Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film about a high school shooting, contains a scene you’ll recognize even if you’ve never seen it. A young man, dull-eyed and soon to commit mass murder, plays a video game in which he walks up to people—unarmed people—and fires. We only glimpse the game, but its genre is clear: It’s a first-person shooter.
The scene embodies an argument that’s resonated for decades: that there is a causal link between violent video games and real-world violence, and that first-person shooter games are the worst culprits of this phenomenon. As Christopher J. Ferguson writes in American Psychologist, there are some matters on which social scientists agree: that video-game violence deserves study, that actual violence has many causes. And there are areas of disagreement: Is there a consistent link between games and aggression? What measures of “aggression” are valid proxies for violence? A 2005 American Psychological Association resolution asserting that video games “[increase] aggressive thoughts … behavior … angry feelings” made headlines when it was released but is now under review. In a 2010 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court found against a law seeking to restrict game sales to minors, largely on the grounds that the research supporting such a law was inconclusive. And just this month, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a forceful indictment of “virtual violence” that is stirring up counterpoints and rebuttals. The issue is fraught, in part because it’s knotty, in part because of the tragic frequency with which it’s put in the public eye. As Ferguson notes, the “watershed moment for the violent video game debate” was probably the 1999 Columbine massacre and the revelation that the shooters liked the game Doom. Doom is an archetypal first-person shooter: You shoot guns at living things, and they go splat. This association became fixed as the enduring narrative of the first-person shooter: young men, bullets, bloodshed—a style of game that at worst is a gateway to nightmare, and at best is a cynical indulgence of masculine id.
But that narrative is incomplete—and increasingly flat-out wrong.
It’s been incomplete for a while, thanks to inventive shooters like BioShock and Team Fortress 2. What’s driving the fact home today is the blazing success of a pointedly inclusive, cheerful game called Overwatch. The game was developed for Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One by Blizzard, the studio behind World of Warcraft, and came out on May 24. Yes, it involves projectile weapons; yes, it involves shooting at humans and humanoid forms. But Overwatch also happens to be a dazzling splash of sunshine. And if there’s any justice, it will transform the unfair popular conception of what the first-person shooter genre can be.
That popular conception isn’t unearned, of course. Take Call of Duty, a first-person shooter, or FPS, franchise with a dozen blockbuster games to its name. Kevin Spacey acted in the most recent one (people were salty about his digitized eyes).
In both Overwatch and any Call of Duty title, you run around shooting; your viewpoint is that of the character you control. The games share fundamental gameplay mechanics. Both, in fact, are owned by Activision, a giant games publisher. But that’s no more useful than observing that Disney owns Pixar and Marvel, and Pixar and Marvel make movies with imaginative elements. It’s where the similarities end.
Call of Duty is part of the cultural script playing out in that Elephant scene. Here’s how the Entertainment Software Rating Board described the most recent CoD game: “players assume the role of a soldier engaging in futuristic military operations … realistic gunfire, screams of pain. … Large blood-splatter effects occur during combat … bodies with exposed organs … intense acts of violence.” Sounds like an FPS, right? It’s easy to imagine: glazed eyes and headshots, doxxing, swatting dudes in basements saying ugly things as they mainline Mountain Dew and tea-bag downed opponents. The entire image that Call of Duty conjures up is toxic, a word that is frequently used to describe the worst behavior of those who play that game and other first-person shooters like it.
In fact, an expectation of toxicity—especially from other players online—has become integral to the FPS genre. And Overwatch is trying to prove that it doesn’t have to be that way.
The common thread of the positive reception to Overwatch is the pleasure of getting to do fun FPS stuff without the soul-crushing downside of “horde[s] of racist 14 year olds” mercing you every two seconds. That’s Tom Ley’s take; he revels in the “salvation” for “washed-up” older gamers that Overwatch offers. Wired praises elements that create a “rare,” “positive,” “troll-free” environment: the game’s emphasis on team-based objectives rather than individual achievements, the lack of a leaderboard/kill count, sound design that mitigates the need for players to coordinate over voice (although chat’s there, if you dare). It’s important to note, especially if you don’t play games like this very often, that these elements essentially are the game: In an FPS like Overwatch, there is no “story mode” or “single-player campaign” in which you fight through a narrative virtual world all on your own. As a player in these games, your experience is parceled in matches: in the character you select, your environment, and the people playing with you.
So what is it, exactly, that makes this game feel so … nice? In the words of Jeffrey Kaplan, a Blizzard VP and Overwatch’s game director, it’s a “bright, positive, hopeful world.” Matches play out in colorful, open-air stages. For a game with no playable story, there’s rich backdrop lore that aligns tolerance and heroism: In the wake of a war between humans and self-aware artificial intelligence, do we yield to hate and fear, or do we accept these new life forms? Discussing how these elements interact, Kaplan links them directly to player behavior. “The setting isn’t one that’s already cynical,” he says, contrasting Overwatch’s world with the “gritty” realist dystopias in which some first-person shooters are set. Previously, observing players in World of Warcraft’s more forbidding zones, Kaplan had seen an “oppression that would happen … we’re absorbing all of it at all times. Everything around us: We’re absorbing.” What that meant for the Overwatch design team was a mandate to create a world that feels, well, warm.
