20 years of DOOM!

I'm still trying to overcome my continued posting drought and motivate myself to write again. My job/internship search is really difficult right now, so I spend more time checking Indeed.com and the Brad Traverse Group than writing (and that's when I'm not watching funny videos to ease the anxiety of being on the job market). But let me indulge in my nerd side and reminisce about Doom, which celebrated its 20th birthday this month - on December 10, to be exact. I might have forgotten about this momentous occasion had I not read an interesting little Ars Technia article in which the editors reflected on how Doom changed video gaming forever. Most people who were playing games on their personal computers in the 1990s became addicted to first-person shooters (FPS) after playing Doom, and that includes myself.

Actually, I didn't start getting into Doom until the release of the sequel in 1994, which I first played at a friend's house. Previously, I had once watched one of my Dad's graduate students playing Wolfenstein 3D, but had never been allowed to play, because this student wasn't sure I should be playing something so violent*. So one of my earliest and fondest gaming memories was when I took control of the keyboard and mouse in Doom II and scored my first chainsaw kill against a zombie. It only got more exciting once I got my hands on the game's shotgun and started capping Imps. At the time, I had seen nothing like it, and the semi-3D graphics engine seemed amazing to me back then (The Division be damned!) Unfortunately, back then, nobody I knew had even a 28.8 bps modem, so I never got to experience the online play, which is undoubtedly the single greatest contribution that Doom made to gaming (its significance was not that it was the first FPS, or even the Id Software team's first FPS.) I did try Doom online, about a decade later, but by that point, I had been playing Counter-Strike for so long that there was no way I'd ever enjoy it.

There's another, military/political science-y reason I'm reflecting on Doom: I wonder how many young men from my generation would have ever even considered serving their country had they not spent years playing FPS descendants of Doom? I know I can attribute my own interest in the military to the years I spent playing the aforementioned Counter-Strike, as well as DoD's own FPS recruitment tool, America's Army, during my teen years. There are already political scientists who have studied the effects of war toys and war movies on the militarization of the United States: See, for instance, the ironically-named Patrick Regan's groundbreaking 1994 study on this topic for the Journal of Peace Research. Personally, I'm still waiting for them to update Waltz' Man, the State, and War to think about where the popularity of FPS games falls into IR theory (I would imagine that it affects both the second-image and third-image factors in Waltz' theory). This article in the European Journal of American Studies is the closest thing I've seen to an attempt, but the journal seems a bit too Euro-lefty to be credible. I also found this article by two professors at Fordham University to be interesting, but not theoretical enough for my purposes. And that's all that Google Scholar has found for me; I guess I'll have to check out DTIC next to see what's been published.

Hopefully, Doom's next major anniversary (25th, 30th?) will provide occasion to re-visit this topic and see new scholarship on FPS games, cultural militarism, and IR theory, because I imagine there is a lot of good work to be done on this topic. When even the PLA starts getting into the gaming biz, I think it's time to regard FPS popularity as a cultural factor that can't be ignored.





*Interesting tidbit: The student in question, who was then getting his Ph.D in my Dad's research group at Duke, was none other than Carl Schnurr, who eventually became a gaming pioneer himself as the lead designer for Rainbow Six, the first "tactical shooter" FPS.