The dark ages

Now that online gaming is a catchy term, we could believe that multi-player games are a relatively recent phenomenon. In fact, it all started with multi-player gaming.

The first arcade games simply didn’t have a one-player mode. Then, it always has been a convention to enable 2-player mode. Virtually all arcade games cabinets had two joysticks, two coin slots, and a 2nd player could join anytime...

Consoles, which then tried very hard to replicate the arcade, were usually shipped with 2 controllers well into the 90s, making 2-player mode a de facto standard. Multi-player gaming, admittedly, was much less important than the 1-player mode. But as early as in 1983, the Gameline service on the Atari VCS lets players download games over a 1200baud modem.

The computers were perhaps less prepared to multi-player gaming. Early games that featured multi-player requested players to swap places ("hotseat") or to share the same keyboard. Still, in the 70s, the first multiple-user dungeons (MUDs), the ancestors of today’s MMORPGs, appear in the British universities.

First doubts

But those early 2-player modes had their limits. OK, so arcade games allowed 2-player mode so that coins will be burned faster. And as long as coins did roll in, they didn’t really question that. Still, in many games, that lead to a less than pleasant experience:

• Scrolling. In action games, both players controlled an equally important character. If any of them went near the edge of the screen, they will cause the screen to scroll forward, which could put the other character in a dangerous situation,
• legibility. Especially in shooting games, 2-player action tend to fill up the screen with so many shots and explosions that it’s impossible to understand what’s going on,
• Flow. In fighting games, when the player has to beat a series of opponents, the arrival of a new player means game over for the loser. So it is really an intrusion.

This is why, more generally, the 1-player mode was still the dominant variant during the 80s and early 90s. Not all console games allowed for a 2nd player, and computers even less. New 2-player modes were invented, for instance, the 2nd player could play the role of a side-kick to the 1st player (a role typically devolved to younger sibblings). On the PC front, some games allowed peer-to-peer modem connections: players faced each other over their phone line, without going through the internet. That was especially used in flight sims.

2nd generation of multiplayer games

Two important events took place in the early 90s. The invention of the Gameboy made multi-player gaming on several machines not only possible but natural, as every Gameboy player owned one multiplayer game, Tetris. Linking two gameboys was quick and easy. The second important gaming phenomenon was the release of Doom. Its dissemination as a shareware was extremely rapid. This game was probably the main cause of demand of "null modems", cables that could link any two PCs together, which at the time seldom had ethernet connections! Doom’s multiplayer, multi-machine mode was quite a revolution. People started putting up Doom parties, grouping two or more computers linked by cables.

Things just picked up from there. Soon after, windows 95 was released, which brought the internet to the masses. PCs were now commonly outfitted with modems, so more and more games proposed multi-player modes, often using proprietary protocols. Blizzard’s Warcraft was one of the first strategy games where the 2-player mode was nicely done, and this was one of the main causes of its success. That was then emulated by the competition, eventually giving birth to the RTS genre.

Console games, meanwhile, remained principally focused on single-player games. The influence of the arcade was already much weaker. Still, contemporary consoles had more joypad slots: the N64 and the Dreamcast both had 4 - 2 more than before. It was also possible to connect 2 PlayStations together to play linked games, although this feature wasn’t used much. Multiplayer console games were usually played on the same console and the same screen, using the "split screen" convention.

Modern multi-player games

The next important step was 1999 with three milestone events:

• The release of the Dreamcast, the first internet-enabled console,
• Quake 3, the first PC game focused on multiplayer mode - in which, for the first time, the 1-player mode is much less important than the multi-player mode,
• The advent of EverQuest and other massively-multiplayer online role playing games, which prove to be a very profitable business model.

They all had far-reaching consequences: the Dreamcast may have been early, but it has been followed by the current and future game systems who all feature a more or less complete internet strategy.

Many games have also walked on the footsteps of Quake 3, and instead of offering a multi-player game which is a downgraded version of the 1-player experience, playable by several people at once, they rather build a strong, compelling multi-player mode, with specific rules and resources, and then add a 1-player mode which could be a more restricted version of the multi-player mode (Quake 3), or an entirely different game (Return to Castle Wolfenstein). Most games apparently designed principally for the 1-player mode also feature online gaming, which is no longer a required but tedious add-on to develop but a rich part of the gaming experience.

The MMORPGs have caused a number of vocations, as the bigger ones, among which EverQuest, became soon more profitable than anything else in the gaming industry, ever.

Today, all of the future consoles have strong internet strategies. Does it mean that the future of gaming is necessarily online?

What does it mean to add a multi-player mode?

With internet being more and more present in our daily lives, and with some internet-enabled games being the most profitable game ventures of all times, no wonder that many think that online gaming means better gaming. This is a serious misconception though, as adding multi-player to a game is far from neutral.

In fact, playing a multiplayer game online and playing by oneself are completely distinct activities - one is not the extension of the other. People who enjoy one would not systematically enjoy the other more.

So what does it all mean?

• There is less room for fiction and narration in a MP game. More content is provided by the gamers. Such content is uncontrolled and can be inconsistent with the gaming universe. In 1P games, the universe is solely designed by the developers who guarantee its consistency, as content provided by the gamers is usually very limited.
• Mechanisms that prompt the MP gamer to play are largely of a social nature: be part of a group, enter a competition, interact with others. On the contrary, those which influence the 1P gamer are rather linked to the contents of the game and its narration power.
• The objective of a MP gamer is to be better than others, to be best, in a competitive perpective. That of a 1P gamer is just to be good enough to beat the game, unrelated of the others performance.
• The MP gamer can be eliminated (or at least penalized) by others - including cheaters. That doesn’t happen any more in 1P games, where the "game over" screen practically disappeared and where the computer never cheats.
• The time of exposure to a MP game is usually greater - this, multiplied by the discussions that the social interactions naturally generate, give MP gamers a much different perspective on the game than 1P gamers. Often, MP gamers see beyond the abstraction of the game and discuss "mobs" (mobile objects) or "bots" (robots, opponents moved by the computer’s IA), just like programmers would. To 1P gamers, the game mechanics are usually more mysterious.
• In MP gaming, there are specific, counter-intuitive attitudes that are developped to play which are different to what a player would do in a 1P game. In a 1P game, there is no point in "camping", that is wait in one spot, well-hidden, for opponents that can easily be eliminated, or for "powergaming", that is, play in an obscure, but optimized way so that the characters gain power very rapidly, because the point in 1P game is precisely to have fun while progressing.