So the defining feature of the first person shooter genre is that it puts you very directly in the game. And I have all of the history leading up to this, so that the creation of this genre, where I can look, and I can remember the moments when I could see that this was going to be important. Where the early games where basically two-dimensional games that I had taken, projecting the player into there, and we would have people play these little 2D games: you shoot the monsters, you pick up the goodies, you find the door to the next level, and they're fun in a sort of abstract way. Its like you're playing an arcade game moving your little guy around down, and oh darn, you got hit let's start back over. But then you put the player in there, in the first person perspective, and you turn a corner and there's a monster right in there face, and early on people were falling out of their chairs- their hands would leap off of the control and they would scream and there would be all of this level of response that you just never saw before in any genre of videogames. And that was the most powerful thing there. But what happened after more people started doing three-dimensional technologies on there, you have this bifurcation of the path there, where people found out that you could do much more directorial kinds of things in the third-person perspective. If you do want to be the director and tell a story and present things framed well for the camera, you want to be able to take control of that camera, rather than have the player jam his nose into the wall, looking at the magnified pixels in the seam between the door and the bricks there. So there's technologies that start off with identical engines, but you use them in different ways to do different things. The first person is still very much about the absolute pulse-pounding adrenaline action, you are in the game, you do not want to die, you are not playing this abstract character in there, you've projected yourself into this world. And the FPS's do that more powerfully than any other genre, while the games that take the third-person perspective are a more relaxed experience, even high-action games on there, you're still more detached from it, but you can do better things with presentation and you can show off your art assets better by making sure that the camera looks over the stuff that you've so carefully crafted there, and each sort of use and presentation has its own strengths and merits. There's not just the one true way of doing things, there are many, many valid paths.
