In Praise of Auto-aim

[Edited to add a note that some games already have similar mechanics.]

You haven't heard from me in months and now two posts in one day :).

As I was playing Medal of Honor this weekend, it brought some back-of-the-mind thoughts about auto-aim back to the surface. Auto-aim (also known as "aiming assistance") is a game mechanic in a first-person shooter/tactical-action game where your character automatically aims (or at least refines his aim) without precise manipulation of the controls (mouse, gamepad, etc.) on the player's part.

Lots of players hate auto-aim. To them, hitting targets with the mouse or gamepad is part of the skill/challenge of the game and auto-aim is a cop-out. I'd like to make the case that auto-aim is a feature and should be incorporated into the design of both single- and multi-player games. It is already present, in some form, in games like UbiSoft's Splinter Cell series, although those are played from a third-person perspective.

To understand where I'm coming from, I'm a reasonably well-trained (civilian) shooter of real firearms. I'm not a high-speed/low-drag special operator or anything even close to that, but I can hit targets at combat distances fast enough and accurately enough while moving, using cover, and keeping my weapon running (re-loading and clearing malfunctions).

Except for the trigger squeeze, which you can model on an appropriate controller like the Xbox 360 triggers, the skills required to do this in real life with a real weapon have nothing in common with the skills required to do this in a first-person shooter or tactical-action game. Moving a mouse or an analog stick on a game controller is nothing like pointing and aiming a real weapon.

In my observations of on-line first-person action games like MoH and CoD:MW2, what I see is a lot of full-auto spray-and-pray panic-fire. This seems to be how people compensate for the control issues and it bothers me. I've been in carbine classes with real warfighters and even though they had real M4s and M16s, nobody's selector switch ever went past the "SEMI" position. We fired aimed single shots, aimed pairs, double-taps, failure drills, and hammers. Holding down the trigger, waving your weapon around, and hoping for the best is a popular tactic in some Third World armies and militias, but that's not how professionals (or even serious amateurs, like myself) are trained to shoot. Yet it's exactly what I see people doing on-line and the games seem to embrace and encourage it.

"Natural" control schemes like the PS3 Move and the Xbox 360 Kinect might improve on the control issues, but the jury is still out until games like SOCOM 4 that are specifically designed to support these types of controllers come out. Until then, let's talk about auto-aim.

In a game like MoH, MW2, or BC2, my persona is supposed to be a steel-eyed killer from a special operations unit so secret that it doesn't even exist, or at least a well-trained infantryman. My character's ability to walk, run, climb, and jump without tripping over his own two feet does not depend on my ability to precisely manipulate the movement controls (usually the left analog stick on a gamepad). Instead, I essentially operate at a higher level of abstraction. I use the movement controls to express my intent. When I push the left stick forward, it means that I want the character to move forward: walk or run (depending on how hard I'm pushing the stick or whether I'm holding down a modifier), climb a stairway if there are stairs in front of me, climb up the ladder if I'm on a ladder, etc. Maybe I press the A button to jump over a gap, vault over a low obstacle, mantle up a high obstacle, or climb a rope. The key is that rather than micro-managing the character's muscle movements through the limited interface of the controller, I control the character by expressing my intent through that interface in a natural, intuitive way.

A well-designed auto-aim system could apply this same concept to the shooting mechanics. Rather than trying to awkwardly aim directly through the control scheme, I would use the controller to express my intent for the character's aim. For purposes of this discussion, assume we're using an Xbox 360 controller.

My character normally has his weapon at the low ready position. My field of view is as wide as the TV/monitor allows and it is unobstructed, except perhaps for the top of my weapon.

As I'm making my way through the environment, I spot a target. I hit the left trigger, expressing my intent to shoulder my weapon and aim through the sights.

At this point, the auto-aim kicks in. If there is a visible target within 50 meters or so (if I'm using a long gun, less for a handgun), the game automatically aligns my sights on the center of visible mass of the target. This is exactly what well-trained shooters do and it becomes instinctive after sufficient repetitions.

If I want to fire, I squeeze the trigger. On a pressure-sensitive trigger like the Xbox 360, the accuracy of my shot can depend, amongst other factors, on the smoothness of my trigger squeeze, like in the Military Sniper-Sim on Xbox Live Indie Games. Depending on the position of the selector switch and the capabilities of the weapon, I fire a single shot, burst, or full-auto. Let's say I'm on full-auto and I put two shots into his chest. He's knocked back as his chest plate absorbs the rounds, but he doesn't drop.

Time for a failure drill. I tap the right stick up to express my intent that I want to shift my point of aim up from center to mass to his head. I squeeze the trigger again and he drops as my shot goes through the bridge of his nose and into his brain.

On my right! He has a buddy. I tap the right stick to the right to express my intent to do a target transfer: shift my point of aim to the next target to my right. Two rounds to the chest slow him down for a moment, then I finish him off with another head-shot.

To me, this is a lot closer to what's going through a person's conscious mind in real close-quarters shooting, whether on a one-way or two-way range. You're thinking "aim for the head" or "transfer to the target on the left," while skills and muscle memory from countless hours of training and practice take care of the mechanics of pointing the weapon, confirming your sight picture, and so forth.

A few details:

• I'm not sure what would happen if the player didn't hit the left trigger to aim. I'm not trained to fire without aiming, so I have no idea what should happen. Maybe he just squeezes the trigger and rounds go wherever his muzzle happens to be pointed?
• The auto-aim system would not take all the marksmanship mechanics out of the game. There should definitely be a distance limit, as I mentioned, so sniping would still depend on manual aiming, as would anything beyond 50 meters or so.
• You would also have to work in some target tracking mechanic into the system to handle the case of relative angular motion between the target and the shooter (that is, the target, the shooter, or both are moving). I almost think that you should automatically track your target as it moves, but that this should add some dispersion to your shots.

Couple an auto-aim mechanism like this with shot dispersion based on factors like your characters level of exertion (from running, jumping, shooting, etc.), trigger squeeze, the time that you hold your aim (quick versus deliberate shots) and you'll have a game that I, at least, would love. The focus shifts from manipulating the gamepad in a poor imitation of marksmanship to quick, smart actions and reactions in a dynamic tactical simulation.

Then again, maybe I'm just old and slow and should go back to playing something better suited to an aging armchair warrior, like Civilization: Revolution :).

By: Guardian