First-person shooters are to mainstream gaming what butter is to bread. Even people who don't know what Call of Duty is know that video games have traditionally let us shoot the crap out of just about everything. Recently, within this most marketable of gameplay genre paradigms, many gamers grow tired of the everyday shooter. They've gradually tapered off the main conveyor belt, in search of new ideas and innovation within the FPS perspective... and we're not far behind them. Like the Western film genre and romance novels before it, the FPS's traditional, popularity monopoly is waning. Call of Duty didn't sell as well last year and its player-base has markedly receded. Some of the most inventive first-person games are either tapping the potential of the free-form maneuverability we're used to in third-person games, or just diving down an indie, artsy rabbit hole. The Unfinished Swan and Gone Home were far from conventional approaches to environmental storytelling and interactivity, and all the better for it. The upcoming Mirror's Edge reboot and its illegitimate zombie baby, Dying Light, will continue to change the way we think about first-person action. Bioshock Infinite's mind-bending narrative was only wrapped in a straight-laced, shooter shell as a residual of a concession Ken Levine made with the original game... because bigger studios are commercially forced to do so. Clearly, while most of the top-end industry players still have to play by the mainstream rules, even those expectations are changing. Minecraft's mind-boggling popularity has all but destroyed the world... which it of course continuously rebuilds, brick by brick. Day Z completely redefined the way we think about hardcore, online shooters and finally delivered an authentic, zombie apocalypse, survival simulation. With the new-generation of virtual reality gaining momentum has come a myriad of experimental, FPS game design - and those prototypes are only going to evolve. On the horizon, we've got a first-person future that looks a little brighter and a lot more varied, thanks to the brave men and women who think outside the Kill Box. We welcome the FPS genre's unconventional evolution. The following 9 projects are willing to take the necessary risks to move things forward...