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.
Indeed :D Men seem particularly inclined to need something to do other than just hang out and talk. Hell, I half the time feel like I need a good reason to invite my own dad over, but fortunately I have a near infinite list of things around the house that could stand some fixing, and he an almost infinite list of things that need shooting.
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.
You analyse the rise of cooperative games as the rise of cooperation. A different perspective is to see it instead as the rise of games.
As many other commenters describe, there has always been lots of cooperation and communal affairs.
What's new is that more people are playing 'games' in the sense of structured activities with rules and the ability to win.
It's easier to make compelling competitive games, especially if all you have is cardboard and not computers. So we saw these earlier. (As correctly observed in the blog post!)
But in absolute terms both competitive and cooperative games, both on a computer and on cardboard, have exploded in popularity.
And that explosion overshadows any relative shift between the two.
I guess technically personal computers and role-playing games appeared around the same time, but Dungeons and Dragons was before the Apple I, so it seems implausible to me that the as yet extremely early and niche personal computer situation of the time contributed to role-playing games (which seem to have evolved out of wargaming culture, for reasons which are unclear). But it's plausible that computer games and role-playing games each fed into the popularity of the other over time. This suggests that there should be a social answer, but I don't feel like there has been as much of a change as seems required; again looking at the early history, does it really seem like the 1980s were much more cooperative and less competitive than the 1960s? So I feel like there are still mysteries about how this trend began (though increased computer use and greater numbers of women in gaming probably contributed to the trend continuing to strengthen over time).
In addition to the cooperative work projects mentioned by Doctor Hammer and Jorg, a lot of party games are technically competitive, but in practice are closer to cooperative. Games like charades, Pictionary, guessing games like Blind Man's bluff, etc. There's rules for scoring, but most of that is an afterthought, and often devolves into the group working together to figure out the solution.
Also, we'd have to go back a few generations, but people used to play music, sing and dance for entertainment. Those are all cooperative activities, but ones where normal people have transitioned from actively doing them to being passive consumers of recorded content.
Cooperative games started to take off in 2005 when Shadows Over Camelot was published by Days of Wonder. What makes this and some other cooperative games really fun is the element of a hidden traitor that is secretly working against everyone at the table. The traitor can win the game alone or the rest of the players as a group. In 2008, Pandemic was published and has remained at the top of the rankings for years (see BoardGameGeek, the definitive strategy board game site with a handy ranking chart) and has several editions published. One called Gloomhaven is now considered the best cooperative game of all time but is quite complex for your average person.
What makes them popular is the suspense of winning or losing as a team and the camaraderie that accompanies that. One design challenge with coop games has been designing them so you don’t have an “alpha” player quarterbacking everyone and telling them what to do. You typically want each player to have some personal information so players can make some of their own decisions instead of relying on the smartest or most aggressive person at the table to optimize the moves for the team.
The table-top strategy gaming scene was really been pioneered by the Germans (Catan published in 1995 kickstarted the hobby) who host the largest board game conference in the world called the Internationale Spieltage SPIEL. Anyway, I’d recommend two cheap and very simple cooperative card games for anyone called “The Mind” and “The Game” that are a lot of fun and play in about 30 minutes. And of course Pandemic is a great introduction to this style of game.
My examples are based on the flourishing "tabletop" community we see now with games like the Sentinels of the Universe that David mentioned. You're right though. Depending on how broad we're talking about, Mafia has been hugely influential on the flourishing "social deduction" gaming community who are now playing things like Werewolf, Secret Hitler, and the super popular Blood on the Clocktower.
I was raising my kids in the 80s and 90s, and grew up myself in the 60s and 70s. I remember when teams in PE were "chosen" by the captains, who were always among the best athletes, so the better athletes got chosen first, and the least coordinated kids, last. Years later, I heard/read that people were finally waking up to the idea that six-year-old children should not get pegged so early on as either good or bad - that they should get to learn how to play these games without so much competition. At least in the early stages of life. Eventually, that same attitude got spread to other areas of learning, including academics. Rather than children getting a letter grade and finding out that they're either smart or not, and therefore, forever after living up (or down) to expectations, their report cards should always just be encouraging.
