Victory Game Center

PDS-1 play footage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-GY3bO0YsI

The first first-person shooter - http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/5/ ... on-shooter

Maze War is the reason why I refer to games like Unreal Tournament, Titanfall, Counter-Strike, and Quake III: Arena as primitive first person shooters, despite their release date. The fact that this style of FPS (online, multiplayer) emerged first on the scene and with such a minimal emphasis on aesthetics should clue us in. An emphasis reinforced by the trend among "hardcore" primitive FPS players of dialing all the visuals down to a minimum and forcing ugly green models on every character. A trend which has since been picked up by the MOBA community.

At their core, these are all just variants of VR laser tag. A game in which if you get shot, it's hardly a big deal. You're right back in the game, death having only affected your stats, the final score, and with some players possibly their ego. That's all. It's just sports. All locked within a single-stage stadium. Hence, their primitivism.

That's not to say that they're all trash. I played and dearly loved Titanfall throughout this last year, and every single time I picked it up, I had a blast. Now in the sense that these games function as testing grounds for the next big FPS, I'm all for it. Just so long as we don't close up the lab, and say, "this is good enough."

The history of scoring in game is relevant here and has been analyzed in-depth in the essential On Why Scoring Sucks essay in Videogame Culture: Volume I - http://culture.vg/books.html#art-theory

And as if that wasn't enough, Kierkegaard demonstrates in another article that versus multiplayer games like this are not only primitive, but also fundamentally anti-artistic.

Why Versus Multiplayer Games Are Worse Games Than JRPGs - http://culture.vg/features/art-theory/w ... jrpgs.html

Alex Kierkegaard wrote: It all boils down to one reason: democracy. The equality between the players/customers which the genre's dictates force the designer to observe, leads to a design that will necessarily exclude all notions of a protagonist (or protagonists) from the action and shuts down from the very beginning any notion of the journey — both physical and emotional — which it is art's very purpose to create and communicate. ... Versus multiplayer, the way the West does it, means no stage progression, no scene development, no character arc, etc. It means no narrative, no story; ultimately no immersion at all. ... Lack of a protagonist is anti-artistic.