Shooting isn't the core mechanic in the majority of video games.

It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.

With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.

Games of tag where you are “out” when hit, optionally with a mechanism for being revived are a staple game for young kids around here. Video games with shooting just seems like a logical extension of that into the virtual domain and with ranged “tag” of that.

Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.

> "It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?

My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.

I don't mind shooting.

But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.

Any simple input scheme mapped to a game of skilled hand-eye coordination usually holds up, even ancient arcade games.

Back when games were mostly 2D, a lot of action games got consolidated into platformers. Shooters just seem to be the equivalent genre in 3D.

I mean, the really good ones can be beautiful, terrifying, balletic displays of dominance, skill and tactical intelligence. There’s nothing in all of gaming quite like being hunted by a human being. It’s a real thrill.

It's pointing and clicking. It's just one of the simplest things a game can make a player do. It's intuitive what sound roughly it should make and what visual effect to show up.

It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.

It's not really that complex.

Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.

> Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

Someone should have told the US Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army

(Surprisingly for a government project it was pretty playable)