Comment by enkers@sh.itjust.works on [Ahoy] What genre is DOOM?

I see the dismissiveness as a reaction to the title clickbait/burying the lede. I get that this is how you have to do video titles on YouTube to get views, but a sentence or two about what the video’s actual premise is in the post body would have gone a long way to interest people who are, understandably IMO, a bit apathetic towards headlines like this.

Then let’s transcribe part of the opening:

I know what you’re thinking – it’s a stupid question, it’s an FPS. It’s the definitive FPS. And it’s a fair point. DOOM ticks all the boxes required for a reasonable definition of a first person shooter. It’s presented from a first-person perspective, and shooting the bad guys is a key part of it. But the FPS genre didn’t exist when DOOM was released. The term “first person shooter” wasn’t common until a few years later.

~~So what genre was DOOM? How was it originally described?~~

Edit I’ve now understood that quoting most of the video’s opening salvo has unfortunately misrepresented the video’s contents to the people who are still trying to leave comments without actually watching it. It’s a video about what DOOM’s genre is and what DOOM’s genre was, not only the latter. The title looks clickbait-y but is honestly pretty accurate regarding the subject of the video.

the FPS genre didn’t exist

Wolfenstein…

People arguing with the video without having watched it lmao

I have watched the video. I think it’s Stuart’s worst.

The thesis statement is more like “We now call Doom an FPS, but that term really didn’t come about until Half Life, so what did they call Doom at the time?” Which would have been a quick aside in another video, but here it’s the whole thing. I don’t think there’s enough meat there for a whole video, and the “obviously, but what I’m really getting at is…” title isn’t great.

Given a choice, I’m going to rewatch Chicken-o-meter instead of this video.

He’s not saying Doom was the first FPS, he’s saying the term “First Person Shooter” didn’t exist yet to describe the few games it would apply to at the time.

Then the title should’ve said that… But it’s asking what the current genre is in the title (uses word “is”), presumably to appeal to the “Boomer shooter” vs “FPS” debate, when that’s not what the video is about at all.

A better title would be: “What genre was Doom? Hint: FPS didn’t exist yet.” Or even just “What genre was Doom originally?” Neither is click-baity or overly long.

The video covers that and Catacomb 3-D, which I don’t remember hearing about before but it looks like they released it half a year earlier.

…ye gads, something about the low-framerate EGA + flat topology in catacombs 3D gave me ferocious motion sickness at the time; even looking at screenshots still makes me feel queasy to this day…

(never had that problem with ultima underworld)

The projection’s also wrong. Things in the background move faster when you turn. Essentially it’s a third-person camera with an invisible protagonist. The camera swings around behind you, and stuff appears and disappears when it shouldn’t.

Weirdly, another game did the opposite. Die Hard by Dynamix (not the other hundred licensed titles with the same name) is a third-person shooter with very dungeon-crawler movement but smooth turning animation. Unfortunately that animation shows your character occupying the space in front of you. So you don’t turn, you sort of shuffle around a little circle.

Except what’s really happening is that it’s a first-person perspective, and John McClane is your gun.

…ah, that explains it!..no other EGA games affected me the same way…

The answer is still FPS.

I understand it might be an interesting video on Doom being the trailblazer of its genre, but you give me a simple dumb question as the title of your video and I’ll give it a snarky dumb answer every time.

If this is offending you as a clickbait title, I fear for your long term survival on the internet. This is a downright polite title compared to most of what you’d see on YouTube. Count your blessings.

It is true, every time I have opened YouTube, I have died.

I now realise this video’s existence is my one true blessing and will scoot post haste to the Patreon listed and hand over all of my worldly possessions as penance.

The title used “is.” They should’ve said, “What genre was Doom? Hint: FPS wasn’t a genre yet.” It’s a little more wordy, but I probably would’ve watched it. I’m not watching this out of principle because the title sucks, and I don’t want to reward that.

My quote is not the only content of the video; I’ve just included most of the introduction. The 13:23 long video has the following chapter markers:

00:00 Introduction 00:50 How was DOOM originally described? 02:20 DOOM clones 04:33 Quake Killers 6:06 A hypothetical question 12:05 Conclusion

Only the first half of the video is accurately described by your suggested title. The video as a whole is described by the existing title with reasonable accuracy. It’s not a bait-and-switch: the video also discusses what genre DOOM is, not only what genre DOOM was.

It seems that you (and many others) have used a heuristic of “clickbait-y sounding titles don’t accurately describe the contents of videos” and left corresponding comments. Although often accurate, that heuristic has failed in this instance.

I ended up watching it, and I thought it was generally just okay. Basically, here’s the tldr from what I remember:

Doom was originally a “virtual reality adventure” game - I guess that was the terminology for “first person” game back in the early 90s
Doom clone became a thing for a couple years until Quake came along, at which point “Quake killer” was the term used; just prior to this, “first person shoot’em up” was used
Some random discussion about what Doom would’ve been called if it didn’t get popular - not sure what that speculation is worth imo, maybe trying to discard biases?
conclusion that Doom was actually an action RPG? Because it has similar gameplay as gauntlet? Gauntlet was a hack and slash dungeon crawler, not an action RPG, so the proper conclusion imo is “first person shoot’em up dungeon crawler,” the “action RPG” argument came out of left field

So that’s my take. I don’t think it was a particularly noteworthy watch, and I’m not particularly motivated to subscribe to watch more. It was okay though, so I’m not going to avoid the channel or anything.

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