The objective of a shooter is to get kills. Even when an objective isn’t explicitly focused on this end, getting kills is usually at the top of gamers’ minds.
But should it be? You may ironically find shooters more enjoyable if you focus less on shooting and more on surviving.
Prioritising survival will change the way you play shooters forever. It may also make them more enjoyable for you than they’ve ever been before. Here are a few reasons why.
Surviving is (Usually) Easier than Killing
Getting kills takes skill, reflexes, and an enemy team with neither. By contrast, the skill of staying alive is procedural – a combination of conscious thought and habit. You don’t need a lot of skill; you just need to be clever, which is another way of saying, “Think about what you’re doing”.
Don’t recklessly run into danger. Stay behind cover, even when you’re moving. Fall back from disadvantageous situations. Don’t charge at the enemy directly – flank them.
Playing to survive takes patience, but the reduced emphasis on skill and reflexes makes the experience surprisingly relaxing, even in competitive games.
Isn’t that what you want to feel when playing games casually?
Survival is an Achievement
When you play shooters carelessly, you will die quickly. After a match of constant respawns, you’ll probably be dissatisfied, no matter how well you played.
That’s how it is for me, anyway. But when I put my mind to it and evade death for a few minutes, it feels like an accomplishment.
This sense of accomplishment swells in effect the longer I live. Avoiding death means the enemy can’t farm you for points. This is almost as important to your team as getting kills yourself. If you can’t kill, the least you can do is not die. That is, I assume, what they tell recruits in the military.
Not dying also means you don’t experience the frustration of death. Nor is your patience tested by the respawn screen and the run back to the action.
Even if you’re not getting kills, the satisfaction of evading death is potent because in games centred on the act of killing – as shooters are – staying alive for more than a minute is rare outside of games like Arma, where a single match takes roughly one working day to complete.
Valuing Your Character’s Life is Immersive
When you decide consciously to avoid death, your playstyle naturally changes. You consider your actions more carefully. You’re not so quick to shoot. You take cover more. You move in stops and starts, regularly scanning the area for enemy movement. You listen carefully and devise higher-level plans of action that may take minutes to execute.
In other words, you begin to act as you would in real life – thoughtfully and carefully.
The longer you live, the more precious your digital life becomes. Death means the loss of all your progress, the end to this hopeful and intelligent character you are roleplaying as. You don’t want that.
Your heartbeat quickens at the onset of danger, the sight of enemies, the noise of combat. Killing an enemy in this state feels like a huge accomplishment, a reprieve from the danger, one less variable to worry about. Yet your shots may also alert other enemies. Fearing for your safety, you are compelled to anticipate enemy reinforcements. The tension rises and never lets up until the match ends.
This is the most exciting and the most immersive way to play shooters. Recklessly charging at the enemy and mindlessly firing your gun may give you the occasional cheer, but it will lack the atmospheric tension and euphoria of the times when you genuinely try to preserve your character’s life.
Staying Alive Creates A Narrative
The longer you live, the more you are likely to see and do. This obviously doesn’t apply if you spend all your time camping in a corner (which I am not recommending). But if you pursue your objective and stay alive for a long time, you will traverse much ground, see many things, and get involved in many tense situations.
You may engage in multiple firefights, execute a wide flanking manoeuvre with a squad of teammates, see several of them die, allow an enemy squad to pass to avoid being caught in a disadvantageous position, camp on a hill to observe the enemy and form a plan, move in to take the objective and fall back as the enemy overwhelms your team defending the capture point, forcing you to attack the enemy from behind and retake the point – all in a single life.
So much can happen in one life when you strive to prolong it. When many things happen, moments of excitement and calm, dread and relief, and you live through it all, the game can seem like a movie filmed in one take.
Transforming your gaming experiences into narratives like this makes it easier to form them into memories. You likely can’t remember the matches in which you died repeatedly from start to finish, but you can remember the matches where you lived through the entire thing and went on a Middle Earth-like journey to take the enemy base and survived to tell the tale.
You will easily recall these narrative-like matches days, weeks, or even months after they happen. The highs and lows, the close calls and moments of triumph, imprint themselves on our memories more deeply than killstreaks and pro-level plays do.
Some matches I still remember years later; all are those in which I lived long enough to develop a sense of narrative around my character.
Staying Alive Makes You a Better Fighter
It may seem contradictory, but caring less about getting kills really does make getting kills easier.
When you focus more on staying alive, you naturally play more carefully and intelligently. This translates into better situational awareness and decision-making. When you habitually take cover, move in bursts between points of cover, refrain from facing the enemy head-on, and are willing to back out of disadvantageous positions and reconsider your positioning, it is only natural that an increased kill count will follow.
Reckless, impatient playstyles may feel more productive, but their victories are inconsistent and often rely on how much coffee they had before playing. Conversely, it is often the steady, thoughtful gamers who win consistently. This holds even in fast-paced games like Titanfall 2, where a more careful playstyle gains you superior environmental awareness, thus enabling you to use the game’s versatile movement mechanics to greater tactical effect.
By playing more thoughtfully, you decrease your reliance on aim and reflexes and increase your reliance on common sense tactics and predictive psychology, both of which, win or lose, garner more satisfying, lasting, and consistent experiences in the end.