Heaven Twiddling

There are many MMO* games that mix solo play with co-operative and competitive play across sessions. Not many however take this mass co-operative style and make it an essential component. Trying to organise tens or potentially hundreds of players towards a unified goal is a huge challenge no matter what incentives you give. With various skill sets and objectives of players it is important to make the act of playing together more important than achieving any particular goal. One game that has really shined at this is Transformice.

Transformice is a free to play web game in which players must get their mice to the cheese and back to their hole. It sounds simple but when tens of mice are trying to climb across the same platforms together many can fall to their doom or unbalance something making it impossible for anyone else to cross. With so many players, team work is almost impossible and if one player breaks away it can ruin the entire mission for cheese.

The fun comes from watching the chaos ensue and makes those often rare moments of achieving your goal feel that much more rewarding. The chat box below the game window is a great source of joy and venting as an entire platform capsizes under badly co-ordinated mouse movements.

The moments where you do reach your goal feel hugely rewarding because of the huge struggle it has taken to achieve. That said, the moments of huge team catastrophe can be hilarious as the uncoordinated mob falls to its doom.

What interests me about Transformice is how it sets conflicting goals. Players will be rewarded for being the first to complete the cheese capture, encouraging an every mouse for himself stampede. Also some teamwork requires the help of a special Shaman mouse to lead the way. This mouse has the most power to help or to punish, depending on the mood of the player.

With some MMO’s it is possible to play on your own and ignore any other players that might be in the world, it is then interesting to see an MMO that is solely based on interacting with others. Swarmation is another web based game in which each player controls a single pixel. Players are then challenged to co-operate and create a variety of shapes. On it’s own one pixel is not interesting and even the shapes the game asks players to make are not works of art. The act of putting them together and having to work with others makes each successful challenge very satisfying.

Die2Nite is another web based MMO (I didn’t intend all these to be web-based, but perhaps that says something about the medium?) in which teams of 40 players must survive for as long as they can against a zombie invasion. The game is very minimal in terms of interface, there is no 3D world to explore or even a player avatar to speak of. The vast majority of the game takes place in the worlds forum. Players must communicate and co-operate if they are to survive, sharing resources and pooling their efforts to have the highest chance of survival.

There are plenty of interesting things that happen in Die2Nite but one of the most interesting situations is when a player decides to go against the group. If enough players agree any other player can be banished from the camp, this makes them highly vulnerable to the zombie attack but gives them some new abilities to defend themselves. If enough banished players amass they can revolt and overthrow their banishers and rule the town themselves.

What is interesting about this dynamic is that it all involves real people and blurs the lines between reality and the game world. When someone steals from your game house it can feel like a betrayal on you. Mistakes and misunderstandings in the community can result in disastrous consequences; as team work falls apart so will the town.

A pure single player experience has its purpose and it is not going away, but I think there is much more fertile and interesting ground to be explored in these social experiences. When a game requires multiple people to work together to succeed but also encourages them to have their own agenda it creates an interesting dilemma. AI partners and opponents are currently very limited by technology and even if they can become believable players will always treat them differently psychologically. Using real people creates interesting social dynamics and I look forward to seeing how other games explore this area of design.

*I have used the term MMO in this article to discuss games that require more than 10 players. Perhaps this is a very broad term for MMO and would include many online FPS games which many may not consider to be MMOs. I think the term online multiplayer wouldn’t really do these games enough service so I hope you will forgive the stretched use of the term.

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