Sex/game writer Bonnie Ruberg makes a stimulating, but wholly personal interpretation of the role of the gun in first-person shooter games. These games are generally defined as being played from the character's point of view (the camera is at eye-level), showing in the foreground only the character's hand, the character's weapon, and a crosshairs in the middle of the screen.

Ruberg interprets the gun (the weapon most often seen on screen in a first-person shooter) as an avatar--more of a vessel for the player than the character whose viewpoint we inhabit. "What does it mean to be a gun, or at least to identify with one?" she asks. This is a fine question to ask oneself, but I'm not sure it will get much mileage with gamers. As a seasoned player of first-person shooter games, I can tell you that not once have I ever "been" a gun, or even identified with one. I have never knowingly interacted with any gamer with an identity crisis of this nature, and I have neither heard nor read of such a thing before. But what gamers think doesn't seem to matter to Ruberg.

"Whether or not we like the idea, it's presented to us clearly though the visuals of the games we take part in." Ruberg seems to want to speak for us all here, informing us about the undeniable reality of the situation we are clearly part of. "To state the obvious," she writes, "it's certain a phallic identity." Blam! There it is. Obviously. Thank you, Doctor Frikkin' Freud.

I feel obligated to do a little deconstruction here. What's obvious to me is that sometimes a gun is just a gun, and not an avatar or a penis. What's clear to me is that first-person shooter games don't present the gun as avatar. In my gaming experience, the gun is merely part of the game interface. Its purpose, generally, is to give spatial context to the first-person viewpoint (the player is the character weilding the gun, not the gun itself), to let the player know which type of in-game weapon is currently equipped (when such things are important), and to reinforce the setting of the game (by audio-visual means). From my perspective, the depiction and presence of the gun in a first-person shooter game is not as important as the crosshairs (reticle). What we are shooting at is easily more important than what we are shooting with. By definition, first-person games put the player into the unseen body of the character. The player views the world from the character's eyes. If there is any identifiable avatar in this type of game, it's the invisible one, not the tool the character uses.

Allow me to throw a little Freud back into the mix. I think Ruberg is projecting. I think it's Ruberg who sees the gun as avatar, who wants to be the gun, and who wants to adopt a phallic identity. Which is fine. I just wish she'd come clean and leave the rest of us gamers out of it.