This was originally going to be a comparative review of the most recent iteration in the video game franchise of the James Bond series, Goldeneye Reloaded, but I thought I'd talk more on a greater matter that has been troubling to me and possibly game developers alike.  That's the possible death of First Person Shooters when it could be hailed as art.

Now I don't want this to turn into a discussion about video games as art, as that's too much of an article and with Christmas coming in a few days I simply don't have the time. What I will say is I'll use references to art and art aesthetics to explain the current problem with modern shooters.

While I wouldn't say I'm a big fan of FPS games I do have to say it's a genre I adore in and of itself.  In many games, but more often than not, there is a slew of games that I simply will point my nose at, like the Australian Yahtzee-like snob that I am. I think this year has had an over-saturation of First Person Shooters and anyone who has analysed the figures for best-sellers over the past five years knows why that's so.  But what I'd really want to analyse is where do we go from here?

The FPS genre is filled with all sorts. If you wanna blow away aliens you've got Halo or Gears of War. If you wanna blow away foreign people, Modern Warfare has you lined up for that. If you want to fight oppressive robots in an abandoned science factory, then the Portal series has you there, but what if you just want a nice game? Well, then you probably shouldn't be playing First Person Shooter games.  However they did have fairly simple origins and were quite flexible regarding the amount of sub-genre's there are.

In artistic theory, there is modernism, which is (to put it piss-poorly) when there is an artistic struggle between a creation of work where you often abandoned the old in favour of the new. However, in that breaking, some things and traditions are often let go. I think the modernist period of First Person Shooters had a lot of fun between 2004 and 2007. These were the high times for the FPS genre.

Bioshock, Halo 3 and Gears of War had been on the shelves for some time, as had The Orange Box, and people started to feel the pinch of the FPS genre getting a tad stale. This is not a personal opinion, I honestly think that Bioshock may be one of the best FPS titles behind most anything Valve has created. Then came Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4. People praised the storyline of the game for it's brash, if fractured, storytelling of how the fragments of war often create more problems and terrorism than it actually saves. 

The game's first person storytelling of several soldiers fighting for their lives and country overshadowed the previous efforts by Activision with their World War 2 games, and almost completely killed the sub-genre off.  However, once the dust had settled more people were talking about the multiplayer for CoD4, more than the single player, and I guess that's where Activison saw the money. As did many developers and while I won't touch on the evolution of the Battlefield series, I will say a few "mis-steps" could have simply been taken as an error in "marketable judgement" with releasing a game like BF2142 in the midst of brown shooters.

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