This August marks a decade of Bullet Points Monthly. It seemed to us that the best way to mark this milestone was by having our editors each write a small response to a big question and then invite a number of the site’s past contributors to do the same. That question, answered by all of us below, is:
“What does the shooter genre look like now, in comparison to what it looked like in 2016?”
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Yussef Cole
I’m an editor for Bullet Points Monthly, a “website about shooting games,” and I hate guns. I hate their weight, the way it feels to shoot one, the rattling buck that sets my teeth on edge and the harsh bang that keeps my ears burning for hours afterward. I hate the power they lend to the otherwise pathetic, the power of a god, Prometheus' fire, copied and sold off Walmart racks at a deep discount.
I love guns in games, though. Within videogames, guns serve as an immediate and tactile form of interaction. The bullet, which in ordinary life shreds flesh and destroys futures, connects players to games, unites subject with object intimately. In Marathon, I feel the feedback of each shot hitting my target, the discrete ping of the needle finding home, the flash of purple as shields falter. My touch is deadly but insistent, seeking a connection. In Better Than Dead, I enter a scene, a restaurant, a strip club, and disrupt it. My gun rearranges the visual tableau like a leaf blower. A group of men around a table, their server hovering behind them, transforms into a chiaroscuro of sparkling blood and flying limbs. Horrible and beautiful in equal measure. In Ready or Not, I speak through my gun. It is my mouth and bullets are my words. I use it to enact the power of the state to shut down opposition. Through it, I observe the nature of sadistic authority.
These standouts are the reason I still care about the shooter in 2026. In spite of everything. In spite of a broader industry that seems committed to running away from all that’s good about the format. The shooter sinks under the weight of giants like Fortnite, with its ugly technicolor landscapes and its marshmallow soft gunplay, and Arc Raiders, which feels cobbled together with the bare essentials required to establish a little tension, and enough loot to keep players pulling the slot machine lever over and over again. Worst of all, Call of Duty, a genre-killing doomsday device that first elevated, then desecrated, the shooter, and continues today: regurgitating its shopworn ideology and selling gun decals to spoiled and angry man-children.
Against the downslide into an endless pit of mediocrity, I struggle to hope, and will continue to struggle. I don’t like the thought of killing. I have no desire to end life. I don’t think shooters always have to celebrate death. I’m here for those, like me, who love what the shooter aspires to be. Monuments to connection, to aggressive and delirious energy, seeking, through bold new mechanics, through stories and aesthetics, a taste of the sublime, one bullet a time.
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Reid McCarter
There was talk of something like a shooter revival in 2016. At the time, it felt faintly absurd. A selection of the games from that year, praised as signs of the genre’s vitality, include: Overwatch, Superhot, nü-DOOM, nü-Hitman, Titanfall 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and Battlefield 1. (The excellent Mafia III came out in 2016 as well but wasn’t met with the same sort of unanimous praise, despite being a stronger game than any of the above.)
With the proviso that about half of these games now rest within the catalogue of a corporation so bloodstained that our site ignores its current output, it’s notable that most of these games are decent enough, but none are particularly revolutionary. There is much to recommend in a few of them, but, to put it broadly, the above, as a group, are either overly beholden to work preexisting their 2016 release or noteworthy in discrete ways, not as a whole. The slips between time and space in Titanfall 2, the body-hopping death grind of Battlefield 1’s opening, the pristine elaboration on Hitman’s clockwork assassination formula, the relentless drive and gun-juggling demon-killing of nü-DOOM—all of these games contain laudable elements, even if none really stick out as complete statements in the way that other 2016 releases, like Firewatch, The Last Guardian, Inside, or Mafia III, do.
And yet, hindsight makes these games appear like the corpse rattle of the genre’s mainstream form. In the decade since, the big-budget shooter has atrophied into a wispy sort of thing. Probably best exemplified by increasingly toothless Call of Duty and Far Cry games, of the remake factories crowding the commercial space with 4K-ready nostalgia, of the online coliseums erected in promise of infinite live service cash, the ‘AAA’ shooter, with a story and a point of view and a sense of style to match, has receded.
