The Firearm Blog bills itself as "Firearms Not Politics". Today, it includes a post by Pascal Eggert, an artist and gun enthusiast at Crytek charged with drawing guns. Mr. Eggert feels pretty strongly that guns should look real. He puts a premium on "immersiveness through believability". He thinks fictional guns need to take physics into account. He thinks game developers should actually handle guns instead of just building them from photographs.
You should hold a gun in your hands, fire it and reload it to understand what does what - and at that point you will realize, there is nothing on it that does not have a function - because guns are tools for professionals. Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers or magic devices that kill people at a distance when really it's just a simple and elegant mechanism that propels little pieces of metal.
Mr. Eggert is confusing videogames with reality. When I play a videogame, a gun does not propel a piece of metal. Instead, it's much more akin to a magic device that kills people at a distance. A bit like a lighting bolt spell, but without a class requirement.

I appreciate Mr. Eggert's creative process as an artist and I'm sure his commitment to realism has its place. But it has no meaningful place in most videogames, even if they're first person shooters (Eggert keeps calling them "egoshooters", which I fervently hope isn't going to catch on). And despite his attempt to distill the discussion down to a "guns don't kill people" level of simplicity, there's nothing simple about firearms, whether you're an artist, a videogamer, or a guy writing an indignant blog post. Just have a look at the posts above and below yours, Mr. Eggert, on a blog that advertises itself as "Firearms Not Politics". Above, you'll see a music video of an Aussie good-ol'-boy shooting woodland animals while he sings "I'll give up my gun when the ocean runs dry". Below you'll see a picture making fun of some newly equipped Iraqi soldier who was most likely trained to equip himself that way by one of the Americans tasked with invading his country.

Eggert even gets angry when you call a clip a magazine. Or maybe it's vice versa. I can't keep them straight and frankly, I couldn't care less. I like gun porn as much as the next uninformed nerd, but guns are strictly part of my fantasy play. That's as far as I care to be personally involved with them. On my list of concerns, knowing the difference between a clip and a magazine ranks somewhere below knowing the difference between a high elf and a wood elf. I think the high elves have more silver in their hair.



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