Guns in games aren't real.
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Hey you there, do me a favour.
Imagine You are designing a game for a large company with a tight deadline. You are crafting a military experience, and the player must take the role of a soldier in conflict. Where do you put your focus?
On articulate and precise physics, rotatable items, with small intricate details? On complex and engaging bomb-planting and defusing gameplay? Or on weapon feel, sound and animations, on making the one thing you do all the time feel as good to do as you possibly can. Its not stroke of genius to mention that, of course, FPS devs focus on making the first-person shooter part as good as it can be. And a game with multiple gameplay focuses usually miss the mark on some or all.
The wow-factor of one really good system of gameplay usually outweighs multiple mediocre ones. But choosing to focus exclusively on a clinical shooting experience. One where the player is divorced from the physical handling of the weapon, and other actions, is a choice. While it is the standard for shooting games to focus on the shooting, for obvious reasons, there is space left untrodden when the rest of the reality is ignored.
Know thy machine
Theres a thing people say, usually young guys driving their first car, when the fuel indicator is almost empty: “I know my ride”.
Translated: I've driven this car enough to know precisely how much the fuel indicator is lying to me. I know how fast I can drive to make it the next few kilometers to the gas station, despite the engine groaning and grinding. And they do. It is rarely hyperbole.
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2's campaign opens with the player learning to handle their weapons at a shooting range. As the instructor
The same can not be said about an M16. No matter how many hours your pour into CoD, a hundred, a thousand hours. You would never learn to handle a weapon as expertly as the player character does. There is distance between you the player, and you the character. You can and do do different things.
Nothing changes from shot to shot, the mechanics are static. Yes, you can get good at shooting with a specific gun, but it isn't because of a familiarity with the mechanicals of an object you know well. You don't get under the hood to scrape gunpowder out from the barrel, or deal with casings ejecting improperly. In short: you will never know the machine, because the machine isn't real. It doesn't matter if the barrel is fouled, because it will never be. Every casing will spring out like was it the first. Every magazine you find is already loaded and, somehow, they happen to be filled to the exact amount that is left in your counter in the corner.
The guns in the game are simply statistical changes to the function of shooting. Guns with larger magazines reload slower, some shoot faster some slower, with a relativity to damage done per shot. Some favour precision with singular big hits, while others don't count on you hitting more than 60% of shots fired, and having higher capacity as a result. At no point do you have to think about how many bullets are left in your magazine, you can just look at the counter. You don't have to rack the slide, or cycle the weapon, the reload animation does both as needed.
In real life weapons handling is much deeper than just the action parts. There is a whole lot of maintenance, cleaning, oiling, wiping gunpowder away. Its a process that isn't seen in games. Despite it being the prime action that gunowners actually do with their guns. A miniscule percentage of owning a gun is the actual shooting.
An IndieGem™©® called Receiver (2013, Wolfire Games) breaks with the traditional rootin' tootin' point-n-shootin' of FPS games. By asking the player to handle everything about their weapon. Racking slides, inserting magasines, clearing jammed bullets, managing the safety, and more.
Receiver seen without it's hud or instructions.
Receiver is by all accounts an experimental game. When it came out it presented a new and unique way to interact with the world of the gun. It crafted a reality where the weapon was more than shoot, reload, zoom, switch. It's follow up Receiver 2, was even more ambitious, and, as claimed by Wolfire, simulates every internal part, down to the last spring, of a given sidearm.
Pressing R in Call of Duty spends a set amount of time before the ammo counter in the corner goes back to full. Without needing you to acknowledge the mechanics of a gun, you can get right back to putting holes in faceless goons of non-european descent. In effect it feels more like waiting on, rather than doing, something.
Receiver contrasts the traditional by dedicating space on your keyboard, which also means in your muscle memory, to every bit of the reloading process. It becomes a very different challenge from shooting in traditional FPSs which favour reflexes over accuracy. A much larger weight is put on accurate execution of a process under pressure.
Let me break down how to reload a semi-automatic pistol in Receiver:
v: – Toggle safety e: – Eject the magazine ¨: – Holster weapon (to free up your other hand) z: – Insert bullets into the magazine ¨: – Draw weapon z: – Re-insert the magazine r: – Pull back slide
the full process
Seven discrete inputs, with separate timings, some require holding in order to execute, and if done improperly can mean the swift end of a run, since a single bullet will kill you. High-stress gameplay means that the more familiar a player is with the process, the more likely they will handle correctly, and in a timely manner, even when the red light of a Mindkiller drone is bearing down on you.
Receiver doesn't actually make you more familiar with your weapon than Call of Duty does, because the weapon still isn't real. Mastering weapons handling in game still is just a simulation, and the gun still simply a matter of logic. You can get equally as masterful at handling a M1911 from Call of Duty, or the same from Receiver, without having ANY skill handling a real-life version.
Now my question to you. Do you think it matters? Does it matter that we handle simulated weapons in simulated violence, and would there be a difference if the violence was marred by the actual mechanicals of the gun machine?
I don't have an answer. I am, after all, just a history person on the internet. I think, and I feel, when I play games with guns and violence in them. Sometimes at least. But I do think I'd feel more, and think more, if the game made me, even when doing the simplest things. And in FPSs, the simplest thing is killing.
Thanks for reading
-Ventus