Cooperative Multiplayer with the Devil You Don’t Know [Mutliplayer]

New Super Mario Bros. Wii released a week ago, and even its lighthearted cartoon environment and four-player cooperative mode still manage to bring out the worst in multiplayer behavior – if you don’t know your partner, that is. “Being granted the opportunity to be friends or adversaries, games allow us to act out the worst of human pathologies and encourage behaviors that would get us yelled at, arrested, or killed in the real world,” writes Jamin Brophy-Warren for Slate. This is hardly a news flash. But it’s depressing to consider that, in a Mario’s return to a 2D platformer after 20 years, we still haven’t progressed much further than adolescent brothers taking advantage of the game to antagonize each other. I’d argue that the reason he had a bad experience with it is because he didn’t know his co-player. That made the guy completely unaccountable, and his provocations would stand unless and until the writer called him on his bullshit, which would be more uncomfortable to do face-to-face to a stranger in a “fun” environment than just walking away. Brophy-Warren ponders why multiplayer is an inherently brutish or uncouth pursuit, and I think he answers it in his last paragraph: When you game with people you know and respect, you’re more likely to actually cooperate. Otherwise, “Most cooperative games lie in a vast middle ground, however, a no man’s land between altruism and gaming Darwinism that offers up a host of ways to misbehave.” Et Tu, Mario? [Slate, Nov. 13] Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU’s newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game-that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you’ll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor-what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates. This planning comes up most frequently in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. In that game, players create guilds and go on quests in pursuit of gold and weaponry. Defeating an enemy yields goodies that guilds must choose how to distribute. In a perfect world, everyone would work together to give the appropriate items to the most deserving players. There is a breed of WoW player, however, known as the “loot ninja” or “greeder,” a scoundrel who steals items from fallen comrades or takes more than his share after a battle. (There are also more flagrant modes of sabotage. In the infamous Leeeroy Jenkins video, an overexcitable player decides to take on a difficult boss single-handedly, sabotaging his guild’s meticulous plan. The results are predictably surreal.) This type of stuff was happening long before World of Warcraft. In side-scrolling brawlers such as the early-1990s title Streets of Rage, power-ups appeared along the way that could heal your wounded party or give players special abilities. Bleeding-heart video-game liberals like myself would argue that health packs should always go to the weakest member of the party. This would often lead to discussions about who “deserved” the triage, which begot a lot of petty bickering, which begot fistfights. This Photoshopped box art for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II-which includes the tagline “It’s My Turn to Get the Pizza You Asshole I Need it More!”-is a perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon. Part of the problem (and the joy) of playing games is that such behavior isn’t explicitly condoned or condemned. Looting and friendly fire aren’t forbidden by most games, which leaves us to figure out our own rules. This is the right decision: Good game designers allow players to be whoever they want and trust they’ll come to their own consensus about what constitutes “fair play.” That’s why the New Super Mario Bros. Wii was more enjoyable when I played it as God intended-with a good friend and copious amounts of beer. There was no back-stabbing, and no one’s feelings were hurt. – Jamin Brophy-Warren

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Cooperative Multiplayer with the Devil You Don’t Know [Mutliplayer]

Why Games Should Have a Few More Senior Moments [Weekend Reader]

In video games, senior citizens are largely stereotyped NPCs. Rare is the kind of game like Metal Gear Solid 4 , with a truly aged, playable protagonist. Can games create more roles for the elderly? Should they? Matthew Kaplan of GameCritics thinks games have a lot of growing up to do, especially as the median age of gamers inevitably gets older. His essay argues that games, which often involve superhuman or at least athletic protagonists capable of amazing feats, rarely deal with the issues of aging and if so, typically as a limitation only. But placing a game in the context of someone’s advanced age would deepen both its story, its characters, and the relationships players form with them, Kaplan argues. He goes so far as offering Prototype as a theoretical example, and it wasn’t at all as silly as it sounded at first. This isn’t an issue of inclusion to the degree that ethnic diversity is; the elderly, right now, don’t game in huge numbers, of course. But there is a difference between growing old and evolving, and for games, including the elderly more would be the latter. Ah, to be OId and Fragging: Roles for the Elderly in Video Games [GameCritics, Oct. 27, 2009.] As the median age of gamers continues to rise, I wonder how this will be reflected in the character creation choices made by players. I can only speculate that concern over the seeming physical disconnect between the actions demanded of that character and those we consider typical of the elderly will cause even the oldest players to mold younger, more “able” characters. Yet this is precisely why we need to re-examine what it means to be “able” or an active agent in an escapist fantasy. I ask that aspiring designers consider the following questions with regard to roles for the elderly: 1. Why can’t physical trials reflect the obstacles inherent to growing older while still maintaining their end result of power in addition to experience/success? For instance, why couldn’t Prototype’s Alex Mercer be an elderly man or woman who must wrestle with the newfound power brimming inside them as it conflicts with what they previously considered to be an aging body? Certainly, that is a far more interesting set of physical boundaries for the player to immerse himself/herself in than simply playing as “generic, muscular young male X.” I think the only game that did this even marginally well was Metal Gear Solid 4, but that game addressed age as a constraint more than as a natural characteristic of its protagonist (which makes sense, given that Snake’s aging between Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4 was mostly artificial). 2. Why are the objects of desire in games typically younger males and females? Isn’t an older man or woman worth fighting for? Relationships don’t simply stop after youth. 3. What sort of interesting introspection and character development can come from the dilemmas faced by older men and women? Why can’t a journey of discovery be just as compelling if the character doing the discovering is elderly? More pertinently, why is growing older considered the end of a journey rather than the beginning of one? Of course, there is always the question of whether an idea for a video game is marketable. However, I ask that creators and storywriters not fall into the trap of stereotyping for the sake of pushing what the nebulous and questionable “market” considers “attractive.” What I have found is most often attractive to gamers is that which most pleasurably defies their expectations. And when it comes down to it, the word “pleasure” is at the heart of this issue. For all the patronizing glories we confer upon the elderly, we often associate growing older with a descent of condition, away from pleasurable activity and towards death. Surely the process of growing old is not always a pleasurable one, but there is nothing about old age that makes growing up and having fun mutually exclusive. – Matthew Kaplan Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Saturdays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

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Why Games Should Have a Few More Senior Moments [Weekend Reader]