All right, well, we're going to get into the full bore of video games today, talking about particularly action and FPS games and kind of what they are, what are the major ones, and how do we categorize them and think about them. So, let's get right into it. So I've kind of combined... uh it's really trying to do all video games in two lectures, which is maybe a bit ambitious to say the least.
But I've categorized this particular section as action or FPS. So FPS stands for first person shooter games. I'll explain what that is.
But a first person shooter game, typically you're looking at games here that involve some degree of fast responses or reflexes in order to defeat your enemy. And that doesn't necessarily, it's not just FPS games, but all these other games as well, I'm kind of putting into that category. You're typically looking at things that are reflexively based. And so these kinds of reflexes or responses can be coupled with, in the case of a first-person shooter, some degree of precision targeting or aiming.
And so the idea of the first-person shooter means that you're almost trying, you're seeing things through the eyes of the player that you're playing. And so I've got an example here of what's called a HUD or a heads up display from Halo. And so what you're seeing here is it's as if you are looking through the eyes of Master Chief.
And so this is what he sees. Here's his view of the field. He's got a little radar blip down here. He's got an ammunition loadout up here.
And here's his weapon that he's carrying with a targeting reticle. So if you were to fire, that's where... bullets or projectiles would hit in this case.
So this is typically what you might find for something like an FPS. So we can divide action games in general, I'll talk more specifically about FPS later, into a variety of different kinds of things. First one being what's called a platformer game, and the idea behind a platformer game is that there are platforms.
Super Mario and Donkey Kong being... really kind of quintessential examples of this. So the Mario character has to move along a series of platforms.
This is also called a side scrolling game because the game progresses over here to the right. So as he moves to this platform and then here and then up here, then more of the game will open up over here to the right. And so he's moving along platforms. So then you have your shooter games of which there are many.
So you can see here a screen grab. from one of the Call of Duty series, but you've got Call of Duty, Halo, Fortnite, Overwatch, Wolfenstein, Counter-Strike. I mean, there's a huge number, and these are probably the most popular brand within the action, which is why I've kind of put it as an FPS.
Your fighting games, so Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, particularly Street Fighter II being some of the earliest and most well-known, but... Beyond that, there's additional ones as well. Tekken, Dead or Alive, Soul Calibur, Injustice.
So there's a couple of different things. There are, this is an interesting category, the beat-em-up or waves kind of thing, where it's all about just increasingly large waves of enemies kind of coming at you, and you just have to kind of survive. Stealth. games as exemplified by things like metal gear solid and splinter cell where you're trying to do a lot with without being noticed so again reflexes are involved but there's a lot of prep and setup as well for this kind of thing survival games a lot of and you could almost subdivide this into your typical survivor game and like a horror survival game so resident evil and silent hill being on the horror genre, but also Valheim. been particularly popular recently, but Rust and Ark and Subnautica, or this is a screen grab from Valheim about kind of just surviving in a difficult world.
And then rhythm games, which are also reflexively based. So most people are probably familiar with things like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero and Rock Band. But the world is changing.
And for those of you who have not heard a beat saver this is My guess, if I had to make a prediction, is that this is where things are going to go, the realm of virtual reality, go through the Oculus Rift or the Oculus Quest. And so in this particular version, so whereas in Dance Dance Revolution and a lot of the other things, in DDR at least, you're moving your feet. In Beat Saber, you're in this virtual reality world where you hold two kind of lightsaber-ish type things.
You can see them here. There's a red one and there's a blue one. And there are a series of blocks that come at you, and you have to cut them with the lightsabers in the direction indicated by the arrow. So here's a red block with a down arrow. So the person with the left hand will have to make a swiping motion down.
in order to cut this block when it arrives and then the blue block next. So I want to give you I want to give you a sample for this of what this what this kind of looks like. So this is a first one just to kind of give you an idea and there are not only the not only the red and blue blocks but there are walls that you have to avoid and those kinds of things so yeah check it out.
