multi-player game a much more emotional experience than engaging in a single-player
experience. Regardless of win or loss, the players’ ability to socialize in a collaborative
and social game such as a massively multi-player RPG can lead to emotionally charged
alternate realities, where players can get married and will mourn the passing of a friend
when they stop playing the game.
Finally, having real people playing the game with you can help make the game sig-
nificantly more interactive since dealing with other humans is always a much more
dynamic experience than interacting with a computer alone. Looking at all the “wants”
that multi-player games satisfy makes the success of these games hardly surprising.
They provide for players a challenge, a social experience, the potential for bragging
rights, a significant emotional payoff, and a deeply interactive experience. When work-
ing on multi-player games, it is important for game designers to keep these strengths in
mind and make sure their designs play up the qualities that players are looking for.
Multi-player games are so strong at satisfying what players are looking for that
they open up entire new areas of game design and development, allowing the use of
mechanics that simply do not work in single-player games. Even if an AI is incredibly
smart and challenging to play against, players will still not want to socialize or role-play
with it in the same way they will with a human. Indeed, when creating a multi-player
game, taking a single-player game and forcibly converting it to multi-player can be
extremely limiting and will prevent the final game from achieving its full potential. It is
important to remember that a multi-player component is not always an improvement
for a given game: some titles are ideally suited to being single-player, just as other
games can only work as multi-player experiences.
TheForms..................................
When looking at multi-player computer games, two groups of games immediately pres-
ent themselves: games that are played by a number of gamers all in the same location
and huddled around the same computer or console, and games that are played online by
multiple players who are in significantly different locations. Though both are definitely
multi-player experiences, these two types of games are extremely different and each
present their own design challenges.
Single System Multi-Player.......................
Due to the limitations of networking, multi-player games that occur around a single
computer system have been popular and commercially viable for a good while longer
than online games. These originally took the form of multiple players controlling their
game-world surrogates in a shared view of the game-environment, with the earliest
example beingPongand progressing through arcade games such asMario Bros.,Gaunt-
let, Smash TV, many sports games, and all fighting games. These games are limited in
that both players have to be constrained to relatively the same portion of the
game-world so that they can both stay visible. Multi-player single-screen play can be
further problematic when players have to wait for one another to perform certain
actions. For example, in cooperative mode inBaldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance,the other
player must sit idle while one player manipulates his inventory. Some PC games, such
asM.U.L.E., used a single screen with each player taking a turn at playing while the
Chapter 13: Multi-Player 239