gun shooters also use a first-person perspective, they are generally not included in this category, as the player generally lacks agency to move their character within the game world.

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Notable examples of the genre include Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, GoldenEye 007, Battlefield, Medal of Honor, Unreal, Call of Duty, Killzone, TimeSplitters, Team Fortress 2 and Halo, while games such as Half-Life, Deus Ex, and System Shock would combine shooter gameplay with narrative-focused or role-playing game elements to instead branch off into the immersive sim genre.

Boomer shooter

Boomer shooter is a term used to describe newer FPS games (2010s and later) that are purposely designed to emulate the style and design principles of 1990s FPS games like Doom and Quake.

The name "boomer shooter" is derived from the baby boomer generation, where "boomer" has since become slang for anything old or antiquated.

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According to New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry, the term originated following the release of Dusk (2018), with fans of that game quickly coining the term.

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Newer triple-A games like Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), Doom (2016), and Doom Eternal (2020) helped to repopularize these styles of shooters in the mid-2010s, and indie developers further contributed to the field with games like Amid Evil, Ion Fury, and Ultrakill.

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Third-person shooter (TPS)

Main article: Third-person shooter

reach an extraction point elsewhere on the map while avoiding the opposing team and non-player character enemies.

During their attempt to reach the extraction point, the players may try to loot the opposing team or other features on the map for gear, which if they successfully reach the extraction point, they can keep and use to improve their character.

Alternatively, they may have other assigned objectives to complete before extraction for better rewards.

Gameplay is more slow and tactical for survival rather than straightforward run-and-gun.

Other examples of extraction shooters include Hunt: Showdown, The Cycle: Frontier and the upcoming revival of the Marathon series.

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Looter shooter

Main article: Looter shooter

Looter shooters are shooter games where the player's overarching goal is the accumulation of loot: weapons, equipment, armor, accessories and resources.

To achieve this players complete tasks framed as quests, missions or campaigns and are rewarded with better weapons, gear and accessories as a result, with the qualities, attributes and perks of such gear generated randomly following certain rarity scales (also known as loot tables).

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The better gear allows players to take on more difficult missions with potentially more powerful rewards, forming the game's compulsion loop.

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Loot shooters are inspired by similar loot-based action role-playing games like Diablo.

Examples of loot shooters include the Borderlands franchise, Warframe, Destiny and its sequel, and Tom Clancy's The Division and its sequel.

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Artillery game

Main article: Artillery game

Artillery games have been described as a type of "shooting game", [21] though they are more frequently classified as a type of strategy game.

[citation needed]

Battle royale

Main article: Battle royale game

Battle royale games are a subgenre of action games that combine last-man-standing gameplay with survival game elements, and frequently includes shooter elements.

It is almost exclusively multiplayer in nature, and eschews the complex crafting and resource gathering mechanics of survival games for a faster-paced confrontation game more typical of shooters.

The genre is named after the Japanese film Battle Royale (2000) which itself was based on the 1999 novel of the same name, and was popularized in video games with PUBG Battlegrounds and Fortnite Battle Royale.

player, who in turn has multiple lives.

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Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who combined elements from his earlier Western Gun (such as destructible environmental objects) with elements of Atari's Breakout (1976) and science fiction media, Space Invaders established a formula of "shoot or be shot" against numerous enemies.

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Space shooters subsequently became the dominant genre in arcades from the late 1970s up until the early 1980s.

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Most of these shooting games were presented from a 2D top-down-style perspective, with either a fixed or scrolling field.

Games like Space Wars (1977) by Cinematronics and Tempest (1981) by Atari used vector graphics displays rather than raster graphics, while Sega's Zaxxon (1981) was the first video game to use an isometric playfield.

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In the early 1980s, Japanese arcade developers began moving away from space shooters towards character action games. On the other hand, American arcade developers continued to focus on space shooters during the early 1980s.

According to Eugene Jarvis, American arcade developers were greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but took the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own Defender (1981) and Robotron: 2084 (1982) as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).

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Nevertheless, Japanese developers occasionally released defining space shooters in the early 1980s, such as Sega's isometric shooter Zaxxon
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and pseudo-3D rail shooter Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (1982) demonstrating the potential of 3D shoot 'em up gameplay.

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Shooter games diversified by the mid-1980s, with first-person light gun shooting gallery games such as Nintendo's Duck Hunt (1984), pseudo-3D third-person rail shooters such as Sega's Space Harrier (1985) and After Burner (1987), and military-themed scrolling run and gun video games such as Capcom's Commando (1985), Konami's Green Beret (1985) and SNK's Ikari Warriors (1986).

In the late 1980s, Taito's Operation Wolf (1987) popularized military-themed first-person light gun rail shooters.

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1990s to present

Doom (1993) by id Software is considered the first major popular first-person shooter (FPS), and it was a major leap forward for three-dimensional environments in shooter games as well as action games in general.

While first-person perspectives had been used by rail shooter and shooting gallery games, they lacked player-guided navigation through a three-dimensional space, a defining feature of FPS games.

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The use of texture-mapped 3D polygon graphics in shooter games dates back to Sega AM2's light gun rail shooter Virtua Cop (1994),

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followed by Sega's mech simulation shooter Metal Head (1995)

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and Parallax Software's FPS game Descent (1995).[39] GoldenEye 007 (1997) for the Nintendo 64 later combined the FPS sub-genre with light gun rail shooter elements from Virtua Cop, popularizing FPS games on consoles.

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In the late 1990s, FPS games became increasingly popular while rail shooters declined in popularity, as FPS games were generally able to offer more variety, depth and sophistication than rail shooters.

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One of the last mainstream light gun rail shooter franchises was The House of the Dead horror game series in the late 1990s, which along with Resident Evil had a significant cultural impact on zombie media including zombie films by the 2000s.

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Due to its violent nature, some[vague] consider the shooter game genre to be a representation of real world violence.

Debates regarding video games causing violence were exacerbated by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, whose perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were fans of the game Doom.

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Similarly, in Germany, school shootings such as those at Erfurt, Emsdetten and Winnenden, resulted in conservative politicians accusing violent shooter games, most notably Counter Strike, of inciting young gamers to run amok.

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Several attempts were made to ban the "Killerspiele" (killing games) in Germany and the European Union.

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Shooter games were further criticized when Anders Behring Breivik, perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, claimed that he developed target acquisition skills by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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This has led to a plethora of experimental research to determine the true effects.

Experimental Research, focusing on the short term effects, found that playing violent games can increase the player's aggression.

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In a 2011 Supreme Court case involving a California law, Justice Antonio Scalia stated that there was some correlation between violent video games and increased aggression, but very little real-world effects.

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An experiment by C.A. Anderson and K.E.

Dill, in which they had undergraduates randomly play either a violent or non-violent game, determined that the students who played the violent game were more susceptible to primed aggressive thoughts.

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Further studies have shown that there are some limitations with the research.

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Many[vague] research studies have not taken into account that violent video games tend to be more competitive, have a higher playing difficulty, and are more fast paced than non-violent games.

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Past research also shows that the way aggression was measured in the studies could be compared to the way competitiveness is measured, leaving open the question of whether or not the effects of violent video games are forms of aggression or competitiveness.

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Combat flight simulation games, many of which contain shooter game elements