wired.com
Ryan Rigney
Modern videogames are obsessed with guns, and there are a lot of reasons why.
Shooters, shooters, shooters: Whether first-person like Halo or third-person like Gears of War, games that revolve around a player character taking aim and pumping bullets into rivals have been popular for decades, but the genre has grown vastly more popular in the last few years. In 2006, according to the NPD Group, shooters accounted for a substantial 14 percent of console game unit sales in the U.S. By 2011, that number had exploded to 24 percent.
Other game genres may be growing in popularity on smartphones and PCs, but on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 shooters are number one with a bullet. So it’s no surprise that major publishers pump out more and more of them. But what is it that makes them so attractive in the first place? Do they fulfill some sort of adolescent male power fantasy? Well, yes. But that’s not the whole story. Shooters, especially as designed today, have a way of worming their way into our brains and satisfying psychological urges that other game genres do not.
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