Counter Strike

One of the games I’ve been playing for years is Counter Strike (Half-Life 1 engine) and it’s newer form, Counter Strike: Source (HL-2, Source engine).
Both games are mostly the same with the only differences arising from the difference in underlying game engine such as improved collision control, extended rule set and its enforcement.

Counter Strike can be summed up as this:
There are two teams, the Terrorists and the Counter Terrorists that have to accomplish a set of goals within a set time frame.
The graphics realistically resemble real world locations, player models and modern weapons restricted to small arms, a machine gun and rifles plus hand grenades.

There are 3 types of maps (playing environments), players start grouped up as teams at opposite ends of the map:

• DE: bomb defusal: The terrorist team possesses a bomb with a timer and has to plant it at one of two designated points on the map. The counter terrorists have to defuse the planted bomb before it blows up after a certain amount of time (usually 45 seconds).
• CS: hostage rescue: The terrorists hold 5 hostages in a building and have to defend their position until the counter terrorist team is eliminated or the round timer is up (usually 3 minutes). The counter terrorists have to storm the building, make contact with the hostages and escort them to one of two designated rescue points.
• AS: protect the VIP: This mode is only available in the original Counter Strike. A special player, the VIP starts with the counter terrorist team and has to be escorted to a designated safety point. The terrorists have to prevent the VIP from reaching that point.

The game may also be won by eliminating all players of the opposite team with the exception of bomb defusal. If all terrorists are dead but the bomb is still ticking, it has to be defused or the terrorists will be awarded the win for the round.
This is the most common outcome of a round, players tend to ignore the primary objectives and opt for the easy way, just killing each others.

Type of play	Agôn, Competitive
	Ludus, Strongly rule bound
Narrative:	None, unless you count the above definition of the game as narrative. The map goals are displayed once at game start.
Game mechanics:	Player movement is restricted by map design and gravity. There is one timer for the play round and optional timers for special events. Players may or may not be restricted from harming anyone. Input is standard for FPS, mouse and keyboard.

Some people may associate the type of play with Mimicry since there is a visual impression of real-world simulation but that’s where this association ends (with the visuals). For me, the game play does not exhibit enough parallels to the real world to qualify as simulation type game.

A character has 100 points of health and the player retains unrestricted control over his character even if he’s down to 1 HP meaning he has as much of a threat potential to others at 1HP than he had at 100HP.
My standing record is to hit someone 13 times before his health reached 0 or below. Since the game boils down to hitting others until their health reaches 0, that is not realistic.
The simulation impression is further reduced by the fact that there are no simulated bullets. There are instead invisible laser beams which are shot from between the character’s eyes, not his weapon! This has serious implications on expected vs. actual shooting angles, expected vs. actual ‘bullet’ behavior, on map design or exploits thereof.
I believe that the Half-Life: Source engine doesn’t provide the best possible platform for this game if the design goal really was to achieve realism.
One design decision was not to include counter measures against all forms of attack. Counter measures in CS include blinding people, throwing explosives or dodging bullets / taking a few hits and returning fire. These measures mainly work against small arms and rifles on short to medium range, but none of them are of any use against the strongest gun in the game, an insta-kill sniper rifle.

Team based combat in games is usually structured in a way that attacks can be countered or developers try to keep the damage potential of any action to a level that gives the target some time to react. In games that have insta-kill attacks, the target player is usually allowed to respawn and give it another try after a short amount of time (a few seconds) but in counter strike the player has to wait and watch the game until the whole round is over which can take up to 3 minutes.
Waiting and watching others for 3 minutes is not fun, so this would be a point that could use a reevaluation by the designers.

It is interesting how the developers tried to even out some of the advantages and disadvantages of players (in Counter Strike: Source) which are typical for online multiplayer first person shooters. The most common bottleneck is bandwidth and latency. One player might have very low latency and his opponent might have relatively high latency. The first player would always have a great advantage in reaction time and be able to kill the other one before player 2 can even see player 1.

The way the devs tried to solve the problem is by letting both players make their moves without assigning the hit points straight away, instead it compares what went on on each player’s screen after the fact and depending on who hit/missed on his client and managed to send the data back to the server it calculates the chances equally. All of this takes place within milliseconds and the players often don’t notice or mind and get away with a better playing experience. The other side of the coin is that the software on the server sometimes mis-calculates things and the wrong person dies.