The Game Boy: Single-Player and Multiplayer -- Two Tastes That Go Great Together?

Posted 07/09/2009 at 10:30am | by Nathan Grayson

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Every gamer has a story. A story assembled from countless in-game experiences, a collage of victory, defeat, heroics, and villainy. There is, however, a schism in the way these stories play out. Ask someone who’s lived out their gaming days in solitude and they’ll tell you of superhuman feats, epic dramas, and non-player characters who may not have been real boys, but were certainly close enough that Geppetto would’ve been hard-pressed to tell the difference. Pose the same question to multiplayer-centric gamers, though, and you’ll get an earful of teamwork, commitment, practice, and good old fashioned competition.

Neither side, of course, is wrong to enjoy games for their respective reasons. It’s merely a case of different strokes for different folks. However, what happens when single-player and multiplayer modes get married and pop out a child? Well, if you ask developers like BioWare and Splash Damage (who are working on fusing multiplayer and single-player with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Brink, respectively), they’ll tell you such all-encompassing modes are just The Next Big Thing. And they may very well be right about that.
 
Forgive me, then, for objecting to this holy matrimony.

Now, I’m not saying that Brink and Star Wars: TOR are going to be bad games, nor am I claiming that they won’t knock our collective socks off. However, I’m not so sure aspects of both single-player and multiplayer games can dance together without stepping on one another’s toes. Why? Well, let’s break it down.

Central to my fears are the goals that single-player and multiplayer modes seek to achieve. Single-player games – at least, as they are today – strive to guide players through an experience. BioWare games, especially, focus on story and well-developed non-player characters. Meanwhile, multiplayer games revel in competition, chaos, and adversity. Fail in a multiplayer environment and the developer’s certainly not going to kiss your bruised ego and make it feel better. That’d only get in the way of other players’ good times. Suddenly, you’re no longer some big damn hero; you’re just an unskilled rookie. This fact alone makes many multiplayer tropes inhospitable to the types of experiences many single-player games try to carry you through.