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December Days 05: A Single-Player Experience

[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]

I tend not to play the multi-player components of many games, if those components are player versus player. And skip games that are specifically only player versus player. Couch co-op or players versus machine is fine, though, and sometimes pretty useful to have. For example, a second player can take control of Miles "Tails" Prower in Sonic 2 and take advantage of his fundamental invincibility to clear a path for Sonic in dangerous situations. Having a skilled Tails player also makes the latter Chaos Emerald Bonus Stage targets easier to make, because it allows each player to take a profitable line and collect rings toward the totals needed. When you have to have the layout of the level memorized and play perfectly as a single player, having a friend who can give you some cushion really helps.

Co-op beat-em-ups are sometimes the most useful times to have friends, especially if the number and type of opponents doesn't scale with the addition of new players. (Or even if it does.)

There have been practical reasons about not playing a whole lot of versus games, given that a lot of them are things that required an internet connection in the dial-up era, or to have friends who would be over frequently and would play the game, but I also know my brain is not always well-suited to these kinds of games, because my brain wants to have fun playing those kinds of games, and it has one big rule about what constitutes fun that I can figure out, and that everything else flows from.

Fun, for versus-type games, has to be in the vicinity of fair.

This is the same type of fair as in the last post. Games that are versus, but rely mostly on luck or randomization, and that don't have ways of mitigating that random, are not going to be fun, unless I'm specifically approaching it with the idea that it's just random and not to care. And even then, it can be a struggle to maintain good cheer when I've rolled my fourth failure in a row and hit the sixth bad thing that can happen to me this game. I'm trying to get better about it, but it's difficult, because it offends my sense of fairness. And it often bites me if I end up coming back toward a fair result, because some Terrible People in my life continued to characterize it as "you're not having fun unless you win," and thus a moral failure. So there's some extra baggage involved in playing games with me, and that likely doesn't make me someone that others would want to play games with.

Mitigation comes in a few different ways. It's a running family joke that nobody can deal a good hand of cards when we all get together. But for the games we play, such as pinochle, cribbage, and euchre, it's still regularly possible to obtain points from good play, even if the hand you are dealt is pretty crap at scoring points by itself. Trivia games where everyone is answering the questions is mostly about your own knowledge, and not someone else's actions (although the YDKJ screws sometimes fly fast and furious), so they're mitigating the random nature of the questions and the games. Ticket to Ride and Catan have random elements, but you can still make strategic plays or trades so that you're not stuck holding useless things (and the role cards for Catan, like in Star Trek Catan, really help make every turn be useful, no matter where you are in the game).

Fairness also applies to the skill level of the people I'm playing with. I might learn a lot about a game by playing an expert repeatedly, as a beginner, but it's equally likely, if not more so, that I'm going to quit and cross that game off the list of games I ever play with anyone again. If you want me to enjoy a game and play out and get good at it, you have to let me play it against people of a similar skill level as mine, where I can see the possibility of winning, even if I don't actually win. This is a tricky thing to do in software, and matchmaking either doesn't care about putting you against people of similar skill level (which is frustrating), or it attempts to numerically categorize your skill through your wins and losses. I don't know how much of matchmaking takes into account the ways you win and lose, the preferences of your playstyle, or other things, so that you get matched with someone who gives you a challenge. And for a lot of online gaming, there are a lot of things that are permissible within the boundaries of the game that are not in service of playing a fair game, and reputation-tracking trends to be more in "do they quit matches instead of playing them through," and "do they use slurs and offensive language when they communicate," both rather than "are they playing a fair game?" I think it's important to know if someone is going to disconnect if things aren't going for them, and terrible language should be censured, all the same, but I would like to also be able to rate a player's reputation with, for example, "doesn't back off when it's become clear there's a skill mismatch." That way, sometime who might be looking at potential opponents can see that flag and decide whether they want to deal with (or think they're good enough to handle) someone who won't let up once they've amassed enough of a lead. For some people, that's exactly what they want. For some people, that's the exact opposite of what they want. It's not a fair game to me if I'm playing against someone who is just going to camp and snipe spawn points so it's impossible to do anything but die and respawn, and that makes it less appealing. (And that's before we get to the people who are deliberately trying to lower their rank or otherwise put themselves in a class they don't belong in so they can be jerks to others in exactly this kind of way.)

