What is it about this kind of game that has made it so popular? It's more than just the first-person viewpoint, three dimensions, violence, and escape. These are elements found in a lot of modern video games. However, the first-person shooter uniquely mixes these, creating a virtual world that maximizes a player's chances of achieving what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as "flow"—a state of complete presentiment and joy.
It turns out that first-person shooters are just what produces this captivating experience. Lennart Nacke, the head of the Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told me that video games are actually about making choices. "First-person shooters accelerate these efforts. When you have a split second to make a decision, what would be a very straightforward choice if you keep all the time in the world, becomes much more tempting and complex. The more realistic a game becomes—more recent war simulators like the Call of Duty and Battlefield series make the original Doom seem archaic in comparison—the simpler it is to lose yourself in it.
The key to the first-person shooter's ongoing appeal may be control combined with a first-person viewpoint. Possessing a sense of control over our lives is essential to being happy. According to a new analysis of data from animal, clinical, and neuroimaging studies, it is in reality "a biological imperative for survival." We feel better when we believe we have more control over things; when that power is reduced, we feel worse emotionally. In extreme situations, losing control can result in learned helplessness, a state in which a person loses the ability to shape his environment.
It turns out that our sense of agency and our motor activities frequently have a close relationship. Do our actions alter the environment as we'd like them to? If they do, we are entirely happy with who we are and how effective we are. First-person shooters emphasize how we perceive our effectiveness and our capacity to influence the environment