So this is shown from a third-person view so you can see the individual or gets the avatar the individual standing here and going through the motions for this and you'll see that it can get pretty complicated in the bottom left is the screen of what he's actually seeing here but at least you can see kind of what's involved in terms of the motions here. Don't pull another train, cause this film might just be I lose control and take you right out of the friend zone You know I won't give up, it's all in my feelings I'm burning up, whenever you with me I'm not your love We were snatched away, and you're home So, um, it's relatively straightforward, and then So I'm going to show you, so you get a kind of a sense of someone who's pretty good at this. They have like college level competitions with these kinds of things.
So I'm going to show you what it looks like from inside the helmet in the next slide here. This has the potential to be disorienting, so if for any reason you find that you know you're getting dizzy or whatever like that, feel free to kind of skip ahead or not watch this next section at all. But As a child you would wait, and watch from far away, but you always knew that you'd be the one. It's worthwhile, but they all play When you get laid Awake at night and scheme Of all the things that you could change Believe what you're just dreaming Here we are, we're running away We are the warriors, we feel this hell Here we are, we're running away We are the warriors, we feel this hell Don't look home when you have Rise above the rest and prove yourself Your spirit never dies Farewell, I've come To take my part of all Don't even think of this You'll be the last girl I love Yeah, so you get the idea. It's a pretty cool system, and we'll see where it goes in the next 10 or 15 years.
The systems themselves are pretty expensive right now, like $500, $600 or something like that. But yeah, pretty interesting. All right, so when we're looking at shooter types, which again, as I said, is probably the most popular type of game. There's FPS, the first-person shooter, where you kind of are in the shoes of the person doing it. So this is exemplified perhaps most famously by the Wolfenstein and Doom series.
So Wolfenstein 3D being one of the early ones that came out with this, where you run around a prison killing Nazis. Then you have third-person shooters, with Fortnite being probably the most famous modern example of this. So in this case, instead of seeing through the eyes of the person, you can see the person here who's doing it.
And then again, there's a targeting reticle here. So it's a shooter, but you're not like seeing directly through their eyes. You have a slightly wider kind of perspective on the game.
And then there are top-down shooters, which are typically a bit more old school, where you're looking kind of down on the field. Space Invaders or Galaga would be good examples of these kinds of things. So really briefly, you could say that these kinds of games originated with Maze War in 1974. So they've been around for about 50 years, but not much happened until 1992 when I said Wolfenstein 3D and Doom kind of took over the scene and became really popular as the very first real kind of first-person shooter games.
And then from there, you enter multiplayer kinds of things with Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 in 1999. Very frenetic, very fast-paced. And it was mostly just about, you know, blowing these other people up and stuff. And Half-Life by Valve kind of introduced narratival play.
So, again, it's a first-person kind of game, but it's very heavy on narrative and story. which was something that you didn't see much of before that. So it kind of took advantage of that.
And then you see LAN play or local area network play, really Goldeneye being probably the most classic example of that. Which system was that? But just fairly simple, fairly easy to get involved in, very frenetic, very chaotic, but people can play together in the same place pretty easily. And so that was kind of relatively new. A lot of this happened in the late 90s, where it all kind of came out at the same time.
Including, you see, Halo, which is the screenshot I showed you at the very beginning, introduced this idea of survivability. So you could take some damage and it would lower a shield, but the shield would recharge if you stayed away from damage long enough. And so that was a pretty interesting and relatively novel concept at the time. And then you start, as the physics engines and the graphics and the GPUs... catch up you start uh introducing this element of realism with the call of duty series which i think one of the first versions of it that launched were simulating kind of historical situations like um world war one or world war two and since then they've now advanced to like modern warfare and uh black ops and some of the things are just much crazier and then all the way to what we've now got is things like overwatch and um PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Fortnite were the current kind of iteration of these kinds of things.
