Two decades ago videogames were just moving sprites flashing on arcade games’ screens. A decade later videogames became a common household appliance and families began playing with these electronic games. As the personal computer developed, the Internet came up. Gaming consoles turned out to be pretty much desired and affordable. Nowadays, multimedia language evolved and the mobile age of the Internet is upon us. There’s only one videogame genre enabling a new form of interaction. It’s the First Person Shooter, a videogame genre that has surpassed cyberspace visionaries’ theories and it is acclaimed worldwide due to its online gaming capabilities.
The future begins here, as the FPS becomes an interface model for new media products to come. No longer is enough to see things from the outside, the user-player wants to get inside cyberspace, to become the character. In this way we prefer playing to be “there”, on the virtual ground, left to fate. Either we’re armed or outgunned, outnumbered or betrayed, but in the end, as most of the researches point out: in FPS videogames, players actually become much more space-oriented and fit for survival. The Subjective Cyberspace provided by the FPS is our new media ground, and it will inevitably surpass the borders of gaming.