The sort of subjects that we wanted to talk about when starting Bullet Points—the aesthetics of violence, of portrayals of war and death in blockbuster games—have become less prominent and abstracted in the mainstream, or have become intentionally slippery, to the point where untangling the massive knots of misdirection and contradiction they offer appears less and less worthwhile. There are exceptions, of course, but the contractions of big-budget game making have led to fewer shots at anything beyond bland, sandblasted crowd pleasers.
If there is hope for the shooter, a decade on from the site’s launch, it is found, like so much of modern videogames, in the margins of the industry—in the grubby alleyways whence the likes of Ready or Not or Better Than Dead emerge, free of the desire for commercial respectability. This is a pretty obvious statement, but it seems like the only true one to make when thinking over the decade. Videogames are an art form like any other. The many factors that have contributed to the big studios putting out fewer games, so often characterized by a lack of any real intent beyond the financial, may impoverish the most visible aspects of the medium. The edges of any art form, though, survive, even if unrewarded by praise or money.
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Astrid Anne Rose
Over the last decade at Bullet Points we have stretched the definition of "shooter" past breaking point. God of War? The Medium? Yakuza? Maybe it's a tacit admission that a hardline first-person shooter remit is impossible to maintain. Certainly in that time we did not cover every single new FPS game. Or maybe it's an ethos: the kind of criticism that would take in, and take seriously, an unhealthy number of modern Call of Duties applied to every genre of games.
One shooter we have not covered on the site that nonetheless serves as a kind of guiding light is Ready or Not: a patently repulsive object, diametrically opposed to the personal ideologies of everyone running Bullet Points, and yet magnetic and revealing in ways other, less hideous games are not.
Marathon season one, which we did cover, was a fragile, beautiful thing, and already extinct as Bungie has entered its end-of-life subsistence phase, dribbling out "content" until death. The general resistance people had to a competitive shooter was surprising to me, as if it was a radical break with tradition; we used to live by the sword, guys. What happened?
Speaking of the sword: Fursan al-Aqsa, the self-styled "Palestinian Max Payne," is a jubilant, absurd game where you zip around killcamming IDF soldiers. A single drop in the sea of CIA-brained military shooters, of course—exactly why you should play it.
CICADAMATA" and vholume: the former is like Cosmic Smash with shmovement, the latter an entry in the "megastructure" microgenre that has some of the most convincingly embodied first-person platforming I can think of. Both of them remind us that innovation rarely comes from the top; even the ideas that gestate in huge videogame projects find their real expression in the hands of independent designers.
And I would be remiss not to shout out the work of xxgameroom, an anonymous developer who puts out free or cheap shooting games (in the bullet hell sense) like a solo CAVE; their newest, Eden's Eclipse, iterates on the irresistible Espgaluda formula so beautifully it's hard to believe. One of God's lonely freaks on a quest known only to themself…
That's why I still believe in Bullet Points; even when the release calendar looks grim, even when the deadlines pile up, even when it feels like there's nothing to say. The game is just a prompt, a starting point. There is always something to express from within yourself if you give it space to find words. Bullet Points is a place—one of the few places left, it's safe to say—that exists purely to exhibit writers new and old writing from the heart. Sorry to end it on an English-teacher note, but there it is!!
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Ed Smith
It’s so hard not to be cynical and depressed. I want to be able to say ‘well, this has happened and that has happened, and while it’s not all good, or whatever, there’s still a sizeable part of me that either feels emotionally and artistically nourished by the shooters I play, or that still has belief that I will one day be more emotionally and artistically nourished by them than I am now’. If I go fully one note on this, I think I’ll sound like a bad writer, like a bad critic.
