Cooperative Games
When I was growing up and for some decades thereafter, all games I knew of were competitive. Some, mostly physical games like soccer or football, were cooperative as well, a team of two or more cooperating to defeat another team. The only non-physical example I can think of is bridge, a game whose central feature is cooperation between partners with strictly limited communication.
That has changed. I recently spent an hour or so at Baycon, a local science fiction convention, as communications officer of a starship, sending damaged enemies demands for surrender, requesting docking at friendly stations. My daughter, beside me, filled the more demanding role of science officer. Other players were in charge of weapons, engineering, … . The ship’s captain, moving up and down behind the row of officers, collected information from us, gave orders. We successfully accomplished two or three missions, had one terminated by a systems crash.
There were no human opponents. Considered as a video game it was simple and uninteresting, at least at the easy level at which a crew mostly of novices was playing it. Considered as a teamwork game, it was a lot of fun.
Artemis, played with one large screen and a bunch of networked laptops, is a high tech example of a genre that has become increasingly common, games in which all the players are on the same side. A technologically simpler but more sophisticated example is Sentinels of the Multiverse, a table-top game where the players are superheroes cooperating to defeat the world-ending plans of an evil mastermind, represented not by another player but by game mechanics, cards whose random selection determines his moves. Online, multi-player games such as World of Warcraft feature teams of players, closely coordinated, to kill powerful computer controlled enemies, collect valuable loot. Some teams continue to function for years with occasional changes of membership.
A good many years ago, when I was still an active WoW player, our raid leader noticed that I was no longer responding. Fortunately he had the house phone number. My son took the call, came into my office, found me half conscious on the floor. My family got me to a local hospital where I was diagnosed with a meningioma, a tumor between the skull and the membrane around the brain humorously described as “benign,” meaning non-cancerous. It was putting pressure on my brain and had to be surgically removed; I still have the scar and the dent underneath it. I am not sure what the medical consequences would have been if it had been several more hours before I was found; it would probably be an exaggeration to say that I owe my life to the social links created by a WoW raid.
A few years later my wife and daughter attended the raid leaders wedding — I unfortunately had a previous commitment.
Where did cooperative games come from? I think there are several answers.
One is the increasing popularity of Dungeons and Dragons and similar role playing games. There are some conflicts of interest within a D&D team, mostly over the division of loot, but they are basically all on the same side. Another source may be the element of cooperation among players on the same side of a competitive game. Start with a two player war game, such as Avalon Hill’s Waterloo. Add additional players to each side, commanding different parts of the army — Blucher for the Prussians, Grouchy for the French force opposing him. You how have a cooperative game within the pairs of commanders, a competitive game between them. Convert from a board game to a computer game, put the computer in command of one of the armies, and the human side of the game is a cooperative game against the computer.
World of Warcraft, one of the most popular online games of recent decades, demonstrates the attraction of both competitive and cooperative games and the tension between them. Played by groups of players as PvE, Player vs Environment, it is a cooperative game. Played as PvP, Player versus Player, by individuals it is a competitive game. Played as PvP by groups, raids on an enemy city or battles pre-arranged between the leaders, it is a competitive game between the groups, a cooperative game within them.
In WoW as I experienced it, playing as an Alliance character on a PvE server, there was a tension between players who wanted to raid Horde cities and players who argued that doing so only weakened both sides against the true forces of evil, played by the computer. The compromise my team hit on was defensive PvP, organizing to defend our cities but rejecting retaliatory raids on the Horde. As Torkle, a gnome who spoke only in rhymed verse, put it:
What is wrong with striking back Is it kills the folk that didn’t attack And very likely, by all we know, Adds recruits to the force of the foe.
An older example of a non-physical team game, cooperative within the team, competitive between, is the naval war game invented by fantasy author and military historian Fletcher Pratt as a way of simulating naval battles, used before, during, and after WWII. It is played on a large floor with model ships, each player controlling one ship, and was apparently played at times with as many as sixty players a side. Part of the attraction of the game is the player’s identification with his ship, its location and accomplishments. While you hope that your fleet defeats the enemy fleet, what really matters is how your ship does against enemy ships. If, by clever maneuvering and accurate shooting — the relevant skill is estimating the range to the ship you are shooting at in order to know where to place your shells, revising the estimate each turn to account for how both ships have moved — your heavy cruiser sank an enemy heavy while taking only minor damage, you have won your game even if your side lost due to the errors of your fellow captains.
Why?
