I am a body in motion, as is everyone around me. Twitch, I set the ball on a split-second-calculated trajectory. It connects. Score.

Some FPS games are *about* war. They are not what this manifesto is about.

Most FPS games are not about war.

Many FPS games are ball games.

They are playground games, sports, folk games; games of capture the rubber chicken, darting between plastic cones in the grass or gymnasium; practicing for hours before the big game, throwing stones at a line of cans, pickup games with whatever's lying around where half the rules are made up.

Here is a list of playground games:
- Capture the Flag
- Tag, Zombies
- Dodgeball, Instagib

Many FPS games are also steeped in a skin of warfare. Of guns and grenades. Of rocket launchers and rubble. Of empty buildings full of people deemed OK to shoot.

Why do I view so many computer worlds only down the barrel of a gun?

Why is a weapon the only way I can touch so many computer worlds?

Why is a weapon the only way I can touch the inhabitants of so many computer worlds?

Why is a weapon the only way I can touch the friends and strangers I play ball games with?

Why do I know what a Deagle is?

This skin is no accident. There are people with jobs, bankrolled by military-entertainment complexes and firearm manufacturers, to faithfully represent real-world firearms in games that put them in the hands of people playing playground games on the bet that they will become their next recruits and their next customers. That they will see the world as a world for them to touch with a gun, and see that there are people who it is OK to shoot. That they will see guns as the next skin for them to collect.

Some of them will.

Do not do this job for them.

It does not have to be this way. FPS games are not inseparable from this skin.

Thinking only in weapons has prematurely collapsed all of the possibilities of the medium into a narrow arbitrary category. Despite the rich history of the genre, the surface has barely been scratched.

Peel back the skin and expose the underlying bones that make up the medium. Strip them bare, see their true shape illuminated in the sunlight, and starting from there, imbue them with new meaning.

What possibilities are thrown into relief thinking in hitscan instead of only bullets, projectiles in motion instead of only missiles, physical forces instead of only explosives? What can you do with a camera and a vector in a 3D space?

Let me play and touch computer worlds in all the ways that have gone overlooked!

Here is a list of FPS games:
- Portal
- Momentum Mod
- Powerwash Simulator

4v4 PASS Time is a community-created game within the engine of Team Fortress 2. Skilled athletes pull off every branch of dazzling, high-flying Source engine movement tech to score a ball into the other team's hoop. They rocket jump, surf, trimp from ramps, land airshots and syncs, pogo and wall jump, pass the ball to teammates and knock it out of the air. Any weapons that are not tools for movement are removed. They take away from what the game is about.

This is a beautiful FPS game. A computer sport of the future. It is also on the precipice of entirely outgrowing its skin of weapons by embracing what it is beneath the skin: Bodies in motion in a physics engine.

I want to play ball games on the computer. I want to interact with computer worlds in strange ways. Put something new and different in my hands. What lies outside the weapon-shaped box?