There’s another part of me that wants to say ‘what do I know? Some good, some bad. It’s not like I’ve played every shooter made in the past ten years. I can’t possibly write an assessment of an entire genre. And hell, maybe that’s the beauty. It’s all so far reaching and multitudinous that, just based on the principles of quantity and percentage, there’s a better chance that you’ll find a great, meaningful shooter now than in 2016.’
And when I look at the obsessive little spreadsheet I keep of the games I’ve played, it is true that (at least since 2024, when I started maintaining the spreadsheet) a lot of the games that have meant the most to me have been shooters. Dead Trash did a lot for me. Dagger Directive was a blast. Battlefield 6, Marathon, Alpha Response, Mafia: The Old Country. All of these games have done something to light up my heart. And they’ve all come out in the last three years, nevermind ten. And all of them are shooters.
I’m also mindful that Ready or Not, one of the best games I’ve played in my life (‘best’ as in ‘provocative’; ‘best’ as in ‘gave me a lot to talk about’; ‘best’ as in ‘was emotionally, psychologically and aesthetically “chewy”’) has come out in the time since we started doing Bullet Points. And that’s a shooter, for sure!
But I also hoped there would be more Mafia IIIs by now. Hell, I’d even go for more Titanfall 2s. I’m surprised that opening level from Battlefield 1 still feels so unusual. It’s ludicrous to think of all gaming culture, all game production and all game makers as constantly and collectively journeying towards the same greater artistic north star, as if there’s a unified and quantifiable march of progress that everyone is reaching for in conjunction. But while that’s a ridiculous idea, on the contrary, I do sometimes sense that there is a form-wide pull—albeit informal, unorganised, intangible in its operation—towards keeping games inoffensive. And it’s in the shooter—which by its nature and conventions should be the genre that gives me the deepest gut reactions, but is actually the one that most regularly feels to me like a toy—where I sense this the most, and which as a result makes me feel the most cynical still.
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Grace Benfell
Killing is a profession. Maybe it always was. But something did shift nearly two decades ago with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and shifted harder with games like PUBG and Fortnite just under 10 years ago. The protagonists of endless World War II games were conscripts for the most part. But the protagonists of Black Ops and Modern Warfare were special operatives. These soldiers were close to superheroically competent and were far from ordinary men. Vanishing were the days of Gordon Freeman, working physicist turned everyman gunslinger. It is Captain Price who haunts us today.
The arguably more insidious change came in Modern Warfare's multiplayer, where you could earn XP to unlock abilities and weapons. The escalation in these systems across every multiplayer game mirrored the increasing gamification of work. Fortnite is a platform, a workspace, way more than it is a battlefield. It's a place where you earn perks and promotions for good performance; where you clock in to do your daily tasks. PUBG competitors are Uber drivers are Slack desk drones are Apex Legends eSports pros.
Marathon is the peak of this in some sense, so perhaps fitting that it is the least popular of these games by a long shot. It keeps at least some of the harsh edges of gig work. It's drone warfare via plastic avatar, where the firefights have stakes beyond the completion of tasks and victory, but turn into the realm of profit and downturn. Marathon is far from unique in this of course, but it weaves those economics into its tapestry directly. Its combatants are explicitly freelance contractors, ticking down endless debt.
But there is also the other thing. Videogames have gotten so much more expensive. Where consoles used to trickle down in price, they now ratchet up several times. Videogames were already rooted in technology of exploitation. But now, Microsoft and Sony are cutting the rope to get to the cutting edge. If you weren't already here, you aren't invited.
What's advertised to the poor are games that are jobs and casinos together. You can play Fortnite on your phone. And Roblox. And Genshin Impact. These are all almost endless games with quotas, tasks, "something for everyone," and endless slots to throw in endless coins. The irony is that the past of videogames, and the margins scattered across itch.io and self-hosted websites, is more accessible than ever. But those things require you to be in the know and they won't be advertised to you on TikTok.