I remember this happening and on the one hand, being glad that childhood had become a slightly more "friendly" time, but also concerned that children were not being given an opportunity or a reason to really truly excel.
As for competitive games. My older brother married a woman from a very game-oriented family, so we all got used to playing really competitive, intellectually challenging table-top games. It's great for when we all get together, but it's frustrating the rest of the time that we have so few people who will play with us. It's not that we're cut-throat. We're just really good.
Homeschoolers use games often as a fun way to teach skills. If we still had our homeschooling friends nearby, we'd probably have more people to play with still.
One strategy game designers employ to cater to different players' preferences in the competition/cooperation axis is by allowing for different roles. By the time I played WoW, this was already true: some players have attack roles, others work as healer spellcasters. This pattern is also used in team competitive games. It is probably a consequence of the democratization of videogames, which is a consequence of computers and other devices becoming more widely available, not just more powerful. Reaching more consumers tends to be more profitable than selling to the same consumers at a higher price.
I don't play online games as usually defined, and only occasional tabletop board and card games, but I play and run a lot of tabletop roleplaying games—though these days I do that entirely via videoconferencing. There may be something to the effect of having women players. I've had a lot of them (back in the twentieth century, one of them told another woman that I was "a good game master for women"), and my campaigns commonly have a strong emphasis on roleplaying and social interaction—though I would also note that one of my women players was consistently one of the biggest enthusiasts for action and combat.
For example, in one of my current campaigns, set in a Brazilian colony on a future Mars, major incidents in the latest session included one of the characters following up on the success of a contract to build the keystone hotel in a new tunnel complex, and being invited to speak at the opening ceremonies for the tunnel boring; the family having dinner for the newly acquired fiancé of one of his daughters and for his commanding officer; another daughter hiring a tutor in planetary science and meeting her face to face; and a daughter-in-law and the grandfather going to confront the husband of an older daughter who had decreed that she couldn't attend the family dinner, which led to steps his backing down. There have been a few scenes of combat, but that hasn't been the focus. In fact I've been saying that the genre of this campaign is hard science fiction/telenovela. We had a lot of dice rolls for things like psychological insight, savoir faire, and carousing. . . .
There does seem to be some interest in this. My book GURPS Social Engineering is consistently one of my top earners on royalty statements, and it's all about that sort of thing.
I wonder if a variant of your last option is at play: the natural effects of aging that we have also seen in fandom and in the SCA. When many of us started in these hobbies, we were college students (or soon after) with few attachments. If we wanted to spend a long weekend playing Diplomacy (or going to Baycon or Pennsic), our biggest constraints were likely to be whether we had to work then. As we progressed through life, we found partners and naturally wanted to spend time with them. Thus, activities that appeal to both members of the couple rise in priority over those that appeal only to one. In any pair, one member will be less hard-core or experienced, and so games that facilitate mentoring and teaching as you go are more appealing. "Just play easy (or easy-to-teach) games" isn't a satisfying solution for the more hard-core player, but cooperative games can be. Cooperative games also allow for different levels of interest in the game, within reason -- also something I saw in D&D from the beginning, where leaders and followers developed but everyone still had fun.
Now advance several more years and some of those couples are raising children. There have been kids'/family games for a long time, but not many kids seem to be part of the "organized" world of boardgames. (Anecdotal, but also just today back from GenCon...) But if those couples (now parents) want to keep gaming with their similarly-situated friends, they might look for games that support mentoring, different levels of interest, and different capacities.
On that last: Decades ago, a friend was enthusiastic about a board game called Starfleet Battles. The game was very complex, down to the level of tracking which specific sections of shields on your ship had been damaged, the effects of specific engines being impaired on your navigation, plotting the trajectories of missiles being fired at moving targets... and my reaction was "this is what you call fun?". (I wasn't the only one.) My friend assembled a cooperative (in the D&D sense) game against a common enemy, with ships of widely varying levels of complexity, and handed them out to match players' capacity/interest to manage. We had a fun day as an unbalanced cooperative group; the math nerds got to math and the more casual players still got to contribute. SFB was never one of my favorites, but we played several times over the years with those kinds of accommodations.
