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From GunPlay to GunPorn. A techno-visual history of the first-person shooter

Matteo Bittanti

"Happiness is a warm gun (Happiness bang, bang, shoot, shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun, mama (Happiness bang, bang, shoot, shoot)
("Happiness is a warm gun", The Beatles)

What is a first-person shooter? It is a digital application, originally created for recreational purposes, resulting from the interaction of four major components: computer, film, television, and military technology, with the latter informing the previous three. The computer is both a production tool and a consumption space. Cinema and television provide the visual style and the narrative context of the FPS, whereas the military ethos supplies the ideological basis for the genre. Key to all components is the gun, as a notion, icon, tool, and narrative.

As Rune Klevjer (2006) suggests, in this type of games, "'first-person' means first-person gun, a unique and rather extreme perceptual articulation within a broader cultural category of violent gun-play. The genre holds up and celebrates the gun as the ultimate technology, a focus point for a wide range of modern technology. Captured by the First Person Shooter, technology is interpreted in the image of the gun" (2006, 120).

In this paper, I intend to examine how a recent fist person shooter, Criterion's BLACK (2006) articulates these different components. By juxtaposing the game within the broader range of cultural artifacts, the aesthetical and phenomenological implications of the first person shooter will be discussed. Specifically, I will argue that the first-person shooter represents the last step in a long history of mediated gunplay, a history that begins with the emergence of the photographic medium in the 19th century. At the same time, I will try to explain how and why the first-person shooter emerged as a key genre of digital gaming, and why it holds such a prominent place in the menu of leisure activities that we all choose from.

1. The origins: the fusil photographique
In a thought-provoking essay titled "Gunfire", originally published by Sight & Sound magazine in October 1995, film critic Jason Jacobs (1996) reminds us that "to a certain extent cinema and gunfire had always been intertwined. Guns and movies have been twin obsessions of American culture in the twentieth century, and both possess mythic status" (163). Jacobs goes as far as suggesting that:

"Perhaps, cinema and guns were made for each other. In both, the apparatus is mechanical, chemical, and rhythmic. They share the same terminology (the shot, the magazine), a point-and-shoot rationale, and a historical moment: in the late nineteenth century, the development of the fully automatic Maxim gun (mounted on a tripod) coincided with the first showing of the Lumiéres films" (163-164).

This connection has been discussed at length by many critics, most notably Paul Virilio. In War and Cinema (1989), the French philosopher explores the technology-military-entertainment complex at length. He writes that the world's first portable motion picture camera, Etienne-Jules Marey's fusil photographique, shared the appearance and functioning of a gun.

What is the fusil photographique? In 1882, Marey invented and built the chronophotograph, a camera in the shape of a 'rifle' which could be used to take twelve frames of birds in flight. A physiologist, Marey was fascinated with the problem of analyzing the movements of insects, birds, animals, and humans. With the aid of the chronophotograph, he recorded images of moving targets.

His preference to follow the movement of birds from one perspective led to the fusil photographique or photographic 'rifle'. Through this method Marey was able of moving with the bird in air, as in panning, attaining an accurate scientific study of movement. Marey's mobile camera allowed for the birds to be followed more easily than a still camera. He therefore shared the idea of the Janssen 'revolver'.

Simply by aiming his gun at the flying birds, Marey was able to place twelve exposures along the outer edge of the plate. The very end of the barrel could be moved in or out thus providing focus. At the bottom of the end of the barrel housed the magazine containing the gelatin plate. In front of the plate was another disk, opaque, with twelve shutters, and in front of that disk, one more opaque disk with only one opening. By firing the trigger, all three disks moved with the help of a clocked mechanism. With the gelatin-based film that George Eastman introduced in 1885,

Marey was also able to produce rudimentary movies. They were at a high speed - 60 images per second, unlike conventional cinema which rely on a 24 frame-per-second format - and of great image quality.
The fusil photographique is one of the first examples of the technical overlap between guns and cameras, cinematic entertainment, and ideology. In fact, as Virilio notes, Marey "placed the cronophotography that he had invented at the service of military research into movement" (1989: 10).

Moreover, the fusil photographique represents the first step of mediated gunplay. It had scientific, not recreational purposes. It had creative, rather than destructive consequences. Moreover, the fusil photographique prefigures the emergence of cinema, whose birth is conventionally set in 1895."

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