The rich enough can play at poverty. For the rest, they can play at catching up.
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Grace is a freelance writer based in Chicago. She is the author of Killing Our Gods: Essays On Religion, Christianity, And Video Games. She co-edits the criticism journal The Imaginary Engine Review and co-hosts the survival horror podcast The Safe Room. In her spare time, she writes horror fiction about bad Mormons and organizes with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Her work can be found at The A.V. Club, The Wand Report, Edge Magazine, and on her website.
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Joshua Calixto
For decades, videogames' sweeping formal evolutions have come to us with gun in hand. The 2D arcade era of the '80s built its reputation on shooters like Contra and Galaga. The medium’s marquee cases of 3D embodiment—games like Wolfenstein 3D and later Goldeneye 007—put pistols and shotguns at literal front and center. In the 2000s, glorified hallways expanded to open worlds, and the most influential of them, Grand Theft Auto III, was ultimately still just a game about shooting people, albeit in novel and emergent ways.
Around a decade ago it looked like this could be games’ trajectory for decades to come. Call of Duty settled in as an unimpeachable yearly staple, doggedly prodding at storytelling norms under overwhelming shareholder pressure. Overwatch, Fortnite, and PUBG suggested that first-person shooters could evolve into some kind of unexpected bastion for online friend groups. The guns were ready and waiting; they just needed their Next Big Thing.
But then Covid came and fucked it all up, breaking the pattern (among many other things) into a million pieces. The old perspective-based taxonomies flash-froze into canon: first-person, third-person, isometric, top-down, 2D, text-based, VR. If there was a Next Big Thing to be found, it was no longer in some vertical technological leap, but through expansion into some new and undetermined conceptual zone. And so the shooter—once the industry’s most reliable pioneering genre— dissolved into a sea of friendslop, Twitch bait, soulslikes, roguelikes, roguelites, deck-builders, walking sims, survivals, incrementals, augmented realities, interface games, gacha games, loop games, cozy games.
The good news is that this is good news. We are finding new ways to interact with the worlds we’ve built. We are unearthing things to do besides frag and die. The gun is no longer the defining object of the medium. The bad news is that we’ve seen what’s coming to replace it, and it looks a lot like a slot machine.
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Joshua Calixto writes about technology and culture. Find him on Twitter @hitherejosh.
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Nick Capozzoli
Speaking as a critic: maybe we shouldn’t ask critics anymore. A trend, a genre, an artistic movement, whatever the subject, if it’s a question about its trajectory then it’s a matter of measuring from one’s standing, and the critic is manifestly not. Our answer to this point, as far as I can tell, is to just keep appending more Lates to “Late Capitalism,” a growing pile of IOUs we hope will cover the yawning deficit between our position and that of our objects.
To simplify our calculations, let me propose instead to track one trajectory. After all, artistic trends would be much easier to map in the moment—and in much finer detail—if everyone was perpetually iterating on the same painting. I suggest DOOM. For one, it can run on anything, from fridge to fire trap. And the bare syntax alone rings true for the last decade, to me: If you simply wrote “DOOM (2016) → DOOM: Eternal (2020) → DOOM: The Dark Ages (2025)” on a chalkboard, that by itself is already a pretty funny bit.
Neo-DOOM’s irreverence, its increasingly high-concept premises and impatience for throat-clearing are, as best as I can tell, the closest thing to a trend in the FPS genre at large. Gothic origin stories for Doomguy’s armor? What do we call this, if we already burned our “Postmodernism” card describing the contrived, po-faced shooters of the early 2010s? “Immediacy,” à la Kornbluh, does seem to fit the bill, even as videogames at large hardly seem to factor in to her titular polemic, let alone First-Person Shooters. But what do “flexibility and fluidity, emanation and connectivity, directness and instantaneity” scream to you, if not an FPS? Certainly there is an interesting countervailing movement—slow-FPS games that apply the meticulousness of articulation sims to the act of readying, aiming, firing, and reloading, and which seem additive for both community and the building of shared meaning—but their popularity with the historical reenactment crowd should be enough to show they’re the exception that proves the rule.