The D&D board games started at least in the 1970s, before anything akin to the masses played computer games.
I wasn’t into them myself, but you had the “Dungeon Master” who did the dice rolling - playing the role of “the computer”, if you will - and everyone else was on the team to accomplish the quest / defeat the bad guy.
I only started playing D&D-style games myself when Wizardry appeared for the Apple ][ around 1981. Initially I played it alone, but later would play against the computer with multiple friends, even though in practice “we” were just the solo adventurer preparing our party as a group. This was many years before the technology advanced and allowed the group gaming we have today.
"If women prefer cooperative games, and men desire the social company of women ... " makes it sound as if the men are the only people making decisions in the gaming groups. In our group it was the great success of Dominion (2008) https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion which is not a cooperative game but also very popular with women that changed the demographics of our group. It went from 90% male to 66% male in the course of 4 years. There were over 200 paying members in the group at this time, so a reasonable sample size. From that point on, it is just capitalism. Women gamers were recognised as a new, underserved market, and entrepreneurs showed up delighted to profit from serving them. We think that the fact that women started playing games on their cell phones was the underlying change that made them more interested in gaming than earlier generations of women, but that is just pure speculation. I've seen no studies about this.
I believe (but don't know for certain) that you have an omission, and meant to write "it would probably -not- be an exaggeration" rather than "it would probably be an exaggeration"
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.
Hah, never thought of that. And I have friends offering to help me put a metal roof on my garage.
Indeed :D Men seem particularly inclined to need something to do other than just hang out and talk. Hell, I half the time feel like I need a good reason to invite my own dad over, but fortunately I have a near infinite list of things around the house that could stand some fixing, and he an almost infinite list of things that need shooting.
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.
You analyse the rise of cooperative games as the rise of cooperation. A different perspective is to see it instead as the rise of games.
As many other commenters describe, there has always been lots of cooperation and communal affairs.
What's new is that more people are playing 'games' in the sense of structured activities with rules and the ability to win.
It's easier to make compelling competitive games, especially if all you have is cardboard and not computers. So we saw these earlier. (As correctly observed in the blog post!)
But in absolute terms both competitive and cooperative games, both on a computer and on cardboard, have exploded in popularity.
And that explosion overshadows any relative shift between the two.
I guess technically personal computers and role-playing games appeared around the same time, but Dungeons and Dragons was before the Apple I, so it seems implausible to me that the as yet extremely early and niche personal computer situation of the time contributed to role-playing games (which seem to have evolved out of wargaming culture, for reasons which are unclear). But it's plausible that computer games and role-playing games each fed into the popularity of the other over time. This suggests that there should be a social answer, but I don't feel like there has been as much of a change as seems required; again looking at the early history, does it really seem like the 1980s were much more cooperative and less competitive than the 1960s? So I feel like there are still mysteries about how this trend began (though increased computer use and greater numbers of women in gaming probably contributed to the trend continuing to strengthen over time).
In addition to the cooperative work projects mentioned by Doctor Hammer and Jorg, a lot of party games are technically competitive, but in practice are closer to cooperative. Games like charades, Pictionary, guessing games like Blind Man's bluff, etc. There's rules for scoring, but most of that is an afterthought, and often devolves into the group working together to figure out the solution.
Also, we'd have to go back a few generations, but people used to play music, sing and dance for entertainment. Those are all cooperative activities, but ones where normal people have transitioned from actively doing them to being passive consumers of recorded content.
Cooperative games started to take off in 2005 when Shadows Over Camelot was published by Days of Wonder. What makes this and some other cooperative games really fun is the element of a hidden traitor that is secretly working against everyone at the table. The traitor can win the game alone or the rest of the players as a group. In 2008, Pandemic was published and has remained at the top of the rankings for years (see BoardGameGeek, the definitive strategy board game site with a handy ranking chart) and has several editions published. One called Gloomhaven is now considered the best cooperative game of all time but is quite complex for your average person.
