The world used to be a lot smaller. When I was young I got my start playing Tank Wars on the PC against a couple of computer controlled opponents. The family computer was next to the washing machine, adjacent to the living room; and there I sat, on a stool that was a challenge to climb as an eight year old, alone. Then when we got a Nintendo Entertainment System my brother and I would occupy our finished (and by finished I mean unfinished except for an area rug, a pool table and a TV) basement for hours at a time struggling through cooperative bubble bobble; dying to get through each level and pick up that next password code (before the days of saved games). When the Super Nintendo dropped we begged our parents for it saying “it’s like Mario in 3D!”. Nintendo 64 released a few years later and it actually had three dimensional games. I remember my friend Brian opening it at his birthday party and popping Super Mario 64 in…my mind was blown. I got into the shooter genre with the game that sucked almost everyone from my generation in, Goldeneye. It had four player deathmatches and as a 13 year old boy one of the coolest thing you could ever imagine doing was firing a rocket launcher at your friend. The next step in this progression’s tale was Xbox and it’s flagship game, Halo. Halo was phenomenal. It wasn’t cartoony, it was realistic and gritty. On top of that you could plug a couple Xboxes into each other and load up each one with four players. I can’t count the number of times I carried the TV from my bedroom two flights down to the basement so that we could system link two Xboxes together. We’d set the teams; put the four people on red in the main room and the four people on blue in the back room. At the time it was unbelievable, eight player video games?
These days it’s very different. There’s no lugging consoles over to your friends house so that you can play four vs. four team deathmatch. Today you connect through the internet. There’s no coordinating with your friends to find a time that everyone has free…a couple hours they like to waste killing each other. Today the pool of opponents is practically limitless. You could end up playing with anyone who owns the game and has an internet connection. Many games today have actually gone the way of making local play more difficult. Rarely do you see four player split screen anymore. Instead it’s most common to cap local play at two and online play at one person per console. Playing video games is a different social world now. Back then if you had an interest and a friend with an Xbox you were all set to play to your hearts delight. Chances are your friend was looking for the opportunity to get some multiplayer in. Today you need to buy your own console, pay for online service, get a copy of the game…
In many ways it used to be a much cleaner, purer experience.
Today when I get a game for my Xbox 360 I follow a pretty standard routine. First I play through the single player campaign on the hardest difficulty available (yes, I’m badass). This first step has never changed, it’s just like I used to do on any gaming console in the past. I enjoy that feeling of accomplishment I get when I beat a game. Next I do something I never did before the 360, page through the possible Achievements and see what’s required to unlock those points (play it on a new harder difficulty, kill 30 enemies with the flamethrower, find all the collectables, etc.). I generally crank through as many as those as I can next and that is the point the game sort of turns into work for me. I’m no longer playing it as I see fit. I’m not playing it to escape or relax. I’m playing it to complete arbitrary tasks set forth by the developer. But I can’t help it. I need to beat them…at least some of them.
Once I start to realize I’m not having fun (I’m doing work) I turn my attention to the multiplayer. Multiplayer follows a general cookie cutter format with most new games. The first time you play you are a rank zero. As you play more games and beat people supposedly better than you, your rank rises. In many games this ranking is a range from 1 to 50. Each game uses a different ratio of skill and experience to decide the speed at which you rank up. A lot of games are attempting to use the same TrueSkill system the Chess world uses, ELO. It does a calculation based on which side of the bout is predicted to win and by how much (similar to a spread in sports betting). If the favorite wins, they gain a modest amount skill points and the underdog loses a modest amount. If there is an upset, the underdog gains a large amount of skill points and the favorite loses a large amount. It’s a system put in place to keep public games fun and competitive by matching you against similarly skilled opponents. However, as I said above, in most games this is balanced with experience points. Everytime you win a game you get 1 additional experience point, if you lose, nothing happens.
What I’ve found is this: in games such as halo 3, your rank is advertised next to your name with both a numeric value and a symbol. In the early stages of multiplayer your rank will jump sharply. The further you come along the more the slope of advancement stabilizes until you reach the skill level you are “supposed” to fall under. Under such conditions I quickly found myself playing for a purpose other than the fun of the game. I needed to get to that next rank. Every time I lost a match I was furious because I knew I faced the possibility of ranking down in the network; stepping further away from my goal.