No, it’s the Immediacy, or something like it, that seems to have found its ideal host in the shooter, saturating in the genre’s historicity and pastiche, availing itself of the FPS’s synaptic connections between semiotics and reflex. Complexity and contradiction would only bog down the action. Tom Bissell, over a decade ago, wrote that “a shooter works by effectively training its players to ignore things like great characterization and thoughtful scenario-making.” Chaudhaury observed the resemblance between the FPS protagonist and the “positively conceived characterlessness” of Walter Benjamin’s “destructive character.” Pinning a word to it hardly seems sufficient, though, and the critic who isn’t content with taxonomy is left trying to describe the phenomenon by the vacuums in its wake. The hole is easiest to observe in ourselves, naturally: there is a growing understanding that these games will not inevitably be salubrious, even as we commit more and more time to them. Read Bissell as he said: “I play shooters because I like the pressure, the pressure of learning what to pay attention to in a realm where the ordinary governances of human behavior have been lifted. I like shooters, I suspect, for the same reason I used to like doing hard drugs.” Then read Klimentov on (off?) Valorant.
I imagine more along those lines from us critics, as we contemplate the shooter going forward: more cognitive dissonance, faster metabolization, more binges, more ambivalence…criticism thats acutely aware of its own inadequacies, accurate, and nevertheless unable to find a practicable foothold. Why try to write about these games, which seem to be annihilating the very concept of mediation? But that’s always been the prescience of the Bullet Points project, to me. If a videogame ever kills videogames—or kills us all—it will be a shooter, certainly. They are games’ antitheory and antichrist. But their easy inhumanity is what also empowers the affirmative counterargument. Even DOOM. Especially DOOM.
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Nick Capozzoli is an architect and critic.
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Lewis Gordon
One of the most insightful things I’ve read on first-person shooters in the past decade arrived via an unlikely source: technology writer Benjamin Bratton’s slender and superbly named 2021 socio-technological analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic, The Revenge of the Real. In it, he wrote about first-person videogames as a kind of interface technology, how they “orient the world around the perceptual point of the viewer and compress the whole world into a tunnel-vision of ecocentric navigation whereby everything is shown as an ever-expanding stream from nowhere, just for you.”
This gets at something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: how it feels like we live in a first-person shooter moment—how it has become dishearteningly easy to evidence a dumb line like, “society has entered its Call of Duty era.” UK military ads are made to look like popcorn shooters set in the Middle East; the White House interpolates Call of Duty material into actual footage of life-obliterating rockets hitting Iran. On the one hand, the aesthetics of Call of Duty, Battlefield, and its ilk seem to have wormed their way into the genuine mainstream. On the other hand, the more insidious “ego-centric navigation” that Bratton mentions (which strikes me as a conceptual cousin of “main character energy”) feels like it has, too. First-person shooters train us in many ways: crucially, killing people can feel good; also, you are the most important being in the world. Applied together in the real world, that combination is lethal.
If the first-person shooter can, to some degree, help explain the arrival of this most hyper-violent, hyper-individualistic moment, then I’m encouraged by the new wave of titles that go out of their way to skewer and satirise such notions. I’m thinking of the likes of Cruelty Squad, goblinAmerica, and the upcoming Soul Injector Commando, games whose shared aesthetic, a kind of battery-sour CG-psychedelia, feels just right for these intensely off-kilter, supremely K-holed times (it’s also good to see people push past the low-poly PSX style). I still think violence twinned with the first-person perspective is potent. It can help us see this strange, messy world a little clearer, and not just everything that seems to be wrong with it.
