I have come to notice recently that my gaming habit has become a means of communication, rather than just a means of play. As I have gotten older, and my circle of friends has expanded (and I mean that in a geographic rather than quantative sense!) it’s been very hard to ‘hang out’ with my friends. A current swathe of babies among them all has only added to the time pressure being felt by many of them.
The Xbox 360s ‘Xbox Live’ is a great method for sharing time and chatting with your mates, as I realised when going through a bout of solo gaming recently. In some senses I realised it felt quite an empty experience without sharing it with my friends. Often we get on for a game of Forza or Chromehounds or Crackdown, all cooperative pleasures, and achieve very little in gaming terms but have a great time and a good laugh, which in entertainment terms means these games score very highly. Not only that but they offer great longevity, as we keep returning to them, whereas single player games, once complete are often merely discarded. Perhaps when creating a brand or a new IP, games design companies should keep that in mind, as cooperative experiences can keep fans loyal and keep the brand fresh in gamers minds. Also the very fact of coop gaming, especially in sandbox style games, allows for the players to create their own play experiences. I wonder how many people out there have whiled away the hours with their friends engaging on ‘silly’ projects within a game world, rather than achieving anything the game has specifically set out for you to ‘accomplish’. Crackdown offered the chance to try and build structures out of the worlds physics enabled furniture (such as skips, cars, lampposts, and handily enough highly explosive barrels) and once the structure is big enough and packed with enough high explosive to make any pro carbomber proud, detonated for a magnificent fireworks display. Making tanks by tipping skips over small cars while you coop friend rides on top to provide the fire power is also fairly entertaining, seeing how far you can go before your smart car powered tank/skip falls apart. Co-op gaming isn’t just fun, it can enable fun that isn’t present in single player gaming, even within the same game.
I wonder how many games creators are going to wake up to this seemingly forgotten fact in the next few years? Will single player modes become the ‘tacked on’ element of new games, or will they be designed as seems standard now, as single player games, with coop thrown in if possible? Versus play is core to FPS & RTS gaming, but versus mainly uses humans to replace AI effectively and cheaply, and isn’t a shared ‘friendly’ experience (have you tried playing a bunch of American teenagers in COD4 or Gears of War on Live?! Great well made games rapidly become a hideously un-enjoyable experience…hmm online player behaviour might be another blog chapter soon!). Is co-op the new future that is starting to dawn on an increasingly large number of companies? Titles such as Fable 2,and Army of 2 may hint at it, but they still seem to be in the minority
Games are great fun. But in truth this all seems a fairly obvious reflection of what we all learned as children. Play is great, but it’s a lot better if you are playing with your friends.
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