873: FPS Mod

|< < Prev Comic #873 (March 16, 2011) Next > >|

FPS Mod

Title text: Wait, that second one is a woman? ...wait, if that bothers me, then why doesn't... man, this game is no fun anymore.

Explanation

FPS stands for First Person Shooter, which is a type of video game (like Halo or Doom) in which you are looking at the world from the first person perspective of the character you are controlling. Randall notes in the caption that no one liked his FPS mod (short for "modification" of the FPS game), and in the title text it is clear that Cueball who played this modified version no longer enjoys the game.

FPS games are controversial for their (supposed) quality of encouraging violence such as killing (especially other human beings). One point of the controversy is that, while virtual enemies are just pixels on a screen, real enemies have actual lives, emotions, and the like. In the games, there is a disconnect between the act of killing and its emotional cost, thus leading to the controversy that FPS games encourage wanton killing (or violence in general) to solve problems instead of considering the other party. Randall makes reference to this by adding a mod that gives biographical snippets of the enemy you shoot in the game, thus giving Cueball the perspective of the enemy he just shot, and causing emotional consequence and remorse by removing the disconnection between pixel and life.

The comic can also be a reference towards making games more realistic. Giving the enemies a life above being mere targets definitely makes the game more realistic, but such a game may not be that enjoyable. This has been explored previously in 772: Frogger.

Having lots of unread e-mails was mentioned in 2389: Unread. The third comment ("take care of the plants back at base") may be referring that many FPS video games have some sort of base that you must defend or start the game in. These games do not usually feature any way to take care of plants.^{[citation needed]}

The title text talks about how gender is portrayed in games. For some people it is more emotionally affecting to kill a woman, as women are considered biologically "weaker" than men by many societies, and societal norms state that men must protect them. Gender equality is a highly debated topic with many different viewpoints, where one's conscious reasoned views may sometimes stand at odds to subconscious feelings. When a player becomes aware that killing women bothers one more than killing men, it exposes an inconsistency in the player's own logic, one that's very uncomfortable to confront.

In the 1993 post-apocalyptic novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, the eco-pacifist residents of San Francisco defeat an invading army using a similar tactic. Rather than engage in armed defense, the family and friends of each dead San Franciscan speak directly to the soldiers who killed them, saying, "My wife was the mother of five children, and I loved her dearly," or "My cousin liked baseball." Eventually the soldiers suffer psychological breakdowns and defect en masse, rather as Cueball seems to do in the title text.

Amusingly, the 2014 game Watch Dogs does something quite similar to this; the in-game "Profiler" provides a brief summary of a targeted enemy, and if the enemy does not have a gameplay-relevant feature (i.e. "Can call for backup"), it will mention their hobbies or interests.

Like most other games in the Sniper Elite series, the 2017 Third Person Shooter Sniper Elite 4 allows the player to track and see brief overviews of any visible enemy by "Tagging" them with binoculars. However, Sniper Elite 4 has the distinction of also being very similar to Randall's mod in that it displays short character bios in the "Allied Intelligence" section of the overviews when Tagging in the campaign mode. They range from the mundane (year of conscription, former occupation) to the dark (Sapper Oswald Sander's brutal murder of a cowering fifteen year old makes even his fellow soldiers suspect him) to the comedic (Ewald Amsel regularly steals chocolate from his best friend Wolfram Wasser; Wolfram Wasser wonders who's stealing his supply of chocolates and has sworn to kill them).

The 2012 Third Person Shooter Spec Ops: The Line also has a section where one of the antagonists will chide you with radio message when you kill one of the enemy soldiers, often with short sympathetic descriptions of the enemy you just killed (although he'll sometimes admit he didn't actually know or like that particular person). As this game is a deconstruction of the military-style shooting games of its time and their portrayal of violence, evoking a negative emotional response in the player when killing these enemies is very much intentional.

The game Borderlands 2 directly references this comic with the Morningstar, a unique aftermarket talking Hyperion sniper rifle which berates the user in a nagging, whiny voice any time they reload, kill an enemy, swap weapons, or score a critical hit. The weapon is obtained from the mission Hyperion Contract 873 (a reference to this comic being comic number 873) and is referred to as "the Hyperion ex-K seedy experimental weapon" upon completion of the mission. Another game, Ravenfield, has a mod that makes it so that every time you kill an enemy, it gives you a small fact about the person. The Steam workshop page directly references the comic, and the author says xkcd was the inspiration for the mod.

Transcript

[Cueball is sitting in a chair in front of his TV holding a gamepad while playing a video game. Every time he shoots the sound is written inside a ring of small curved lines to indicate the noise. Text on the screen is noted after each round of blasts with a zigzag line from the screen and between each entry.]

Blam

Game: He once built a treehouse.

Blam

Game: She has 110 unread emails that she was hoping to get to tonight.

Blam blam

Game: He was the only one who took care of the plants back at base.

[Caption below the panel:]

No one liked my FPS mod that gives you three-second snippets from the bios of people you shoot.

 add a comment! ⋅  add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅  refresh comments!

Discussion

This particular comic is referred to in the game Borderlands 2 with the gun Morningstar, referred to in game as an 'ex-K Seedy weapon, custom designed for a murderer like yourself' which is a reward from the mission Hyperion Contract 873. When fired it talks, saying things similar to this comic, like "Someone is now an orphan and doesn't know it yet!" or "They might have been raised in a broken home" after a kill, or "Murderer!" on a critical hit. --68.200.188.141 04:16, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I think you never kill humans in Duke Nukem (or Heretic) and personally I consider it advantage. Alternatively, in Unreal Tournament, everyone respawns just like you do, making it something like game about game. -- Hkmaly (talk) 09:53, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

While not technically a FPS, Dishonored did something similar with The Heart. You can aim it at anyone and get a surprisingly similar type of insight into their life. Made the game a lot more interesting in my opinion. 141.101.104.22 09:47, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

Agreed. Though I was kind of disappointed when I realized that I didn't learn anything about different mooks of the same class, because they all share the same lines (so you can get the same description by asking the heart about two different assassins, or two different overseers, for instance). 108.162.229.168 20:07, 1 September 2014 (UTC)

I recently realized that although not an FPS, Watch_Dogs does exactly this.Delorean225 (talk) 01:18, 9 October 2014 (UTC)

That's true. I've died many times during a bullet hell after I've hesitated to kill a "Newlywed" or someone who was "Diagnosed with terminal cancer." What was worse was when I profiled someone AFTER I killed them, after which I usually caught myself justifying their deaths ("He had a heart defect, he was gonna die anyway", "he suffered from delusions of grandeur, good riddance," "he had schizophrenia, I just put him out of his misery"). 162.158.126.140 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

For those curious, Sniper Elite 4 has biographical snippets on every enemy as well. 162.158.2.219 11:26, 17 October 2022 (UTC)