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Lewis Gordon is a Glasgow-based journalist and critic who writes about video games, technology and culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Verge, The Ringer, Vulture, ArtReview and other publications, examining games both as an art form and as products embedded in wider political and technological systems.
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Kaile Hultner
As ubiquitous as they are today, I find it harder and harder to imagine people playing first-person shooters themed around warfare a decade from now. Each new game in a Call of Duty or a Battlefield franchise feels less and less connected to any recognizable context, decreasingly legible against the backdrop of destabilizing empires and power vacuums-in-waiting. Task Force 141 isn’t going to run out of ordnance anytime soon because the Laws of Good Storytelling dictate that they don’t, but the actual American military might run out of bombs to shoot at Iran within weeks of this little snippet of writing going up.
I think games like Call of Duty will continue to morph into lethal hyperpop gameshow hellscapes where contestants can dress up as celebrities and cartoon characters through carefully-brokered brand crossover deals. Eventually someone will try to make the Spec Ops: The Line of live-service killfests and it will garner critical acclaim from a smattering of blogs and video essayists but fail to do appreciable numbers, because at the end of the day Paul Tassi will be the only employed person left in “games media” and that man fucking loves CPCs. Fortnite and The Finals will merge and become one. Army recruitment will crater. Trickshots are for aura farming only.
Maybe the future of first-person shooters is in all the DOOM wads and Quake levels and hyper-mobile movement shooters like I Am Your Beast and Don’t Stop Girlypop, and years from now those seeds start to bloom. Maybe there will be contexts that we’ve never encountered before, brought to the fore by people who were sick of the status quo and desiring a different reality. Maybe Bullet Points Monthly will be around to catch that new context and put it in conversation with what’s come before. That would be pretty cool.
Congratulations to BPM and friends for making it through a whole decade of a brilliantly executed idea. Here’s to many more decades, if they wanna go that hard. — Kaile Hultner
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Kaile Hultner is a writer, editor and curator in Oklahoma City. They run the digital culture website No Escape.
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Zack Kotzer
I came to arena shooters pretty late. I’ll place some of that onus on the fact that Canadian internet bandwidth is historically awful. But by the time I finally did arrive to them I did so agnostically. Skipping Unreal Tournament, Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, bridging directly between Overwatch and slappers-only Goldeneye. I was an open shell, washed ashore. Fill me with your sea treasures.
By 2016, Nintendo had introduced ‘their’ online arena shooter. Bullet-aversive and always fishing for their angle, the game revolved around trendy, mutant squid teenagers who adore paintball. In Splatoon, your paint heals. Their paint kills. Swim through your spill and whoever has left the arena covered in the most muck wins. It’s a dynamic way to play. Over the three games and one recent spin-off, memorizing the quirks of each map, identifying player behavior and adjusting your routes as they shift in real time is as important as how true your aim is with a super soaker.
When possible, I dress my character like a Tom of Finland pissboy. Appropriately armed with the ‘Bloblobber,’ a urinal that spews bubbles. Its range is incredible. Its mess, impeccable. But to kill someone you’ll have to land all four bubbles per shot, leaving you exposed between clips. Somehow, people do not take this game very seriously in the live service scheme of things. That has not prevented Splatoon from outliving almost all of its competition.
Splatoon 3 became the multiplayer game in my friend circles over COVID lockdowns. When Nintendo announced two years back that they would be discontinuing support for the game, we spent the final ‘Splatfest’ weekend expunging all our stored up juices. The game seemed to know we’d be doing so bitter-sweetly. For this last event, the game threw a Coachella, setting up fair grounds and rotating stages for all the in-game pop stars to play on. You could adorn yourself with costume jewelry won in the games, sway with the crowd like it’s “Good Riddance” being played. The three teams you could align to were “Past,” “Present,” and “Future.” Say farewell to the game. Say farewell to the summer. Say goodbye to your beach friends.
