What is it that has made this type of game such a success? It’s not simply the first-person perspective, the three-dimensionality, the violence, or the escape. First-person shooters are now responsible for billions of dollars in sales a year, and dominate the best-seller lists of current-generation gaming consoles. By August, 1996, Doom had sold two million copies, prompting Wired to name it “ the most popular computer game of all time,” and it had spawned a new sub-genre of video game, the so-called “Doom clone.” Though Doom itself was not the original first-person shooter (a game in which, as Nicholson Baker wrote in his 2010 article about video games, “you are a gun who moves-in fact, you are many guns, because with a touch of your Y button you can switch from one gun to another”), it catalyzed the genre’s popularity. “We noticed that the janitor coming in to empty the trash had just been sitting there staring at the game-for a long time,” Carmack told Time magazine. They knew that they were on to something big. The following year, Carmack and his five colleagues at id Software released the product of that vision: Doom. It would merge the first-person perspective of a game like Myst with the direct combat of the shooter game Wolfenstein 3-D and the multi-player capacity of Spectre, and it would do so in a more realistic three-dimensional environment than any game before it.

Which is to say you don’t have that cognitive break in so many other action games, you know, when the hero is good at literally everything, so long as it involves killing.In the fall of 1992, a twentysomething college dropout and former juvenile offender named John Carmack was hard at work in Mesquite, Texas, on a new concept for a video game. Each is distinct and memorable, and what you do feeds into each particular story. Each of these vignettes builds on an idea: you’re a fighter pilot or you man a tank or you just put on a boatload of armor and wield a horrifyingly large machine gun. But this year the studio nailed the campaign for Battlefield 1, largely thanks to a simple trick: instead of one, 9-hour slog, the single-player mode was spread across a handful of short stories that could be gobbled up faster than a romantic comedy and a bowl of popcorn.

For years, my Twitter stream was polluted by think pieces telling developers to abandon the classic campaign, usually directed at Battlefield creator DICE. Plante: The only thing more surprising than first-person shooters having a moment was that quite often players were as interested if not more interested in single-player campaigns.

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