Moral clarity is taken for granted in most shooting games, because otherwise the psychological weight of killing hundreds or thousands of other humans (or humanlike beings) would make many games unbearable to play. Aliens, mutants, zombies, Nazis and criminals of all description have fallen to my bullets, blasts and laser rays without provoking a smidgen of guilt. In thinking about all those victims, the common thread is that within their various fictions almost all of them had it coming � they deserved it. What I am sure of is that I have stared down a gun sight and blown away tens of thousands of bad guys since the first-person shooter became perhaps the most popular form in gaming about 15 years ago. Maybe it was as I escaped from a Nazi prison castle and killed Hitler as the Polish-American soldier B. Or it could have been when I took down a mothership full of alien slavers in the 1994 Mac classic Marathon. It might have been when I first saved humanity from interstellar demons in the original Doom. I can’t remember the first time I shot someone.
