Coop Mechanics 2
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.
I justed realized something about cooperative play btw:
Parallel play might be an alternative. But it will possibly only feel as though the players are on the same side, not like a cooperative effort because the players would need individual tasks to perform. Perhaps a better name would be completitive play.
Play in which players need to help each other perform certain activities, and that each instance of help would be an individual goal for a player.
Of course, this would open the system up for griefers, but perhaps we shouldn’t try to find a perfect greifless system and just try to improve the current system of creating play.
Jesper Bylund - February 4, 2009 at 2:10 pm |