Cooperation

People that follow me elsewhere on the internet (so, anybody reading this) already know of my obsession with extreme mouse torture simulator Transformice. Transformice is a multiplayer flash game wherein the players control mice that need to get to the cheese and then get to the mouse hole. One of the players gets magical abilities to create platforms to help the other mice towards the cheese. If you get the cheese first, a number in your profile will go up. If you get that number up high enough, you will be able to change a title that is displayed under your name. That is pretty much the only advantage to speed. Nevertheless, everybody tries to get to the exit first, most likely killing every other mouse in the process. (For more information check out the awesome Meet the mouse video by EvilDaedalus.)

In short, getting cheese is better than getting no cheese and getting cheese first is better than getting cheese in any other position. This system breeds some real cooperative/competitive action that is awesome to watch. People will fuck over everybody else to get to the cheese before them. People will rush towards the cheese, hoping that the level they're in won't be one that kills them for doing that. It's awesome, and it's really this weird system of cooperation married to competitiveness that keeps me going back to the game all the time.

So that's great. A game system where the point is to fuck eachother over and have fun. Awesome. Then take Burnout Paradise. It's a driving game where the single player is basically based around driving around a big open world, doing races and stunts and hitting into other cars. The single player is great fun, I just spend my time riding around and titting about in my big silly car. It's fantastic.

But recently I tried the multiplayer for the first time, and the multiplayer is goddamn nightmarish. Set in the same open world, you are now driving with a load of other people. You get set "challenges," some of which involve doing a stunt individually, some of which involve doing a specific stunt in a specific place, and some of which involve driving to a place and meeting all the other drivers there. This should be fun, right? You're basically doing the same stuff as single player, but you've got other people around you and you're given specific goals. Nope, it's not fun. It's nightmarish, like i just told you earlier in this paragraph. Pay attention. Jeez.

The game doesn't reward you for fucking over the other players, but it does acknowledge that you fuck over the other players. If you wreck another person's car, they are your "nemesis" and until they crash you back and settle the score, that relationship sticks. As far as I can tell, it means nothing. Apparently just this small incentive is enough for people to spend all their time on the game barging into other cars and wrecking their challenges. It's really weird.

I've been trying to think of a way to tie this post off with a nice bow, but I can't. Basically all I've concluded is that griefers exist, and in some games I'm fine with it and in some games I'm not. You get any group of people playing a game cooperatively, and you'll get assholes trying to ruin other people's fun. I guess all you can really do is make a game that embraces it, or make a game where kicking griefers off the game is easy.

Side note: another cooperative game that I recommend trying is Moonbase Alpha. My laptop can't really handle it, but it's still super fun. It's a NASA game where you are a astronaut. You have to hook up the solar panels to the life support machines before all your astronaut friends in the moonbase die. It's free, it's a grand old time, and you get to control a silly little robot with a funny arm.

Dwarf Fortress

For the past week or so, I've been playing extreme cat breeding sim Dwarf Fortress.

If you're a Serious Internet Person, you've probably at least heard of it. It's got some significant infamy for how nuts it is on so many levels. Let's examine some of these levels of nuts, shall we? (Yes.)

The game looks like a 5 year old got a hold of his dad's typewriter and just went nuts all over the Johnson report. It's an ASCII game, so everything is represented by text characters rather than images. It is impenetrable to the untrained eye. The only way to work out what letters are supposed to represent is through checking it and memorising it. Even then, the same letter can mean a bunch of different things, depending on its colour or its background or friggin anything. You think you're being attacked by elks? They're elephants, idiot. Jeez.

Admittedly, this is made a lot less terrible by the graphics mods that are available, but it's still a nightmare. A group of migrant dwarfs arrive, and you're supposed to be able to tell that is a fish dissector. First you're supposed to imagine that there are any contexts where a fucking fish dissector is useful (there aren't), then you're supposed to work out that the blob he's holding isn't an arrow or a tiny word or whatever. It's horrible. Fucking hours I must have spent pressing [k] and hovering over objects that are meaningless.

Speaking of meaningless, there's no goal. There are no explicit objectives. It's like The Sims, but the members your love hexagon of lesbian astronauts (which represent 'your fortress') is destroyed by the postman (which represents 'a skinless elk that vomits poison dust') because you didn't double-lock the door. You gotta make your own fun, which you do. You start naming your dwarfs after in-jokes that nobody else will get or see. You put the cages of the crundles that have been pissing you off for the whole game in the magma pit. The game doesn't reward you for doing shit like that. The game doesn't reward you for anything. You're making up what you want to do, and seeing whether or not the game will fuck you over before you can do it.

The only way that the game ends is by your dwarves dying. In the first game I played, a cave spider blocked the way to the farm so my dwarfs all either starved or were eaten by the spider. You work really hard to build up an impenetrable fortress where you can make statues of the dwarf you named after yourself all day, and inevitably it is not so impenetrable.

Even if it is impenetrable, you just get bored. I get some serious Paradise Syndrome playing this game. I'll make a beautiful fortress that's never gonna be destroyed. It's huge, everyone's happy and there's no way for anybody to invade it. So I cut a hole in the wall to let the goblins in. So I send the army into the caverns to piss off some demons. So I get deliberately sloppy with my mining safety, see if I can't flood the place with magma. Losing is fun. That's the Dwarf Fortress motto. It's in the help menu, it's all goddamn over the wiki, and it's true.

I love Dwarf Fortress. If you wanna play, go over to the site and download that shit right now. If you wanna know how to play before you start (which you do, it makes no sense without someone explaining the basics) check out capnduck's excellent youtube tutorials. If you want an in-depth look at how a typical game might go, check out the Boatmurdered Let's Play, which gets very hilarious very quickly. If you've got time to waste and you're ready to get lost in your own mistakes, check it out. It's like nothing else I've ever played.