It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games.

Does this serve any purpose?

Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

Games of tag where you are “out” when hit, optionally with a mechanism for being revived are a staple game for young kids around here. Video games with shooting just seems like a logical extension of that into the virtual domain and with ranged “tag” of that.

Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.

Shooting isn't the core mechanic in the majority of video games.

There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly understandable win conditions and game states, being relatively simple to implement in code, having properties that make discrete variations and permutations of gameplay situations easy to build and easy to parse for players, setting rules up in ways that can be structured with real-time pressure, often embedded in large spatial structures to organically pace an experience...

Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).

These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.

I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.

And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.

To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.

It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.

With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.

I'm not certain that shooting is a core mechanic in a strict majority of video games (may also depend on how you define shooting, is flinging fireballs around shooting?).

But aside from that, Campster argued in his video about violence in games (<https://youtu.be/wSBn77_h_6Q>) that violence is easier to program in an accessible way than nonviolence.

I don't think there's any purpose behind it, most like early on, game with shooting were just simpler to develop, especially with regards to limited processing power and storage. For example I remember an extract from a review on the original Doom, saying that it would be much better if they were able to talk to the monsters; but at the time, a talking game would have been nearly impossible to make, especially to the same level of polish as the original Doom.

And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...

I think it’s more because point-and-click is suited to shooters. Look at thing you want to shoot, click on it. A simple premise that you can layer stuff onto to make a good game.

> "It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?

My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.

One thing I liked about Gothic 1 was how you could fight people and not kill them ( Kill was an extra action after you won).The NPCs reacted differently to winning vs killing, pushing you to let others live. In a brutal penal colony, this made a lot more sense than win=kill.

I don't mind shooting.

But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.

I mean, the really good ones can be beautiful, terrifying, balletic displays of dominance, skill and tactical intelligence. There’s nothing in all of gaming quite like being hunted by a human being. It’s a real thrill.

It's pointing and clicking. It's just one of the simplest things a game can make a player do. It's intuitive what sound roughly it should make and what visual effect to show up.

It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.

It's not really that complex.

Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.

> Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

Someone should have told the US Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army

(Surprisingly for a government project it was pretty playable)

Any simple input scheme mapped to a game of skilled hand-eye coordination usually holds up, even ancient arcade games.

Back when games were mostly 2D, a lot of action games got consolidated into platformers. Shooters just seem to be the equivalent genre in 3D.