Because deliberate practice is so important to mastering a skill, and because getting to the range and shooting live rounds is so inconvenient and expensive, I’ve been thinking about tools for practicing shooting. Matt Burkett, for instance, has some simple Flash-animation dry-fire drills on his site, and Mike Hughes has developed his SIRT laser training pistol.
Of course, there’s another very popular kind of shooter training, the first-person shooter video game — which doesn’t train shooting at all, actually, since the in-game character always perfectly indexes his weapon, even on the move. Rather, the FPS can teach tactics — which may or may not reflect real-world tactics, depending on how the game is set up.
What I didn’t foresee is the FPS trainer:
FPS Trainer is a free-to-play browser-based multiplayer First Person Shooter (FPS) game, combining an innovative coaching system with a community website and social network integration.
That is, it’s a first-person-shooter game designed to train you to… play first-person-shooter games:
The objective of the game is for players to rapidly improve their FPS skills based on sound training principles, in order to become more competitive at any online multiplayer FPSs, such as Quake Live, Halo and Call of Duty. Skills will be directly transferable from our game to other FPSs.