A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. This genre shares multiple common traits with other shooter games, and in turn falls under the action games category. Since the genre's inception, advanced 3D and pseudo-3D graphics have proven fundamental to allow a reasonable level of immersion in the game world, and this type of game helped pushing technology progressively further, challenging hardware developers worldwide to introduce numerous innovations in the field of graphics processing units. Multiplayer gaming has been an integral part of the experience, and became even more prominent with the diffusion of internet connectivity in recent years.
A player engaging in combat during an above-ground section in Half-Life
More 21st century first-person shooters utilize the Internet for multiplayer features, but local area networks were commonly used in early games.
2011 shooter Xonotic
First-person (video games)
In video games, first-person is any graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character, or from the inside of a device or vehicle controlled by the player character. It is one of two perspectives used in the vast majority of video games, with the other being third-person, the graphical perspective from outside of any character ; some games such as interactive fiction do not belong to either format.
A screenshot from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl; the presence of the player character's right hand firing their gun (bottom right) denotes the first-person perspective.
First-person can be used for virtually any genre; Zeno Clash (screenshot above) is a beat 'em up in first person, an unusual choice for the genre.
