First-person shooter swaps guns for cameras Here's a new take on the first-person shooter videogame genre. Instead of running around capping people with guns, how about shooting them with a camera instead? Warco - short for War Correspondant - does exactly that, putting gamers in the role of a dare-devil journalist who follows round troops at war, ArsTechnica reports. …
Hasn't this been done before?
Wasn't there some safari themed game a few years ago?
Of course I can't remember what it was called, because it disappeared into the bargin bins pretty much as soon as it was released.
Next, someone will be writing a game in which you can only fire blanks - that way instead of firing virtual bullets, you can fire virtual virtual bullets which are far safer.
I can actually see myself enjoying it quite a bit, but why does it look so ugly? I know it's a work in progress, but I would have thought that when you're planning on recreating war correspondence it has to look bloody good to hold the interest, otherwise it does just turn into running around with a camera not being able to shoot people.
Needs better animation, needs more detailed character models, needs tracers that don't just look like sprites, needs deforming buildings. I mean, presumably the idea is that you can immerse yourself in the horror of war so that you can feel better about sitting at home playing computer games while people actually die, but if it's not immersive it's not going to have any effect on people.
Just imagine...a 'run the guantet' 3-team scenario with a twist:
you and your team of 4 journo's must be able to survive a car drive through the suburbs of Bahgdad, carry a precious bit of footage.
You must avoid being killed on one side by the native who *do* want to kill you with snipers and IED's, and the Americans on the other side with their A10's who aren't trying to kill you, but will anyway.
One of you drives, the other 3 film. The other teams must aim to eliminate the other combatant team, and gain bonus points for confiscating the incriminating footage from the journos (without killing them).
As an amateur photographer/videographer, I have become aware of how much society hates and fears cameramen. This angst even shows in popular media; the cameraman is always some creepy villain. "Road to Perdition" is one example. People in Texas fear other people's cameras in a way similar their fear of guns, and the rules for operation and possession are becoming similar.
I think a useful game would be a simulator of several models of cameras, then putting the player in a simulated environment to learn how to operate the camera in that environment. You could have deep jungle, shooting photos of wildlife, or underwater, or sports photography of various sorts. I mention this, because there is little likelihood that I would ever actually develop such a simulator myself.
Do they do the bit when you get back home to discover no-one other than NGOs want to to publish your work because the images of traumatised civiliansand brutal assaults by government troops don't fit the narrative of "necessary intervention" the press has been pimping on behalf of the government of the day.
The days when journalistic glory and editorial integrity could comfortably be used in the same sentence are long gone, sadly.
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