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Dan responded to my earlier post saying, among other points, that humans are intrinsically social. I completely agree with this, we all need social elements in activities to find them rewarding and be able to use them.
Most people however find forced social elements a nuisance. Perhaps one of the reasons for the huge silent majority of players in MMOG’s. But I digress.
If most games have crude adaptions of their singleplayer to create multi or cooperative play and at the same time players actually crave social elements we are going the wrong way. Games should never from the start be developed as singleplayer, because no one wants a completely singleplayer experience. Even today’s blockbuster singleplayer games have achievements that can be unlocked and view by or shared with friends. These are passive social elements that are now viewed as a norm in games. But why are there so few active social elements?
Going back to my earlier post the reason games work like they do is because game development is, as most industries, incremental. Games build on earlier games.
Singleplayer and multiplayer have simple forebears in earlier games, chess for instance. Cooperative play is a completely different problem. There are few examples in sports and games that are truly cooperative without having an enemy and an individual performance. Team sports for example are made up from individuals performing together forming a team. But with drop-in-drop-out cooperative play it is much to hard to form a team.
This is the main point to why I endorsed the substitute of parallel play. But exactly how that could be implemented remains to see.
Cooperative play is the new big thing in games. It’s actually more surprising that it has taking this long to get here then it is that most games incorporate coop today. Playing with friends have always been more engaging then playing against the game itself, which means multiplayer is more fun then single player. But the old standard of multiplayer pitted players against each other which led to high levels of stress and performance anxiety in play. Which is not very enjoyable for most people. Hence, cooperative play was an implicit must have long before it became the norm.
Cooperative play in games today tend to be very simple by design, mostly games tend to copy the single player mechanics creating another player and then upping the difficulty level. This makes for pretty shallow cooperation but can indeed be fun (ex: Gears of War).
To emphasize cooperation some games add elements that constrain the players from advancing without cooperation (pressing two buttons at the same time to open a door) but this is still quite shallow cooperation.
Some games further along the coop spectrum have more coop interaction to make the experience more engaging but with varying degrees of success. For instance Little Big Planet is a fantastic cooperative game play experience when two player play. When three or four players play the game comes across as limiting as the players will need to progress at the same pace to cooperate but can simply run ahead to leave one or more players ahead. This closely resembles the hierarchies we can find in schools, the better players are picking at the less proficient players to show off their skill.
I think a better way of implementing cooperation might be as is announced by developer Phenomic in their upcoming RTS game Battle Forge where players team up to achieve different objectives at the same time. Winning or loosing an objective affect the difficulty curve of the other players objectives. But I guess it’s easy to call this type of gameplay parallel rather then cooperative.
Cooperation might be hard to achieve as true cooperation is not even that usual in real life. When do we ever work at the same things at the same time? Perhaps we should abandon the search for cooperative play and focus our efforts on creating parallel play instead.