Often I miss the days of sitting in my basement with 3 of my friends in the back room and my brother and 3 of his friends in the other room, screaming at each other through the wall, talking all sorts of shit, but laughing my ass off win or lose. After the match we’d step outside for a cigarette and either congratulate ourselves on our awesome win and talk some trash to my brothers team or laugh about how badly we were beat after the warthog we were all in got hit with a rocket and went flipping through the air…
This is why I applaud the Gears of War 2 ranking system. There are 5 ranks represented by pictures, not numbers; FIVE, not fifty. You have no way of telling how far or close you are to the next level. I feel liberated...freed. I’m not worrying about making it from 22 to 23. I’m not pissed at my teammates for not coordinating as well as we could have or not reviving me at some crucial moment. I’m not thinking about any of those many things that irked me while playing Halo 3. I’m simply too busy laughing.
These days it’s very different. There’s no lugging consoles over to your friends house so that you can play four vs. four team deathmatch. Today you connect through the internet. There’s no coordinating with your friends to find a time that everyone has free…a couple hours they like to waste killing each other. Today the pool of opponents is practically limitless. You could end up playing with anyone who owns the game and has an internet connection. Many games today have actually gone the way of making local play more difficult. Rarely do you see four player split screen anymore. Instead it’s most common to cap local play at two and online play at one person per console. Playing video games is a different social world now. Back then if you had an interest and a friend with an Xbox you were all set to play to your hearts delight. Chances are your friend was looking for the opportunity to get some multiplayer in. Today you need to buy your own console, pay for online service, get a copy of the game…
In many ways it used to be a much cleaner, purer experience.
Today when I get a game for my Xbox 360 I follow a pretty standard routine. First I play through the single player campaign on the hardest difficulty available (yes, I’m badass). This first step has never changed, it’s just like I used to do on any gaming console in the past. I enjoy that feeling of accomplishment I get when I beat a game. Next I do something I never did before the 360, page through the possible Achievements and see what’s required to unlock those points (play it on a new harder difficulty, kill 30 enemies with the flamethrower, find all the collectables, etc.). I generally crank through as many as those as I can next and that is the point the game sort of turns into work for me. I’m no longer playing it as I see fit. I’m not playing it to escape or relax. I’m playing it to complete arbitrary tasks set forth by the developer. But I can’t help it. I need to beat them…at least some of them.
Once I start to realize I’m not having fun (I’m doing work) I turn my attention to the multiplayer. Multiplayer follows a general cookie cutter format with most new games. The first time you play you are a rank zero. As you play more games and beat people supposedly better than you, your rank rises. In many games this ranking is a range from 1 to 50. Each game uses a different ratio of skill and experience to decide the speed at which you rank up. A lot of games are attempting to use the same TrueSkill system the Chess world uses, ELO. It does a calculation based on which side of the bout is predicted to win and by how much (similar to a spread in sports betting). If the favorite wins, they gain a modest amount skill points and the underdog loses a modest amount. If there is an upset, the underdog gains a large amount of skill points and the favorite loses a large amount. It’s a system put in place to keep public games fun and competitive by matching you against similarly skilled opponents. However, as I said above, in most games this is balanced with experience points. Everytime you win a game you get 1 additional experience point, if you lose, nothing happens.
What I’ve found is this: in games such as halo 3, your rank is advertised next to your name with both a numeric value and a symbol. In the early stages of multiplayer your rank will jump sharply. The further you come along the more the slope of advancement stabilizes until you reach the skill level you are “supposed” to fall under. Under such conditions I quickly found myself playing for a purpose other than the fun of the game. I needed to get to that next rank. Every time I lost a match I was furious because I knew I faced the possibility of ranking down in the network; stepping further away from my goal.
Often I miss the days of sitting in my basement with 3 of my friends in the back room and my brother and 3 of his friends in the other room, screaming at each other through the wall, talking all sorts of shit, but laughing my ass off win or lose. After the match we’d step outside for a cigarette and either congratulate ourselves on our awesome win and talk some trash to my brothers team or laugh about how badly we were beat after the warthog we were all in got hit with a rocket and went flipping through the air…
This is why I applaud the Gears of War 2 ranking system. There are 5 ranks represented by pictures, not numbers; FIVE, not fifty. You have no way of telling how far or close you are to the next level. I feel liberated...freed. I’m not worrying about making it from 22 to 23. I’m not pissed at my teammates for not coordinating as well as we could have or not reviving me at some crucial moment. I’m not thinking about any of those many things that irked me while playing Halo 3. I’m simply too busy laughing.
No comments:
Post a Comment