So, yes, fairness is important to me. A game should always feel winnable, and winnable through skill and good play. Too far in either direction, and it's not fun for the person who is outclassed or has the bad luck. And when you put achievements reliant on braving the waters of online play and of winning in online play, that's almost a guarantee that the list of achievements won't ever be finished, because not everyone likes playing online, nor do they want to subject themselves to toxic cultures for shiny digital badges. Because there is a lot of toxicity involved in playing online, and short of stripping away the ability of players to communicate at all, allies or enemies, there's very few ways to cause a cultural change away from the gatekeeping and ultracompetitive environments that result in people getting false threats called against them or virulent sexual harassment of women (and men, as the insults inevitably are or turn homophobic, as well). Given that many of the last games of the shooter era are team-based games, communicating is important, clearly. Perhaps the consoles had it better in their earlier forms, where you could only communicate with a preset number of phrases that were all relevant to the game. (Even text chat was and remains a venue rife for abusive language.)

It's not a complete disaster for me to play multiplayer games, thankfully. There are some ways that I can get around my own brain. If I'm good enough to stay competitive, even though I'm not going to win, ever, that can sometimes be enough. For as long as I have been playing the various Smash iterations, I've never been good enough to consistently win against other players, who are all younger and have practiced more than me. (And insist on discarding most of the joy and fun of the game by turning off the items and restricting themselves to boring stage designs.) But Smash is a balanced enough game that I don't end up just watching my character get pummeled and die. In that sense, then, it works out fine, and occasionally things go well.

Another way I've found to shortcut the frustration of not being good enough to win with the character I've invested time in developing is to play random character selection. If a thing goes terribly wrong, then it was getting a bad pick, and if it goes well, it was getting a good pick, and I improve incrementally with all of the characters by doing so. It shifts from "my best is consistently not good enough, therefore the fairness principle is being constantly violated" to "didn't do so great on this time around, maybe I'll do better with the next one." I realize that's what's supposed to happen with all games, really, regardless of how they turn out, but brains are sometimes difficult and useful coping strategies are useful.

So, for a multitude of reasons, including not having time, not really wanting to deal with the culture, and because there still isn't really a way of matchmaking where you can accurately get a winnable challenge every time and have an enjoyable game while you are at it, I don't play versus multiplayer games all that often. Which means I haven't done a whole lot in a big swath of AAA gaming for a long time, unless that game has a single-player mode to enjoy. I dipped a toe into Overwatch, but soon after, I thought I saw someone from Blizzard making a statement that Overwatch's loot boxes were always going to be cosmetic so it could separate the people who wanted to get better at playing the game from people who just wanted to collect neat things, and it was phrased in such a way to suggest the collectors weren't really the people they wanted playing the game. Can I find this now? Of course not, and there's a high probability I might be confusing what an official person said with a toxic member of the community. I don't think so, but, of course, my search engine technique fails me. And there's a high probability that if something that inflammatory were actually said, it would be walked back in a hurry. But the toxicity issues are definitely real, so whether for real or imagined reasons, I'm waiting for everyone to basically be done with it before picking it back up again.

As with many of these rambles, there really isn't a conclusion, other than that I would like some way of mystically only being able to find people who play challengingly but with similar skills and who are otherwise polite and delightful to play with. Or, probably more importantly, I want games I can play by myself or with friends on the couch and have that experience be great, rather than having all the resources get pulled into the online multiplayer experience, because I can at least control who I'm playing with in local play.