What makes them popular is the suspense of winning or losing as a team and the camaraderie that accompanies that. One design challenge with coop games has been designing them so you don’t have an “alpha” player quarterbacking everyone and telling them what to do. You typically want each player to have some personal information so players can make some of their own decisions instead of relying on the smartest or most aggressive person at the table to optimize the moves for the team.
The table-top strategy gaming scene was really been pioneered by the Germans (Catan published in 1995 kickstarted the hobby) who host the largest board game conference in the world called the Internationale Spieltage SPIEL. Anyway, I’d recommend two cheap and very simple cooperative card games for anyone called “The Mind” and “The Game” that are a lot of fun and play in about 30 minutes. And of course Pandemic is a great introduction to this style of game.
What makes Shadows over Camelot stand out to you as the takeoff and not say Mafia, which became an international success in the 1990s?
My examples are based on the flourishing "tabletop" community we see now with games like the Sentinels of the Universe that David mentioned. You're right though. Depending on how broad we're talking about, Mafia has been hugely influential on the flourishing "social deduction" gaming community who are now playing things like Werewolf, Secret Hitler, and the super popular Blood on the Clocktower.
I was raising my kids in the 80s and 90s, and grew up myself in the 60s and 70s. I remember when teams in PE were "chosen" by the captains, who were always among the best athletes, so the better athletes got chosen first, and the least coordinated kids, last. Years later, I heard/read that people were finally waking up to the idea that six-year-old children should not get pegged so early on as either good or bad - that they should get to learn how to play these games without so much competition. At least in the early stages of life. Eventually, that same attitude got spread to other areas of learning, including academics. Rather than children getting a letter grade and finding out that they're either smart or not, and therefore, forever after living up (or down) to expectations, their report cards should always just be encouraging.
I remember this happening and on the one hand, being glad that childhood had become a slightly more "friendly" time, but also concerned that children were not being given an opportunity or a reason to really truly excel.
As for competitive games. My older brother married a woman from a very game-oriented family, so we all got used to playing really competitive, intellectually challenging table-top games. It's great for when we all get together, but it's frustrating the rest of the time that we have so few people who will play with us. It's not that we're cut-throat. We're just really good.
Homeschoolers use games often as a fun way to teach skills. If we still had our homeschooling friends nearby, we'd probably have more people to play with still.
Mountain climbing might be a pre-computer cooperative game.
One strategy game designers employ to cater to different players' preferences in the competition/cooperation axis is by allowing for different roles. By the time I played WoW, this was already true: some players have attack roles, others work as healer spellcasters. This pattern is also used in team competitive games. It is probably a consequence of the democratization of videogames, which is a consequence of computers and other devices becoming more widely available, not just more powerful. Reaching more consumers tends to be more profitable than selling to the same consumers at a higher price.
I don't play online games as usually defined, and only occasional tabletop board and card games, but I play and run a lot of tabletop roleplaying games—though these days I do that entirely via videoconferencing. There may be something to the effect of having women players. I've had a lot of them (back in the twentieth century, one of them told another woman that I was "a good game master for women"), and my campaigns commonly have a strong emphasis on roleplaying and social interaction—though I would also note that one of my women players was consistently one of the biggest enthusiasts for action and combat.
For example, in one of my current campaigns, set in a Brazilian colony on a future Mars, major incidents in the latest session included one of the characters following up on the success of a contract to build the keystone hotel in a new tunnel complex, and being invited to speak at the opening ceremonies for the tunnel boring; the family having dinner for the newly acquired fiancé of one of his daughters and for his commanding officer; another daughter hiring a tutor in planetary science and meeting her face to face; and a daughter-in-law and the grandfather going to confront the husband of an older daughter who had decreed that she couldn't attend the family dinner, which led to steps his backing down. There have been a few scenes of combat, but that hasn't been the focus. In fact I've been saying that the genre of this campaign is hard science fiction/telenovela. We had a lot of dice rolls for things like psychological insight, savoir faire, and carousing. . . .
