Way back, before they had computers or televisions or Atari consoles, people used to make their games out of wood, paper and stone. Games such as chess, or Go - strategy games, if you like. Card games, from solitaire to poker. Board games. Trivial Pursuit to Monopoly.

The thing that most of these games lacked was AI. It was a multiplayer game by default, unless you played against random chance, as in Solitaire. Anyone who has ever tried to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe by themselves will know that it isn’t much fun. When you threw in other people, though, you got one hell of a competition.

Roll forward a few (hundred) years, and the first video games made their appearance. In arcades, for the most part. Although these were often single-player, going to the arcade was a group experience. You went as a gang, you tried to get the highest score, and you socialized. Even today, visiting the arcade tends to be a social activity, where you play pin-ball and drink some beers, or challenge your friends on DDR.

After arcades proved such a success, however, the console manufacturers spotted an opportunity - and took it. I’m not writing a history, here, but those of you who are old enough to remember will no doubt wipe a nostalgic tear from your eye at the mere thought of those old games.

The thing was, it was around this point that an interesting trend started to develop. The single-player. The lone gamer, locked up in their room, battling sprites for hours on end.

Now, before you all jump on me at once, I will readily admit that their stereotype wasn’t true even then. There were plenty of two player games, where you either battled it out split screen or took turns to race through levels. Point scoring is only fun if you can compare figures afterward. However, it was around this time that classic games were mainly single-player. Anybody who got to try and play as Tails when rushing through Sonic will know that it consisted mainly of catching up and occasionally helping out by being a helicopter. It definitely wasn’t a highlight of two-player gaming. At two-player best, there were the fighting games, such as Streets of Rage, or Street Fighter. Most of these were ports of arcade games.

If you look at this era, the games that stand out are single-player. Zelda, Mario, Sonic, Lucas Arts adventure games, platformers, ‘God games’…. and then (in this very concise history) the internet happened.

Suddenly, multiplayer was on the agenda again. We were no longer talking about two people watching the same screen. We were talking about hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of people logging on to battle it out in FPS games, in RTS games. We were looking at the birth of clans, of ranking, of hardcore pro gaming. If you want a challenge, forget about booting up Devil May Cry in ‘hard’ mode. Forget about beating all the side-quests in a Final Fantasy. Instead, grab a simple FPS like Call of Duty 4 or Battlefield: bad Company, and try and win. Consistently.

These days, if a game doesn’t come with multiplayer, we don’t want to know. GTA4? Great game - awesome multiplayer. On the PS3, you can link up a blue-tooth headset and then call up your friends on your in-game cell-phone. A single-player campaign might last a few hours or a few days, but multiplayer can last a few years. It’s brilliant.

Yes, you get cheats. Yes, you get annoying kids with potty mouths and bad attitudes. Yes, you get new players who don’t know how to fire. But you also get to talk to people on vent (or equivalent), you get to play groups against each other, where organization and supporting your team mates can be as important as your skillz. You get to make long-lasting friendships with people. You get to socialize, to return gaming to its rightful place in human culture - a way of playing with each other.

Since most of the people who read this are gamers, let’s take a quick informal survey. How many of you have made a friend via online gaming? How many of you met up with that friend in real life? How many of you have had an online relationship? How many of you are now living with that person?

Multiplayer gaming isn’t just fun. It’s a triumph of human culture. In a world which very effectively isolates us from other humans, where technology stops us from working creatively with others, where many of us are delivering pizzas, answering complaint calls, serving twenty customers a minute or waiting tables - gaming stands up as a place where people can just have fun with each other. Yes, it gets competitive - but competition is fun. Competition with others is how we grow. We need relationships with other humans, and even if that relationship is with someone five thousand miles away - it doesn’t discredit what we can learn from them.

As a mild example, witness my partner. Having moved countries to marry me, he now maintains connections with his brother and his friends by playing with them on Call of Duty 4 and GTA4. Doing something with someone is usually a far better bonding activity than just sitting on the phone with them. Shared triumphs and shared failures are far more effective in maintaining friendships than reporting what you ate for dinner. When they visit with each other, they will still have a shared experience to jump-start conversation, to reminisce over (remember that one time when we were taking down that one dude and that one thing happened?).

The downside? Well, you shouldn’t elevate online relationships at the expense of real-life ones. Turning down an evening out with your family in order to run dungeons in World of Warcraft for your guildies isn’t necessarily healthy. You probably don’t want to be spending 6+ hours a day hanging out with the same people doing the same thing. That’s how drama develops, and when incestuous relationships develop where everyone has e-dated everyone else.

To wrap this essay up, what’s your experience been of multiplayer gaming? Tell us the good, the bad - and the downright scary.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Gamer Culture, Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.