Press Start (Aug 2019)

Domesticating the First-Person Shooter

  • Dean Bowman

Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 2

Abstract

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This article argues that—due to their lack of conformity to key characteristics of dominant videogame paradigms, particularly the violent competitiveness of “agonistic” play—the walking simulator is at the heart of a struggle over changing definitions and material realities of videogame consumption and production, linked to the emergence of disruptive female and queer player and creator identities (Anthropy, 2012; Chess, 2017; Juul, 2012; Shaw, 2015). The genre thus provides a valuable alternative space within what has been referred to as the “hegemonic” limits of the game industry, which privileges—through various historically embedded mechanisms—a white, male, cis-gendered, and heteronormative audience (Fron,Fullerton, Morie, & Pearce, 2007). Such progressive gains have been hotly contested by so-called hardcore gamers (Dymek, 2012; Gursoy, 2013; Kagen, 2017), who view them as a threat to the prevailing orthodoxy of game production that has historically served their interests. Furthermore, by uncritically adopting the dominant and normative industry-oriented paradigm, game studies has served to further reify this hegemonic player through the replication of its values in rigidly formalist definitions of play constructed around agonistic values (Aarseth, 1997; Juul, 2003). I call this tendency “orthodox game studies,” a position that has bled into wider discourses wherein walking simulators are constructed as “not real games.” I argue that Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), a prominent example of the genre, challenges industry hegemony and orthodox game studies by enacting a subversive appropriation of first-person shooter (FPS) mechanicsand a radical decentring of the hegemonic gamer—constructing a domestic space as the ground for the development of new subjectivities of play (Fullerton, Morie, & Pearce, 2007). To articulate this, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1981b) notion of the chronotope, demonstrating the critical relevance of this theoretical tool to game studies.

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