There does seem to be some interest in this. My book GURPS Social Engineering is consistently one of my top earners on royalty statements, and it's all about that sort of thing.
I wonder if a variant of your last option is at play: the natural effects of aging that we have also seen in fandom and in the SCA. When many of us started in these hobbies, we were college students (or soon after) with few attachments. If we wanted to spend a long weekend playing Diplomacy (or going to Baycon or Pennsic), our biggest constraints were likely to be whether we had to work then. As we progressed through life, we found partners and naturally wanted to spend time with them. Thus, activities that appeal to both members of the couple rise in priority over those that appeal only to one. In any pair, one member will be less hard-core or experienced, and so games that facilitate mentoring and teaching as you go are more appealing. "Just play easy (or easy-to-teach) games" isn't a satisfying solution for the more hard-core player, but cooperative games can be. Cooperative games also allow for different levels of interest in the game, within reason -- also something I saw in D&D from the beginning, where leaders and followers developed but everyone still had fun.
Now advance several more years and some of those couples are raising children. There have been kids'/family games for a long time, but not many kids seem to be part of the "organized" world of boardgames. (Anecdotal, but also just today back from GenCon...) But if those couples (now parents) want to keep gaming with their similarly-situated friends, they might look for games that support mentoring, different levels of interest, and different capacities.
On that last: Decades ago, a friend was enthusiastic about a board game called Starfleet Battles. The game was very complex, down to the level of tracking which specific sections of shields on your ship had been damaged, the effects of specific engines being impaired on your navigation, plotting the trajectories of missiles being fired at moving targets... and my reaction was "this is what you call fun?". (I wasn't the only one.) My friend assembled a cooperative (in the D&D sense) game against a common enemy, with ships of widely varying levels of complexity, and handed them out to match players' capacity/interest to manage. We had a fun day as an unbalanced cooperative group; the math nerds got to math and the more casual players still got to contribute. SFB was never one of my favorites, but we played several times over the years with those kinds of accommodations.
The D&D board games started at least in the 1970s, before anything akin to the masses played computer games.
I wasn’t into them myself, but you had the “Dungeon Master” who did the dice rolling - playing the role of “the computer”, if you will - and everyone else was on the team to accomplish the quest / defeat the bad guy.
I only started playing D&D-style games myself when Wizardry appeared for the Apple ][ around 1981. Initially I played it alone, but later would play against the computer with multiple friends, even though in practice “we” were just the solo adventurer preparing our party as a group. This was many years before the technology advanced and allowed the group gaming we have today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizardry:_Proving_Grounds_of_the_Mad_Overlord
I say all of this mostly to say the pure technological explanation of the start of cooperative gaming don’t hunt.
In terms of its *popularity*, OTOH, I have no firm opinions, other than that it seems obvious to me it’s a bit of a recursive, all-of-the-above thing.
I once played a very simple cooperative game that was pretty fun
There are 100 numbered cards, and you distribute a random fraction of them (maybe 30) to a few players
The goal is to stack all the distributed cards in order, without communicating in any way
So the players have to get on the same rythm
It's probably a very hackable game, and I guess it gets old quickly, but I liked it
That is "The Mind" that I recommended above. :-)
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/244992/the-mind
"If women prefer cooperative games, and men desire the social company of women ... " makes it sound as if the men are the only people making decisions in the gaming groups. In our group it was the great success of Dominion (2008) https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218/dominion which is not a cooperative game but also very popular with women that changed the demographics of our group. It went from 90% male to 66% male in the course of 4 years. There were over 200 paying members in the group at this time, so a reasonable sample size. From that point on, it is just capitalism. Women gamers were recognised as a new, underserved market, and entrepreneurs showed up delighted to profit from serving them. We think that the fact that women started playing games on their cell phones was the underlying change that made them more interested in gaming than earlier generations of women, but that is just pure speculation. I've seen no studies about this.
I believe (but don't know for certain) that you have an omission, and meant to write "it would probably -not- be an exaggeration" rather than "it would probably be an exaggeration"
I meant it as written.