Back in the mid-2000’s, the height of the Iraq War and numerous what would-later be called “police actions” by the war-obsessed United States Government, the looming threat of paramiliarization hung over every aspect of pop culture. Marines fought Dragons in Television Commercials, held jeweled broadswords in gaming magazines. Everywhere I turned, there was a Military Advisor telling some history obsessed guy with a goatee on a TV show with a name like “Ultimate Warrior” the battlefield brilliance of a Roman Soldier compared to the modern United States Military. Videogames stayed obsessed with Vietnam, World War II, the War in the Gulf, and that’s not when they made up armed conflicts where the brave Americans rode into battle with M4’s and .45 caliber pistols at their hips.

The new battlefield had a sword shield. Bulletproof plastic and assault rifles, high-caliber pistols and grenade launchers got deployed in fantasy Las Vegas where the brave Rainbow Six teams of Tom Clancy’s posthumous paranoid fantasy of total crime takeover played out in the streets and hotel high-rises. The war wasn’t on the news: there might be footage of soldiers traveling via convoy down a desert road, or soldiers in caskets on the way home. We saw military drills with our own eyes, mortars fired into vast plateaus of smoke and fire and ruined cityscapes: they could be fighting something called a terrorist, but we never saw those unless it was to depict an absence of American Soldiers that could fix it all by showing up in the street with boots and guns.

It’s no surprise then, that during that panic period of the the second-to-last president of our nation, the United States of America’s teens and videogames turned to jumping at shadows and decades old conspiracy theories. That all-marker harbinger of the American Present, the First Person Shooter, turned towards catholic demons, Area 51 extraterrestrials and shadowy government organizations. After all: if the reality of violence is mostly defined by television, newspapers and the internet, our mind might turn towards the paranoia left behind by what we aren’t shown. It’s all a fiction, ripe for exploration.

F.E.A.R. was released in 2006. Broadly, it’s a game about Government Conspiracies: cloning, ghosts, x-files and abandoned water treatment plants. The first line barked by an NPC while you stand, the player an unnamed point man with a mysterious backstory: “This is why nobody takes our organization seriously!” You, me, and our protagonist know that we’re about to become the most Serious Government Organization in existence, and we’re going to do it by looking at the world over a rifle. The next thing we know about the world: I have the greatest reflexes of anyone alive, and they come at the click of a mouse button. I’m in an agreement with every soldier that wants to point a rifle at my head: one, two, three, draw.

The Western has come home, the sheer pace of gunfights in F.E.A.R. hitting a mark of nervous desperation. Flank, grenades, misdirection. Or steer your two-legged gun pilot through office buildings and industrial facilities, bumping the key to slow down time like a nervous college kid in an anime convention hotel room. Our arsenal is limited, a handful of guns separating our world from the one drowning in blood filled hallways and mystical conspiracies. Nameless cops called Replica’s bark chatter at each other over crackling shoulder-mounted radios. Without a face, without a name, I hunt the new suits of inanimate armor through the castles of mid-modern gothic. Stone walls and blue flecked paint. Broken pipes and clattering industrial ducting grates. A skeleton falls from a plaster and paperboard wall tile in an office.

I’ve never had to work in a real office. Mostly, shunted between retail rooms and little corner storage areas fitted out with ten year old PC’s and Office Depot furniture. When a shooting happens in America in one of these places, my mind turns to videogames. I know the shape of the place from instructional videos I’ve been watching for ten years in case someone wants to kill me, for any reason, at any time.

F.E.A.R. has office buildings free from all of the callous pretend-world building of modern game design. There are few product shout outs, not terrestrial dressing up in places of extreme violence. I’m raised on a generation of videogames dedicated to showing me which walls can be hid behind if someone tries to kill me: is it any wonder the modern workplace or school or library tends to aim towards the direction of heavier furniture, more bulletproof decorations?

And it’s true. I stalk through the halls of central offices and military compounds rendered in clipboards and soda cans and plywood desks. A gunfight stops so I can play back the antique messages on a corded phone. I wonder long enough through empty hallways that I stumble into the next area of pitch-high chatter and military baritone. Firefights in these places last panicked half-seconds, barely enough health or armor to scrape by. It’s not ballet, it’s not a syncopated rhythm or a dance. Put soldiers in front of me, I kill them. In the lingering seconds of active time, it seems like every bullet fired is a waste. My enemies are stronger than I am, they can kill me faster.

Our primary instrument is The Shotgun; not one with an artifact presence like the glistening double barrels centered in the screen that take the imagination towards childhood. It’s a beast of black gunmetal and steel railings that has a face like an old friend: a gun held by the people opposite a front line protest. Carried by action movie heroics and military branches, and now I get to bring it into the house for a lovely version of the home game.

F.E.A.R. has guns, it’s true: but one of them belches smoke like a campfire raised too hot, cuts through the silence of a room like an industrial speaker bringing a crowd to a sweat-fueled orgasm of dopamine. Creature with many names, here it’s the VK-12. In real life, we call it the SPAS-12. “Special Purpose Automatic Shotgun”. Later renamed “Sporting Purpose Automatic Shotgun”. Too many people liked to ask what kind of special purpose it had in importers offices.

Every time the left mouse button is clicked, every gun in F.E.A.R. roars to life in a way too hot to handle. Assault rifles spray ammunition over great muzzle flares too bright to see, every object caked in enough layers of dust that you spend more time checking the floor for bodies than you do trying to place the barrel of a gun between the highlighted goggles of a paramilitary clone. Bullets in slo-mo are depicted as clean trails of translucent silver being delivered towards or from the camera, and everything in that place takes on an artistic sensibility. We don’t shoot through the smoke, we move fast enough to put bullets in bodies before it can even rise.

These office buildings, depots, secret military bases are discreet places of war. On the rooftops of levels you can see in the distance low-rise apartment complexes and mysterious concrete structures: the world outside of this chapter is not as important as the shooting happening inside it. Our wetwork operative, The Point Man, solves some kind of generational dispute that has shorter, three letter acronyms. Whatever we’re up to here, we are making the world a better place.

Our Sporting Purpose Autonomous Shotgun lifted by a free-spinning camera (we are saved from FPS indulgences like bathroom mirrors and reflections) sometimes delivers such an impact upon being fired that even through twenty pounds of Kevlar, a soldier might be rendered into a red-dust that hangs in the air like the set-dressing that happens when we puncture any number of props in the game world, chunks of meat floating lazily to the ground in slow motion. When it happens in the middle of a firefight, it feels like success. A haze-ring of supersonic ammunition floating.

The American Shotgun carries with it a feverish, pacifying quality. Good for home defense. Exorcise a devil, a ghost, or a robber: in some paranoid imaginations, one of them is all of them. After all, who could be looking into my neighborhood windows? Thinking about everything I’ve worked Real Hard for that they don’t have…or maybe motivated by a type of maliciousness towards all that I’ve fought for by clocking in and clocking out every day. A shotgun can look like a nice piece of decoration next to a night stand, and the cops have them in all of the magazines.

A little ghost girl pops out of the shadows to frighten me. A room fills with blood. Lights crackle and pop that make me reflexively reach for a flashlight, just long enough to pop a shot off against something in the darkness. The new sword and shield sometimes comes packaged in a 40. caliber slug. Can anything save us, but a point man with a shotgun?