Et tu, Mario?Murder, looting, pizza theft, and other hazards of cooperative video-gaming.
Posted Friday, Nov. 13, 2009, at 4:51 PM ET
This past year, during a brave attempt to weather the sweaty show floor of the video-game industry's annual E3 conference, I stopped by the enormous display dedicated to Nintendo. Unlike many publishers that show videos of their upcoming titles but won't let the public play them, Nintendo had bushels of flat-screen televisions pumping its biggest game of the year, the New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The most marketable feature of this new version of the franchise is the addition of four-player cooperative play, meaning I had the chance to play with three random strangers. I stepped up to the booth, grabbed a controller, and immediately had flashbacks to my youth—the many parts of my childhood, at least, when I'd start crying because of various Nintendo crimes perpetrated by my younger brother.
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StumbleUponThe ostensible object of New Super Mario Bros. is to advance through each level as a cohesive unit. The plot: Mario, Luigi, and a pair of "mushroom people" work together in yet another attempt to rescue the hapless princess from the clutches of Bowser's minions. The fellow next to me, however, felt no inklings of team spirit and proceeded to stomp on my head, steal my power-ups, and generally act like a complete "greedy Gus," as my mom would say. Immediately infantilized, I was transported back to the living room of my childhood, where my brother used to torment me by driving my on-screen character to some unseemly demise, insisting that he was "just playing the game his way." I left the Nintendo booth dismayed and frustrated and had the overwhelming desire to call my mother and gripe.
What is it about games that bring out the worst human behaviors? I'm sure the guy next to me was a wonderful human being, a delightful co-worker, and a caring husband and father. But in this game, he was the Poseidon to my Odysseus—yes, it felt that epic—an enemy bent on ensuring that I would never reach the promised land. As long as you don't take it too personally, cooperative play reveals what makes video games such a special medium. Being granted the opportunity to be friends or adversaries, games allow us to act out the worst of human pathologies and encourage behaviors that would get us yelled at, arrested, or killed in the real world.
Multiplayer video games operate along two dimensions. There are fighting games like the Tekken and Street Fighter franchises that give players a single option: defeat each other in glorious battle or turn off the console and bake cookies together. On the other end are games like the popular Facebook application FarmVille, in which players must help each other by fertilizing one another's crops and exchanging gifts. (Watch out for lead-generation scams, though!) Most cooperative games lie in a vast middle ground, however, a no man's land between altruism and gaming Darwinism that offers up a host of ways to misbehave.
My brother, whom I love dearly, is an exemplar of in-game selfishness. There was a particular sequence in the old Nintendo game Contra that involved jumping up the side of a waterfall. If one player jumps too quickly, the other gets left behind and falls to his demise. My little brother did this almost every single time, deliberately leaving my hapless soldier to die. He would cackle and cheer until I unplugged his controller or broke into tears. (My composure in the face of adversity has since improved.)
My brother's waterfall antics were a predecessor to a common issue in first-person shooter games: friendly fire. Greedy players often disregard the lives of others—stealing weapons that a fellow teammate was carrying, for instance—in a bid to improve their own statistics. "Splash damage" is a common problem with weapons like rocket launchers that destroy everything in a certain radius, including unlucky teammates. The company Infinity Ward, which released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to record sales this week, released a fake public-service announcement in which Phillies pitcher Cole Hamels discusses the dangers of throwing grenades in multiplayer mode. (The phony PSA has since been pulled on account of its childish homophobia; the interest group that Hamels represents is called "Fight Against Grenade Spam.")
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