What defines a shooter?

[Alfador_VII]

Yeah if you have a projectile weapon and use it to kill enemies, it can be defined as a shooter.

I know this technically means Minecraft is a shooter sometimes, but that's not exactly the main focus of it's gameplay, so it's skirting the edges of the genre.

Another interesting example is Portal, you have a (portal) gun, you shoot it, however as you don't actually use it to kill anything, it's not really a shooter

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I can kind of see the point he's trying to make. There is some difference between games being based around guns and games including guns. I'm pretty sure (though I wouldn't like to try it) that you could actually play through Bioshock without actually pulling a gun. If anyone cares to correct me then please do so, but I can't actually think of a single part of the game that can't be done with purely with the non gun mechanics. The same cannot be said for games like Call of Duty or Killzone. I think from his post you might be taking quotes out of context, clearly the cover based thing is pretty stupid.

You can do it using nothing but Plasmids and melee, but Plasmids are just guns that use a different ammo system, really. If being able to use plasmids disqualifies it as a shooter, then Hexen, Heretic, and that Wheel of Time game that ran on the original Unreal Tournament engine are all in some separate, non-shooter genre, which is just ridiculous; they're all first person shooters.

I'd disagree, plasmids have more in common with a magic system than guns. If plasmids count as guns then you could argue that Oblivion is a shooter because the magic there is just guns that use a different ammo system.

Plus I'm not saying that plasmids disqualify it as a shooter. I'm saying that the fact you never have to shoot someone separates it slightly from some games where the use of guns is required to play the game.

Well, now that you mention it, the magic system in Oblivion was a lot more like a shooter than a traditional RPG. Oblivion isn't a shooter because it's focused on melee, and also because it's an action RPG, not because one of the things you /can/ shoot happens to be magic. If you want to see a magic system that actually works like a magic system, and not like a gun by another name, take a look at Morrowind; in that game, magic actually has a chance of failing, even if you line up your crosshair properly to hit the target. Different mechanics, different genres.

Edit: Case in point: I dare you to tell me that the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows game isn't a third person shooter -- a Gears of War clone, to be more precise. Sure, the gun is replaced by a wand, and the bullets by magic spells, but it's pretty darned clearly a shooter. You have to understand that this genre goes back decades, and it describes any game that is primarily focused around shooting things, regardless of perspective. There have been quite a few games over the years that said the projectiles were magic and not actually bullets. What matters is how the mechanics match up, not the window dressing.