We probably weren’t the only ones, but we misunderstood what Nintendo’s ‘end of service’ actually meant. Weekend limited event modes such as Splatfest, and more importantly the psychotic PvE “Big Run,” ended up continuing. My chums and I could continue as we had over the global pandemic. They just weren’t adding any new maps or weapons, the latter kind of stagnant to begin with. But the final “Grand Fest” still hit pretty hard, and illustrated the hold Splatoon has where others slip.
It treats this gathering of friends like a party. Because when you gather your friends, it should be a party. You should spill into the night, overdressed and inked to high heaven. You can murder each other. You can also meander the open streets of this fish city, watching jellyfish rave kids do glowstick tricks and hear the soft clattering dishes of late night dim sum spots.
My arena shooter bonafides haven’t really expanded since 2016. Splatoon did not become a vector to others in the genre. I like that it paints over those foundations more than the foundations themselves. The recent Splatoon Raiders is a similar lunge at extraction shooters, making the three load out kits a kind of Vampire Survivors-style remix. The fact it’s set on a desert island is a poor excuse to feel so isolating. Its multiplayer features have lots of room to grow, and had 3’s ongoing support not been so fantastic I would be low on hope.
Splatoon is no longer the butt of the live service joke. The strange trial of the last decade has made live service the butt of the live service joke. Scrutiny towards online-focused shooters has hit a fever pitch. The routine ones. The big guns and Pixar eyes one. The chasm has opened upon games made in Splatoon’s image. Hangabout games that emphasize the social over the anti-social, currently called, for a critical lack of a better term, friendslop. Their numbers sprint by like a fun run, but I’ve already settled in on the ocean floor. I enjoy being in a bizarre fishtopian world. I’m on a “sea friends” diet. When I see friends, I say “hello.”
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Zack Kotzer is a writer, editor, and former carny. He is the creator of FUNLAND zine and does weekends over at Kotaku.
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Cameron Kunzelman
Two things have accelerated in the past decade. One is that a nostalgia complex has become a cornerstone of games culture to the point where I think you could reasonably argue that there are only two things happening in games now: retro aesthetics pointing backward to a mythical collective childhood and battle passes projecting forward into eternity.
In the broadest understanding of the genre, including first- and third-person shooters, the shooter is one of the main drivers of these trends. In the future-facing mode, the genre was one of the places where the season pass logic of the games industry first found its home, crawling an economic logic into the daily questing patterns and regular-interval attachments of the Call of Duty player. The ideal contemporary buyer of a shooter is someone who sees themselves playing Battlefield or Call of Duty for eternity, strung along on daily, weekly, and seasonal reward systems until the next game comes out.
As always, for myself, I find the looking back to be more troubling. The future has always been eaten up by the industries that specialize in that particular form of fencing; their primary investment is in arresting any way out of their walled garden of potential enjoyments. My real mumbling is reserved for the constant retrojective maneuver: the boomer shooter, replacing the Super Nintendo Christmas morning nostalgia with Quake in the computer lab; the seasonal return to the Fortnite or Warzone content that you used to enjoy; the hope that someone will make a Halo 2 again that makes you feel the way you did one time.
I think about Max from Kicking and Screaming and I imagine he’s talking about the shooter genre: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing right now.”
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Cameron Kunzelman is a writer and a critic. His books The World is Born From Zero, on science fiction games, and Everything Is Permitted: On Assassin’s Creed, about the Assassin’s Creed franchise, are books you can buy. He podcasts for Ranged Touch.
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David Wolinsky
An essential question plaguing our fragile species: Where have shooters gone since 2016? You could argue they haven’t gone anywhere—meaning they’ve stalled out and are content to coast forever, or maybe don’t have to change much because their potency is unquestionable. Those first-glance impressions are like only looking at a duck gliding in the water, pretending there isn’t something else happening in the interface of waves and web.