So there are other, also in the action category would be kind of racing or sports games. Rocket League being probably one of the most popular ones right now. Again, this is an e-sports game, so it's made its way into the competitive college scene. But essentially you've got teams of little cars that are working in a low gravity environment. and they are playing soccer.
And so here's the soccer ball, there's the goal, and you basically hit the soccer ball with these little RC cars, essentially, and try and get them to go into the goal. Because it's low gravity, it allows for some fairly interesting gameplay mechanics and things like that. Mario Kart being another really popular, well-known version of racing games, gone through a lot of different iterations over the various different kind of Nintendo platforms. There are other racing games, too, that have... as series made names for themselves.
And then you've got sports games like FIFA. FIFA is probably the most popular sports game. Again, soccer being the number one.
number one sport in the world internationally. And so understandably the appeal for that. But there are other things too. Madden series for the NFL and football, Tony Hawk skateboarding, things like Wii Sports or NBA Jam also have series that have gone on for years and are fairly well-known and fairly popular. So I want to end by talking a little about Overwatch, which is a recent game.
relatively recent game, and there's a lot of text here. And I think Overwatch is a good place to end because Overwatch actually covers a lot, in and of itself, covers a lot of FPS, first-person shooter history, and kind of understands its place in that situation. And so it pulls all that together.
And so this is a quote here, but I liked it because it kind of brings these things together. It talks about, it's interactive with the genre of the FPS. FPS history. So for example, you'll see here and say it doesn't just reach out to the variety of different weapons and gadgets and abilities, but also their quirks and exploits and antics to the communities.
It understands the people who are playing these games and who know something about it. So like rocket jumping, which is a thing you can do in Quake, it incorporates that, incorporates things from Counter-Strike, which is another FPS game. And then you'll see particular types of players.
pro gaming celeb turned mech pilot diva is is a kind of a knockoff of a game called from titan fall but also a parody of a gamer person soldier 76 is a pull out of call of duty and it's kind of an homage to that um so it understands a lot of these different kind of tropes as it were and so this is it's cool it speaks to the range of concepts um that are available there and kind of tries to incorporate them all and does that fairly well. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to end with a kind of a gameplay trailer from overwatch and hopefully you'll see some of those tropes as well. Um, some things like each, each character's got its own kind of thing that it's, it's referencing and it's kind of, some of them are fairly inside references, but at the same time I want you to also kind of bring together everything we talked about.
and take a look at some of the physics engine stuff that's happening some of the collision stuff some of the trajectory stuff uh yeah some of the things that are that are happening there as well so let's see here go to this so that you can see it This is strength. You're covered. There's people. Fire in the hole!
So here I'm coming. So right now it's showing off the different kind of characters you can play and some of the abilities that they have and stuff like that. but you'll notice they're very different characters so each one is kind of referencing or pulling from a particular trope or genre I love you. You didn't make the cut.
I've got you in my sights. Target rich environment. Get the payload moving. So this is the character that's kind of a reference or some of the things he's saying are references to Call of Duty kinds of things. Wing.
And coming. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
Eat this. Eat this. Eat this. Eat this.
It's a noob. Most of you can probably easily recognize the Wild West standoff kind of shooting trope here and some of that. So there are these subtle and careful things that the designers have put in all throughout. Pardon me.
You all had it coming. Yeah, let's pick it up! Oh, let's break it!
Get back! Genshin! Stand up! I'm going to win! One for my highlight reel!
Suiting up! Boosters engaged! Let's fight for a better world!
Freeze! Don't move! Sorry!
This will stop us. Let's go! Throw away your body, but don't throw away your food.
You are nothing. We shall see. Notice the soft body physics engines with the moving of some of the clothing and stuff like that. Mother. Yeah, it's quite a cast of characters.
So a lot going on. Quite a cast of characters. A lot going on. But it's a nice kind of summary of kind of where FPS has gone to at this point in some of the action stuff.
All right, well, that makes for a fairly long video. But hopefully that kind of covers at least some of the breadth of what this genre can be.