Crossfire, You'll Get Caught Up In The (Part II)

(Click here to check out Part I)

There are three basic categories of multiplayer:

Competitive - playing against each other

Cooperative - playing with each other, common goals

Cohabitive - playing with each other, non-common goals

Personally I don't feel there has been a whole lot of freshness in competitive multiplayer. We are still dealing with classic one-on-one fighting games, free-for-all FPS games and free-for-all racing games. They can be fun, and the ubiquity of online has given a nice jolt to this format, but the other two areas are much more interesting.

We are beginning to see a lot of great uses of cooperative multiplayer, with more and more games being built around that concept (e.g. Resident Evil 5). This is a very welcome change, and most gamers agree. There is just something about working with another person to achieve a goal that makes it that much more satisfying.

That being said I think co-op games have a long ways to go. The co-op games we see are typically watered down. The designers put certain aspects of the games on dials, and they are just cranked up as more people are added to the game. Too Human adds more enemies to a level as more people join the game. Many games don't go any further than that.

What was the last game you played where you accomplished tasks that truly required multiple people to play the game? I'm not sure I've EVER played something like that.

Now let's discuss cohabitive games. There aren't many of these out there... yet. Essentially I see this form of multiplayer catering mainly to the emerging "casual" game market. Animal Crossing was probably one of the earliest forms of this genre. Although multiple people wouldn't be playing at the same time, they would inhabit the same virtual space, and would go about their own tasks, interacting with others in the town at their leisure. A more sophisticated form of this would be something like Sony's Home and Second Life.

I think multiplayer is an extremely valuable tool in the game designer's arsenal, as long as it is used wisely. Technology has enabled our definition of multiplayer to expand beyond head to head competition, and we've barely scratched the surface of cooperative and cohabitive games.

Here are the questions:

-Have you ever played a cooperative game that truly required multiple players to accomplish a task?

-How could elements of cohabitive design be applied to more "hardcore" types of games?

Crossfire, You'll Get Caught Up In The (Part I)

(Thanks to Clayton for requesting a post on multiplayer, I'd love to know what else you guys want to talk about!)

Multiplayer in games is just about as old as games themselves. Yet it's often used incorrectly, just because "the other guys" are doing it.

Multiplayer can drag a game down, and worse can take valuable resources off of what makes a game great in the first place. Every element of a game should be there for a valid reason, and each element should give the other elements of the game their proper respect.

When you think about the truly great multiplayer experiences, it's clear the game was built around the idea of having multiplayer, and the multiplayer is designed around the rest of the game elements. It's a hand-in-hand relationship. That's when it works. That's when it's fun.

Great uses of multiplayer:

Rock Band

The Adventures of Cookie & Cream

Left 4 Dead

Bad uses of multiplayer:

Metroid Prime 2 (you should play it just to see how bad it actually is)

Brute Force

Gran Turismo

Here are the questions:

-What's the best and worst use of multiplayer you've seen in a game?

-Do you find multiplayer more often enriches your experience or more often detracts from your experience with a game.

In Part II we'll discuss some different forms of multiplayer: competitive, co-operative and co-habitive. Stay tuned!