A thought occured to me after playing Counterstrike a few times, which is a first person shooter game if you're unfamiliar with it.  In Counterstrike, as with most first person shooters, your task is essentially to chase down the enemy and shoot them before they shoot you.  There are some strategies used, like sneaking up on them, hiding from them, and so on, but these strategies tend not to be as effective as having a faster internet connection and faster reflexes pulling the trigger.  Even a tenth of a second lag time can mean the difference between victory and defeat, simply because you do not see your opponent as soon as they see you.

Also there are a few other annoyances in the game, like the ability to press the jump button repeatedly to hop around and make oneself a more difficult target, or to get too close to your opponent so that the artificial constraint of how fast you can turn around in the game makes it difficult to put you in their gun sights.  If these were intended to be part of the game, or were realistic for the scenarios the game depicts, then it wouldn't matter.  I doubt though that a person would ever survive a gunfight by excessively jumping in front of someone shooting at them with a machine gun, or by running toward them face to face, and somehow getting alongside them and stabbing them to death because they can't shoot back.

I have a few suggestions to return some sanity back to these games, and which I also think will make them more enjoyable.  First, if nothing else, why not implement an automatic aim feature when an opponent is very close to the player?  Instead of requiring them to slowly pivot themselves around, why not at least spin them around quickly to point in the right direction?  Why not take that a step further and allow them to toggle a setting that will make them automatically turn to face any loud noise, or gunfire, or the direction they were shot from?  Perhaps even to automatically return fire, which realistically due to their being surprised, would not be very accurate but might cause their enemy to take cover.

I for one don't see why certain basic actions like this need to be tediously controlled by the player.   In my opinion, the player should be concerned with overall strategy such as sneaking up behind the enemy, or staying in the shadows so as not to be seen, but not to worry about having to instruct the computer to return fire when fired upon.  What sense does it make to be killed when your opponent runs out into the open in front of you, hesitates, and then fires?  Why not allow the computer to reflexively attack?  To make things more realistic there might be an advantage for the player crouched down and waiting over the player running into view.

Here are some extensions of this idea.  There might be a few modes that a player could choose that would direct their soldier to respond in different ways to events.  For example, rather than returning fire when fired upon, they might try to take cover or both.  How near is near enough to shoot at an enemy automatically?  If they are trying to sneak up on someone, they would want to toggle that option off or else to a very close range.  If they are trying to snipe someone off, they might set it to a longer range.  Also, how annoying is it to worry about how far to throw a grenade?  We all know how to throw a baseball and can throw one with reasonable accuracy.  Why is it that the trained soldier we are in control of cannot predict approximately where we wanted that grenade to go?

Some people might prefer the current style of gameplay, where the player is responsible for every tedious detail of the game.  I for one would rather concern myself with overall strategy, the choice of weapon, the choice of running or walking, from what direction to approach the enemy, and when and how to engage.  The current "clickfest" as I call it, where the real competition is in how quickly players can zero in on their target and how many times they can click the trigger button in five seconds, is not enjoyable to me.  If it were just me, then that would be my own problem.  However, if there is one person that would prefer a different way then there are probably many others that would prefer a different way, and so there would likely be a market for a new product.

Afterthoughts : In games like Counterstrike there is also a problem with cheating by using "aimbots" to automatically aim perfectly an enemy's head and fire.  By putting aiming in the hands of the computer and making it the player's responsibility only to choose which enemy to target, this problem would be eliminated also.