The story of where most gunfire reigns in 2026 gaming owes a lot to Duke Nukem Forever, a 2011 game nobody has thought about much since maybe us merry few Bullet Points Monthly writers danced with it in 2019. DNF is in the lifeblood of shooters today, because it was a costly buoy warning that the old ways could not last, and why they needed to start doing something new. Whether the new waters feel sufficiently ambitious for those paying attention is another matter (who even thinks about or evaluates such things, and is being honest with themselves?)—DNF built Xanadu, then handed us all an eviction notice. The weird lesson learned, nobody would have predicted: “Hey, what if development hell is actually a feature, and we make games with no end in sight?”
2016 was when DOOM went back to the drawing boards and the genre relaxed into a confused prominence similar to rock music, aware cover bands can also draw a crowd. In 2026, shooters are now also folk music: grammar so basic you can keep discovering new things to say while still sounding the same. (This folk revival also has us believing that boomers played Doom 64.) It would not be an exaggeration to instead argue that shooters are where the action is and fresh ideas are in videogames, today. Exfil shooters like Marathon are vicious altars you willingly sacrifice yourself on and sometimes are heartened to learn total strangers can be cool. Battle royale shooters like PUBG: Battlegrounds turned 100 players loose and taught us the winner could be someone who wasn’t particularly interested in shooting anybody. Whatever Wardogs turns out to be, its gimmick is betting on stakes. Today, shooters are synonymous with Videogames overall. Even the blind alleys—tinkering with time manipulation, other ambitions too lofty in their launch to sustain—are taking us somewhere. Whether you see it depends on which side of the barrel you’re looking at.
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DAVID WOLINSKY is the author of THE HIVEMIND SWARMED: CONVERSATIONS ON GAMERGATE, THE AFTERMATH, AND THE QUEST FOR A SAFER INTERNET, which grew out of Don’t Die, a decade-long, 500-plus-interview inquiry into what videogames the internet is doing to our sense of ourselves, our culture, and our politics. He was an editor at The Onion AV Club who helped start its games section (RIP), and a founding writer for Kill Screen (RIP).
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Autumn Wright
In 2016, Overwatch struck as close to mainstream success as any hero shooter has gotten, by appealing to shippers and weebs and horny teens and young adults and also people who don’t love shooting stuff. (A proven playbook, followed by Baldur’s Gate 3.) Most of its characters rejected the twitchy accuracy of the genre, and you didn’t need to know what Team Fortress 2 was to “get it”. It wasn’t sold on playing to an objective rather than to a kill count, nor was it sold on ‘not needing to aim well’. It was memeable characters in Pixar-nostalgia-styled shorts who were easily transported into fanart and cosplay, two things that were both increasingly acceptable, if not yet popular, on social media. And in its background was a shining near-utopia setting, a city on a hill that was protected by its team of strong heroes who drew on their diversity to fight hot villains. I don’t know if it sounds trite because of the abundance of YA tropes that are overwatered today, or because of how much fanart and cosplay you can find from literally any fandom today, or because I was just 18 at the time and playing with college friends. We played a lot of Pharmercy.
But you’re never getting the high of Overwatch back. You can’t reopen the first Halloween loot box from that fall in your dorm and get the sexy Witch Mercy skin on the first pull. You can’t undo the first Trump admin or the Roe repeal or Obama’s drone strikes. And you can’t be 18 again. It’s 2026. You’re 28. Hiding in the cozy fictions you remember won’t save your access to hormones.
Could we have imagined Marathon a decade ago? As satirical and punishing and just plain dim as it really is? Could we imagine then that making a good game wouldn’t save a studio, let alone the world? But I do still like playing dress up with my player characters, more than I could admit back then. So, survive another decade. Outlive the studios and the servers. And pair up with your Pharah main who’s about to be a dad for one last heist on Perimeter.
What lesson is there in a decade of shooters? You can run. Hide in the shadows. But there is no escape from Tau Ceti, and there is no return to the future you thought you had.
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Autumn Wright is a critic. Find them online.