What really distinguishes Overwatch, according to the millions of fans it’s already snared, is its “lovable heroes,” as Kaplan describes them. In an FPS, where the player is not looking at but out of the character, it’s common for that character to serve as a blank, a cipher on whom the player impresses his or her actions and therefore identity. Overwatch takes an opposite approach. It offers a roster of playable characters whose diversity and idiosyncrasy stands in pointed contrast with what Kaplan calls the “nameless, faceless, generic soldier” of most first-person shooters. In visual design, gameplay mechanics, and vocal shouts, each character presents a strong identity that “impresses and projects” upon the player and the players around them. Let’s say you play as Tracer a lot (to pick a character at random). You might die a lot, because she doesn’t have much health. But you love playing Tracer because she’s a chipper slip of greased lightning who does cool stuff with time and has a charming East London accent. And everything about Tracer—her yellow pants, her cheerful shouts—influences the experience of everyone you’re playing with. This goes for the “edgy” characters, too: sure, Roadhog and Reaper don’t seem like nice people. But they’re charismatic, they’re fun, and they feel fun to play.
Crucially: None of this is new. And no one’s pretending it is. Certainly not the people at Blizzard. Kaplan warmly acknowledges Team Fortress 2—an FPS that also features team-based objectives and an offbeat, cartoonish sensibility—as “probably one of my favorite games of all time.” Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007, and as I write this, 48,000 people are playing it. TF2 itself traces its origins to a 1996 “mod” of a different shooter: a software tweak that allowed the single-player FPS Quake to be played in multiplayer, class-based teams. Splatoon, a 2015 release for Nintendo’s too-maligned Wii U, is a third-person shooter (camera over the character’s shoulder) in which your team of shape-shifting squid kids competes with the other team of shape-shifting squid kids to paint-gun the environment your respective team colors. “Exposed organs?” Um, no. And toxicity? You can’t even taunt. Splatoon—again: squid kids—has sold more than 4 million copies on a console the world’s (sadly) mostly given up on; it was IGN’s Shooter of the Year and Multiplayer of the Year and the Game Awards’ Best Shooter and Best Multiplayer, as well as other honorifics one might expect—if one subscribed to the hoary narrative of what an FPS is—to see bestowed on games in which photorealistic future-Marines make no-scope bloodmeat of their foes.
But despite these successes, the “toxic” FPS archetype—aesthetics, player-base, implications—has stood firm. So what is new about Overwatch? And why might it succeed in updating a creaky narrative?
Remember those “lovable heroes”?
Lovable heroes: meet internet. Go.
On release day, Overwatch’s subreddit saw more action than the Reddit front page. The vitality and depth of the Overwatch cultural moment is well past the point where I could coherently curate the explosion of fan-generated content this game has spawned. Overwatch has generated memes, cosplay, fan fiction and, uh, porn in a way that no Call of Duty, Battlefield, or Defiance ever has. Or, I’ll submit: ever will.
Why? Well, yes, the heroes are awesome. But that’s a tautology. It’s also true that Blizzard is a sophisticated studio that knows how to lure a sticky player base from franchise to franchise. Or, maybe Blizzard’s choice to make its “lovable heroes” conspicuously diverse (especially compared with similar games) is yielding love from the fans. “The idea of diversity and inclusivity was literally there Day 1,” Kaplan says; that forthright stance is generating the mix of goodwill and backlash one might expect, but it seems reasonable to hope that it’s helping the game more than hurting it. Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez, in her glowing review, notes that seeing her “skin color and body type” among gun-toting heroes is “the closest I’ll ever come to being a little girl who sees a new Disney princess that actually looks like her for the first time.”
No one’s suggesting the end of the “toxic” blam-blam headsh0t GIT GUD FPS. That culture is deep. A new Call of Duty will come out later this year. It will sell many copies; the franchise overall has sold 175 million (a good way to get Kevin Spacey onboard).
But with Overwatch, we’re not discussing some niche moment in the face of the mainstream. Like other ostensibly nice shooters before it, Overwatch is a hit. Blizzard tweeted in June that the game’s base has grown to 10 million players (an opaque metric that doesn’t quite mean “copies sold”; the game industry is characterized by opaque metrics and lumpy data.) It took Overwatch three weeks to get to that number. It’s (lumpy) apples to oranges, but comparing Overwatch’s 10 million players (one game, around three weeks) with Call of Duty’s 175 million copies (12-plus games, 13 years) … well, Blizzard and Activision like them apples just fine.
This is what a mega-successful FPS looks like in 2016. It’s not without challenges; the introduction of a Competitive Mode, in particular, has provoked concerns that some of Overwatch’s distinctive nontoxicity may be slipping away. But Blizzard is tangibly prioritizing these issues, making “under the hood” changes to the game’s social interactions in an active attempt to “have our cake and eat it, too,” as Kaplan recently told Kotaku.
And that these concerns exist in the first place is testament to the fact that this game feels, for its legions of players, safe. And welcoming, in a way that might update a limited popular understanding of a pastime enjoyed by millions of people. And, even more importantly, update how that pastime is perceived, shaped by, and shapes its participants.
Kaplan laughs with pleasure about the music videos and Gremlin memes. But what most excites him, as an industry veteran, is the capacity of a massive community of affinity to “realize that they can define who they are.” In creating Overwatch’s zippy characters and bright future, Blizzard tried to make something as hopeful as Tracer’s spunky ’tude; something that makes players say, “Wow, I hope that’s the trajectory that we’re on.”
It’s hard to look at the game itself and not hope the same thing.
