The FPS Lifestyle

The First Person Shooter, or "FPS" as cool people like myself call it, is the only real online multiplayer alternative for those of us who haven't waved the white flag on Operation: Life and refuse to waddle into the soul sucking quicksand known as MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game). We like to interact with other people online and play games with them, we just have no desire to invest 4 hours a day in the fruitless quest to level up our characters only to later have the game developers take a collective piss on us by capping/crippling players by issuing patches to correct the things they screwed up on and decided to ship the game anyway. So instead of playing games with elves and paladins and Eskimos, we instead party up and shoot each other and blow each other up with grenades and such. That is how we roll. But what really sets the typical FPS'er apart from the rest of the gaming community is the fact that we have little to no desire to participate the real-life version of our game. You see, the guy who plays Madden has in all likelihood thrown a football at some point in his life. The Real Time Strategy aficionado yearns for the day when THEY get to call the shots and control the world around them. The typical RPG nerd would love nothing more than to leave Earth and live in a cell shaded anime world with dragons and other such nonsense. And if you pressed them hard enough, I'm willing to bet money that the average Mariophile would love to become a chubby Italian plumber who rescues the same princess over and over.

You see, 99% of people who play FPS games have never touched a real fire arm. We view ourselves as being "above the fray", and would never sully ourselves by discharging an actual gun. You see, in real life (or IRL, as it is more commonly referred to) there are no respawn points. IRL, when you shoot someone there are real consequences. More importantly, to shoot someone IRL would require us to interact with other human beings, which is an idea so preposterous that I feel dirty even mentioning it. Sunlight? No thanks. Exercise? Bah! Human contact? I get all the verbal interaction I need through my trusty headset, which allows me to talk to my teammates and also to taunt my victims. The FPS'er has transcended the life of a typical human and has become something else. Something better. We no longer conform to traditional laws of online video game playing. We have created our own language, rife with terms like "n00b" and "pwned". We upload videos of our finest kills to YouTube and boast about our skills at virtual-murder. The FPS'er has changed online gaming in ways no other genre could have ever dreamed of. And for this valiant service, we receive no thanks from the rest of the gaming universe. Instead, we are mocked and scorned. Little do those who look down on us know, FPS'ers hold all the cards in the gaming industry. You want that shitty indy game that you love so much to see the light of day? You better hope the annual release of Call of Duty sells a billion copies to fill the coffers of the developers to the point where they can feel safe throwing away money on whatever pseudo-intellectual pile of pixels with an unlikely hero and OUTSIDE THE BOX gameplay mechanic that is all the rage these days. You want to see more downloadable content for whatever obscure MMORPG you play? You better hope us FPS'ers keep supporting the entire DLC market by buying map packs. Checkmate, losers.

The FPS Lifestyle is here to stay. Get used to it.