Let’s look at a few more notable examples in more modern history. As with any form of monopoly, it gestates in a state of inertia until it reaches the point of fever that we are at today. We explored in Part 1 of the idea of space, viewpoints and gratification. As such, the elementary ingredients of a first person perspective were established. And so how do designers, and players build upon this edifice?
If first person shooters provided a more cerebral and personal way into the manipulation of space, then what did adding more players do? In retro gaming, we mostly saw competition in the form of fighting games which at the time is all the technology could argue.
Goldeneye (N64)
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At this point, the solitary image of a single gamer in front of a screen in the dark had penetrated the reality and the minds of all those who played. Yet a “game” in the most basic senses of the word, always implied other people. Most sports and “games” included other people in order create a solid sense of cause and effect, and of interaction.
The effect of split screen multiplayer is penetrating the solitary and confined space of the player with other voices. Kids got together and competed on the same screen to see who was best, there was a sense of community that was being established. In the mind of the player, he had to not only include his own viewpoint, but to use information that was not being fed to him by the computer. It was often that players would exploit split screen by looking at where other players were on the map then heading off to kill them.
This created an important sense of chaos, of improvisation; the rails that game designers had spent their day jobs creating had been dismantled, and in its place was free fall. A new plateau had been reached, since now it was the job of the designer to create environments that would encourage improvisation and competition in the form of multiplayer, rather than creating tight single player environments. Within the sphere of multiplayer, FPS games found a new evolution that would shoot them into popularity.
Counter-Might
A lot of the older gamers nowadays will have fond memories of Counter Strike (CS). I remember the days when we still had LAN cafés and people would pay a little money to play a few rounds of CS before going home. I also remember spending hours and playing until 5 AM sometimes, trying to master the game.
Here’s what CS did well. It combined arcade style gameplay with realism. This created a direct reference point between the player and reality; a scenario in where the player (whilst learning the game) would imagine a scenario in real life in order to help them win the game.
A lot of players were surprised or impressed for example, when the game exhibited life-like rules and behaviour. Gun recoil for example, could be controlled by moving the mouse in a downward motion in order to steady the gun while it fired. Flashbangs could be avoided by turning around at the moment the grenade exploded. Frag grenades could be bounced around corners.Footsteps could be heard from other players but were quietened if they crouched. Holding a knife meant you ran faster than if you had a full rifle in your hand.
Of course, games do not have to fully conform to the rules of reality. This would mean that a single shot would render a player incapacitated (or he would at least hit the floor), but game design that is based on reality is about reaching a happy compromise between realism and gameplay balance. Thus, this inherent tether to reality meant that the learning experience of the player was sped up.
When you die, you get to observe the other players who are alive on your team. Therefore, dying didn’t become a wasteful experience, because now you were able to experience someone else playing and more importantly, LEARN from them.
The impact of this is twofold, not only does the learning curve of the game dramatically flatten out since gamers were able to spectate from FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE OF THAT PLAYER rather than watching a pointless zoomed out 3rd person model run around (though there was the option to do so), they were able to copy players who learnt tiny things that new players had not learnt, such as shooting sweet spots, possible enemy locations, map routes, hiding spots and so on.
Second, it created pressure because now when you were one of the few left alive on your team, you knew that everyone was watching you. It created an intense rush when you single handedly outplayed a team or achieved the objective. But most importantly, it created a sense of camaraderie and team bonding which meant that even if it was only for 2 or 3 mins, you functioned as part of a team that lived and died together.
There are many reasons that CS became popular world-wide, some of those reasons are above(design-related). Some of those reasons are because of Steam. But essentially, the spectator friendly nature of CS, as well as its fast paced, round based gameplay meant that it was easy to drop in and drop out. It was easy to learn the game, near impossible to master.
It showed the world that multiplayer and FPS go hand in hand, a secret combination that was previously hidden to game designer. As famous and as effective as cheese and tomato, or salt and pepper.
The Ontology of Games 