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.