Having lived through many years of gaming it’s been fascinating to see how co-op gaming has evolved. At first, co-op gaming was a popular idea: during the eighties to early nineties, co-op gaming was essential during the era of the arcade game. Having trouble trying to beat any particular game? Don’t worry, get a friend and the playing field is leveled! You’ve got someone to watch your back and to develop strategies with! This mentality then carried over into the consoles and computers people had at home. Indeed, it was certainly satisfying to struggle with one game – only to have a much easier time once you talked someone else into helping you out.
And better still, if you had two more friends you could form a team and go up against the computer – as the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade (and it’s successors) proved.
In retrospect the arcade era was co-op gaming at it’s finest.
But alas it couldn’t last forever: Because, according to history, the likes of Quake and Doom dominated the mid-to-late nineties era of gaming. Suddenly everyone can play games against each other over LANs and everyone has their own computer screen.
And it’s funny how the attitude towards co-op gaming not only turned around but so drastically: based on my own experiences, everyone loved playing against each other over LANs – to the point where the mere suggestion of a co-op game would result in being laughed out of the room.
Why is this so? Maybe because, following on from the arcade era, everyone realized arcade games are essentially a money thief and thus obsolete. Or maybe the computer AI wasn’t efficient enough to cater for more than one person. But the most likely reason is that there was a certain satisfaction in blowing away a human opponent – This was, after all, the era that spawned the term deathmatch.
During this era of gaming, I personally both tried co-op and deathmatch gaming. I found the former to be due and the latter to be trampled upon by someone who knew what they were doing (Stadium level of Duke Nukem 3D anyone?).
However in recent years it seems that co-op gaming is enjoying something of a resurgence. Mostly due to online gaming where many people can come together and work together to achieve a goal. Of course deathmatches are still the sole domain of LAN parties, but it certainly is satisfying to see that people realizing, again, that to beat a game it helps to have someone watching your back. Indeed, it makes for an interest contrast where co-op gaming builds friendships while deathmatches wrecks friendships.
This presents an interesting question: is there a future for co-op gaming? It can be argued that once you beat a game, with or without help, there’s not much left to it. Indeed, with what could well be the king of gaming co-op, World of Warcraft, that has lasted so long through it being well-designed and having a stream of regular updates added to it. It is doubtful that there will ever be an end to co-op gaming in WoW considering the amount of quests available and the time it takes to get to (at time of writing) level 90. But ultimately World of Warcaft is a MMPORG: Which is more or less a complete genre where co-op gaming is a dominating force - much like how deathmatches dominate LAN parties. In a way it seems MMPORG gaming seems much like an evolution from the co-op gaming that was the arcade era.
I’ve seen certain games trying to carry the standard for co-op gaming in a different manner (Resident Evil 5 being one such example) but is there much point? For, as established above, the attention of the gamer can only last so long and the lasting power of a co-op game seems reliant on how much new material can be delivered. Furthermore, a co-op game truly works when the players have to work together and each player can provide something unique that contributes to victory. And to find examples of this, one has to look back to the arcade/early-nineties era. The best example of co-op done right is the Chaos Engine – for the unfamiliar, it was about guiding a two man team against a horde of mutants and really emphasized the co-op nature with each selectable character having unique weapons and abilities and both players being rated on how much they contributed to the objective.
Also noteworthy is the arcade game Crackdown where two players operated separately in laying bombs in a monster-filled maze before time ran out – it works because the two players were working for the same goal and could operate without being joined at the hip (something that should any potential co-op games should consider in their design scheme).
So it would seem co-op games can work – it just requires a lot of thought and some clever design. And as nay gamer will tell you any clever design will win anyone over. Even those who aren’t normally associated with any particular gaming genre.
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