Games and Video Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 15

Competition and Cooperation
Competition occurs when players have conflicting interests; that is, when the
players try to accomplish mutually exclusive goals. Cooperation occurs when the
players try to achieve the same or related goals by working together. Players who
are trying to achieve different, unrelated goals that are not mutually exclusive are
neither competing nor cooperating—they are not really playing the same game.
Competition modes are ways to build cooperation and competition into games:
■ Two -player compet it ive (“you ver sus me”) is the best-known mode; this is
found in the most ancient games such as chess and backgammon.
■ Multiplayer competitive (“everyone for himself”) is familiar from games such
as Monopoly , poker, and of course, many individual sports such as track and field
athletics. This is also known as deathmatch , although the term is usually only used
in shooter games.
■ Multiplayer cooperative (“all of us together”) occurs when all the players
cooperate to accomplish the same goal. Conventional cooperative games are some-
what rare, but they are more common in video games. Many games, such as LEGO
Star Wars , offer a two-player cooperative mode as a variant of their normal single-
player mode. Gauntlet was a wonderful four-player cooperative arcade video game.
■ Team-based (“us versus them”) mode occurs when the members of a team
cooperate, and the team collectively competes against one or more other teams.
This mode is familiar to fans of soccer and many other team sports as well as part-
ner games such as bridge.
■ Single-player (“me versus the situation”) is familiar to those who play solitaire
card games as well as the vast majority of arcade and other video games such as the
Mario series from Nintendo.
■ Hybrid competition modes occur in a few games such as Diplomacy . Such
games specifically permit cooperation at times, even if the overall context of the
game is competitive. In Diplomacy , players may coordinate their strategies, but they
also may renege on their agreements to their own advantage if they wish. Monopoly ,
by contrast, does not permit cooperation because it gives the cooperating players
too much of an advantage against the others.
Many video games let the players choose a competition mode at the beginning of
the game: single-player, team-based, or multiplayer competitive. A choice of compe-
tition modes broadens the market for these games but adds considerably to the
work of designing them. In several cases, the designers clearly found one mode
more interesting than another, adding the others as an afterthought. For example,
Dungeon Keeper was a brilliant single-player game but was not well designed for
multiplayer play.