Played: Battlefield 3
The more I think about it in abstract, the more it perplexes me that military first-person shooters are quite as dominant as they appear to be. I say this because the imaginative aspect is fairly thinly-sketched, at best - yes, the game’s plot is fictional, but it repeats plots and ideas that are decades old and done to death. The thing that drew me in, if anything, is the sheer visual fidelity - Battlefield 3 is stunning from start to finish, with some setpieces that are powerfully realistic. In fact, there’s nothing here that really breaks immersion, which is an achievement by itself.
But. But but but. Why this? I’m aware that both Battlefield and Call of Duty have a massive multiplayer community, but even then this feels accidental - there are plenty of plausible first-person multiplayer environments, and no real reason why this should take precedence over the rest.
I think I saw a little of this with the Grand Theft Auto V hype machine - at what point does gullibility in the face of pervasive PR take over rational instincts? I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of good reasons to want to own GTA V, just that there was the sense even before the game’s release that everyone was playing it, would be playing it ad infinitum and anyone who wasn’t playing it was seriously missing the party. I think sometimes cultural commentators can get stuck in a feedback loop where they see something that might be portrayed as important by the game publisher’s marketing team, then write or talk about it and essentially generate free publicity, which drives other reviewers to take notice, and so on, et cetera, et cetera.
Or maybe people just really like hyper-real manshooters. I don’t know. People seem to like League of Legends, and that will always baffle the fuck out of me, so I might not be the best person to scrutinise this sort of thing.