The interesting question is why pure cooperative games became popular in recent decades. I have three possible answers. One is technological, one social or psychological. The third was suggested to me by a woman of my acquaintance, along with the warning that including it would get me yelled at.
The technological answer is that computers made it possible to play a game without a human opponent. Once people got used to doing so solo, the natural next step was a team against the computer. Once people got used to cooperative computer games, game designers started finding ways to do the same thing on a tabletop. I do not know of any purely cooperative games that predate the availability of personal computers, but perhaps one of my readers does. If any exist, that would be evidence against the technological explanation.
The social/psychological explanation is that competition became less popular and cooperation more popular, perhaps for reasons associated with the leftward drift of social attitudes. The third explanation, perhaps a version of the second, is that the shift was a result of the increasing number of women gamers, women being more attracted to cooperative social strategies than men, less attracted to competitive. If women prefer cooperative games, and men desire the social company of women, …
Readers are invited to offer other explanations, and evidence.
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I think part of the rise of cooperative-only games can be traced to the decrease of cooperative work projects. At the extreme end is cooperative hunting, but also barn building or home construction work with family provides a lot of the "let's socialize while accomplishing something together" feeling, and modern people just don't do nearly so much of that. So if inviting your friends and family over to just sit around and talk seems miserable and you want something to occupy yourselves while doing that, you need a game or other activity to do.
Related to that is the issue that different skill levels and interest in games really limit what kind of competitive games people can play while socializing. I used to play some very competitive table top games, and that totally worked with some of my social circle, but with family it was a bit of a stretch. Cooperative games let players coach each other along and help carry weaker team members (or in the bad version one player just ends up playing everyone's role). More casual players can mix with more serious game players without a great deal of difficulty.
Plus, cooperative games tend to require and encourage interaction and discussion, whereas competitive sometimes punishes focusing on chatting instead of focusing on the game. For people who maybe are a little awkward when interacting in groups or with strangers coop games make the process more comfortable. It's a good way to make friends at the FLGS board game night.
I think Doctor Hammer is on the scent. I am old enough and rural enough to remember social cooperative events like butchering, making rag rugs, cutting quilting patches, canning fests, raising barns (not just for the Amish), and so on.
They were work, training, and socializing all rolled into one. I suspect that sort of thing is as old as settled villages. When my family (family includes not just blood relatives but chosen people who are treated like family) butchered in the Fall, it might be two steers, half a dozen or more hogs, and a couple of hundred chickens. It involved perhaps 20 or so full-grown adults, and lots of children, and it was a teaching/learning event with plenty of specialization. I learned to skin a steer from my grandfather, who had me watch for a couple of years, then handed me a special skinning knfe and said, "No thin spots." It took me maybe 3 times as long as it did him, but eventually approached his skill. It was an all day event, and into the evening.
Not much of any animal was 'wasted'. Chicken feathers were save to make pillows and comforters. Bones were cut up for soup base, hides were sold to tanneries, just about anything edible not used otherwise became sausages cased in hog intestines turned inside out and thoroughly washe and scraped, hog fat was rendered into lard, beef suet went into the sausages, and so on.
Younger children from ages 5 and up fetched and carried as they could, caught chickens, watched the various methods involved, had things explained to them, and so on. And all this time socializing occurred. Gossip, family news, politics, etc. And aftrwards some alcohol consumption for adults who indulged, and card games and lots and lots of talk.
Same with tearing old cloth into strips and rolling them into balls to be hooked into rugs later, or cutting up of patches to be quilted, plus actual quilting, or sewing bees (which usually had more non-family members), and such.
Butchering was in the Fall. Quilting, ragging, sewing was mostly winter after harvest and before planting, canning was late july through late September. Everything had a season.
I think though, that this was made possible by a relative abundance of the proper resources that made it fairly easy to distribute the final products in a manner presumed fair by all who joined in. I strongly suspect that is where the division between competition and cooperation begins.
Possibly competition is always a potential choice because 1) some things by nature are perceived as 'scarce'. (If you don't believe me, try asking in my old neighborhood some friend's or relative's favorite mushrooming patches are. If you're lucky, maybe they will leave you drectons n their will. ;-) And 2) we have evolved to be ready to compete and enjoy the 'practice'. Evolutionary psychology if the term doesn't upset you.
But cooperation seems most likely when a desired resource exists in such abundance as to make cooperative success AND division of the gained resources relatively satisfactory to more people than competition does. And perhaps in cases where the belief in the chances of winning in a competion for resources is not easly predicted.
Anyway, I think if we see interconnectedness through computing power as a resource, I think the evolution of the internet all but demanded the rise of cooperative online games.