actually, an mmorpg needs a persistent world!

Any game in which you spend most of your time in first person, and use guns or other ranged weapons often is pretty much an FPS by default. FPS is a dominant genre. While Deus Ex: Human Revolution may have a lot of RPG elements, that isn't what defines the game. Just as well, you can go about every mission stealthily, but does that make it a stealth game?
No, because the base gameplay is that of an FPS. The cover system makes you go into third person, does this mean the game is a TPS?

I think you see my point here.

Would Mirror's Edge be an FPS then?

No because the gameplay doesn't revolve around guns and shooting.
How does nobody understand this.

Mirrors Edge is first person and has guns. This does not make it an FPS.
Minecraft is first person and has a bow. Does this make it an FPS?

No. Both of these games are in their own genre, with pieces from others. Mirrors Edge is first person freerunning. Minecraft is firstp person openworld sandbox.

how about we say that Deus Ex is a blended RPG/shooter (an RPS if you will, har har har)

then we can call it a day

"First-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other shooter games, which in turn fall under the heading action game."

-The Infallible Fount of Knowledge that is Wikipedia

Action + lots of shooting, to where it is the central or core mechanic, + first person perspective = FPS.

i think after a certain point in a medium's maturity, old, rigidly-defined genres start to break down and blend into weird new things

that doesn't mean that genre stuff goes away, it just means that a lot of things can't be completely confined into "FPS" or "sneaky game" categories

take borderlands; it's an FPS, but borrows stats, leveling, randomly generated loot and quest architecture from RPG games

we can't call it a straight-up FPS game, can we?

here is an image to justify my lengthy post

From my steam screenshot folder.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I was getting at. Most genres don't really make sense at this point, because, despite people's claims that the industry is stagnating, there's been a lot of genre blending going on. Saying "all [genre] games are [adjective]" is kind of ridiculous, since you're artificially drawing boundaries that probably don't need to exist. Genres are really only helpful in getting a very perfunctory concept of what a game might be like, such as in a press release.

Also, we're getting way off-topic, so here's an image of a hilarious ad for Internet Explorer that I found on MSN a few months ago:

"Scientists have made a tiny pair of glasses and put them on a fly."

I think he'd do better with contact lenses.

Har, har, har. That was funny.

silghty redarted

WITNESS THE ELDRITCH "ELEPHANT'S FOOT" OF CHERNOBYL

TO LOOK UPON IT IS A QUICK DEATH BY GAMMA RAYS