All For One, and One For All
A number of recent events — my 13th game design and it’s response, a post by Yehuda, and some first-hand play experience — have led me to reflect on the idea of cooperative games: specifically, games that feature all players acting together against the game itself.
All games are competitive in some way, even the conceptual ones that are deliberately unbalanced or unwinnable. Most are primarily competitive between players, using the system as the language by which that competition is expressed and resolved (though the lines are fairly well blurred, as Yehuda asserts). Cooperative games are competitive in a different way: to defeat the resistance of an impartial, “dumb” system of mechanics. I make no assertions about the superiority of this type of competition versus the other, at least not at this time. What I am concerned with here are the particular challenges that face a designer of this type of game. How do you make a game cooperative? How do you make a cooperative game good?
A number of my own Sunday games are cooperative, expanding on the basic mechanic of Solitaire: to unravel the randomness of an initial deck shuffle. Design #13, Cromwell, is cooperative in a loose sense, in that players do not directly compete with each other even though only one can win in the end. But these are all simple examples: players merely working to organize a random pattern. The weightier design objective is forming a system that can withstand the combined efforts of multiple human brains without any controlling intelligence: a “dumb” system.
To move beyond mere randomness, as in Solitaire, is at the heart of the cooperative game designer’s struggle. There are many excellent examples of this: Shadows Over Camelot, by Days of Wonder, is among my favorites: players play as the Knights of the Round Table, collectively striving to defeat evil in the form of numerous varied quests that threaten to destroy Camelot. The system resists by forcing players to play both sides: they must take an “evil” action every turn before they are allowed to take a “good” action. While much of the system is still based on randomness — a deck of Evil cards, in this case — it nonetheless takes an important step towards developing an autonomous “anti-player.” By forcing the players to actively counter themselves, the game introduces a dynamic that holds strong regardless of how well or poorly the players play, matching the crusade blow-for-blow without any need for complex rules or tables to simulate intelligent control: it is an effective “dumb” system — it acts appropriately yet without any knowledge of consequence or metagame. Board games depend on this, as they have no computer to make decisions for them.
Assuming a dumb system of this type has been formed, the next step is to make it scalable and flexible. It is one thing to have dynamics that react to the players, and quite another to ensure that that reaction is appropriate and matched to the mastery the players are exercising. This is a fine line, much like the slope of the difficulty curve: too hard or strong and the players will get frustrated and angry, believing they cannot win. Too easy or too weak and the players will triumph too soon and grow bored, believing they have exhausted the game’s potential resistance and have nothing more to gain from play. Shadows errs on the side of too hard — I’ve played it eight or nine times but only won two or three, even with veteran players.
The final piece of the puzzle is the trickiest: creation of a group dynamic that encourages and inspires the players to cooperate. It isn’t enough to simply stipulate that the players do so. They must feel the need to aid each other; the game must create situations and force dilemmas that drive the players to seek aid and comfort in each other’s presence, to unite in the face of evil. Shadows does this very well, as players quickly realize how close they are to losing and how dire is the need to coordinate their efforts. Without this impetus to bond, the game becomes fractured and ends up more like multiple simultaneous games of Solitaire than a true cooperation.
Cooperative games offer some unique challenges, but with them come unique opportunities. Purely competitive games can rely on the player’s natural will to dominate and succeed to keep the game lively and fun, but cooperative games must tap a deeper emotion: group devotion. They offer one of the few chances a game designer will ever see to build a real mechanic based on self-sacrifice. And by the sum of all this, they offer a chance to develop truly lasting play experiences.
And yet, how much more fun Shadows Over Camelot could have been if each player had the opportunity to decide for himself whether he wanted to be either black or white before the game started. And you would never know if all players are working to one side or the other, or some combo.
Cooperative, competitive, both, and neither.
Yehuda