Which is a great reason, I wish them luck! I'd say it's slightly mis-aimed - it's not just FPSes - but it's a start. I'd love to have a whole variety of blockbusters that aren't the standard fare we have now, and more people working on other things makes it more likely to happen.
If you read it closely you'll see that he talks about someone who shielded his children from violent computer games, then he says that he'll never work a FPS again citing "ethical reasons", but never produces any kind of argument connecting these two points, or stating what those ethical reasons actually are.
I know it's just a blog post and all but I saw the length of the text and was therefore hoping for a more reasoned discussion rather than anonymous anecdote and soul-searching.
He seems rather hung up on "protecting children" from something, although what outcome he is afraid of is entirely unstated. I was not shielded from the horrors of the world as a child so it is unclear to me what has changed in the last twenty years, or what makes, specifically, the first-person-shooter genre such a travesty in his eyes.
Quite right. Violence is the simplest form of human conflict, the one we can most easily adapt to games. Even chess is an abstraction of war strategy.
But personally, I'm much more OK with fairly abstract strategy games than I am with games that shove a gun in your hands and shower you with blood. It's exhausting. I have no problem with those games existing on the market, I'm just so very tired of the fact that nearly every big-budget game centers on shooting people in the face. Or stabbing them.
If nothing else, I've been doing that in videogames for the past 20 years now (since Wolf3d and Doom), and it's getting boring.
I've had this problem too for the last several years. I like 3d, and I like hyper-realistic game environments, and I like science fiction. But I am sick to the back teeth of gore, and of being confronted by hideous mutants/ zombies/ creatures that I'm supposed to splatter all over the walls. I play games far less than I used to because I'm tired of this horror element.
What gets me is that even within these genre conventions, there seem to be very few new ideas. How come I don't see survival-horror games based around super-powered alien insects that can walk on the ceiling? Why isn't there a Terminator game that involves fighting giant robots in Shadow-of-the-colossus style as well as FPS? Why not a game set in an abandoned but heavily trapped environment where destructibility is a key game mechanic?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81JSMr%2BIR6L._SL1500_...
But seriously, there's almost an absurd variety of games out there. No one has to play violent games. One problem is that multiplayer doesn't work well in most other genres.