So, even though our project for this week involved many of the practices in writing this blog, I wanted to try to dive into another layer of DOOM I we haven’t touched on, but that still impacted my experience this week. While thinking about this, I came to thinking about first person shooters and why they have recently become the most popular genre in current video gaming. We have team based shooters like Overwatch and Counter-Strike, objective shooters like Battlefield and Call of Duty, puzzle and story-based shooters like Half-Life and Portal, and then we have DOOM, a strange, somewhat out of place shooters amidst the other. Sure, there is an objective, like any other game: get through the level as quickly as possible while doing as much as you can to stay alive and get the most stuff. However, in compared to more modern titles of the same genre, the game itself makes very little sense. Small details create some assemblance of a story, there are enemies to shoot, levels to get through, and yet even with the additional secrets and new enemies with every new chapter, stopping to think about why I am enjoying myself as much as I am does not produce a cohesive answer. And then it hits: it’s fun because it is a shooter. DOOM represents the fun-for-the-sake-of-fun aspect of shooters, a kind of middle ground between stress relief, catharsis, and disconnection from reality nearly everyone can relate to. With that, I am beginning to see why this game sits on its throne of obscure popularity and why so many shooters, with all of their polish and variety, still pull from DOOM. I am interested to delve more into this in the coming weeks.