Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
(us against the machine), or team-based (us versus them) play. In online play, a net-
work links the players, who occupy (generally, but not necessarily) separate locations.
Local play can be broken into two categories: LAN play or physically local play. LAN
play is virtually identical to online play except that Internet access is not required—
a technical distinction that has little or no impact on game design. In physically
local play (hereafter referred to simply as local play), all the players sit in the same
room, playing the game on the same machine and, most important, looking at the
same screen.
For the last 30 years, local play has been the standard mode of interaction for mul-
tiplayer console games: Each player holds a controller, and all players look at the
TV. This may change now that the new generation of consoles has network capabil-
ity, but local play is likely to remain the most common way people use multiplayer
games because it incurs no network charges and lets friends play together in groups.
PROBLEMS WITH LOCAL PLAY
Local play as just described presents the game designer with serious difficulties. For
one thing, because all the players share the same TV, any user interface elements
displayed must be duplicated for each player, taking up valuable screen space. If the
game maintains a separate point of view for each player, you must subdivide the
screen into little windows. Each player will find it harder to see a small individual
window than the full screen image, and activity in the other players' windows will
distract him.
More important, however, because local play uses a single display device, you have
no way to hide information. Each player can see everything the others do. This
works well for fighting games, but not as well for any game in which players might
want to keep their activities secret—war games, for instance.
NOTE
The Nintendo
GameCube is unusual:
It allows players to
plug in a Game Boy
Advance and use it
as a controller. The
designer may take
advantage of the Game
Boy's screen to display
secret information
only to the player who
should see it. The
wireless connectivity
of the Nintendo DS
also allows multiplayer
local play in which
each player has his
own screen.
Finally, local play necessarily imposes limits on the number of people who can par-
ticipate at one time. Consoles seldom support more than four players; PCs support
even fewer. Even if you could add players indefinitely, the screen would become
crowded with characters and other data, and the machine itself would bog down
as the computing tasks grew.
BENEFITS OF NETWORKED PLAY
Online gaming solves all these problems. Each player uses her own screen, and the
entire display supports only her gaming experience. The game can present her with
her own unique perspective, including exactly as much information as the designer
wants her to have and no more. And online games can support large numbers of
people (although games requiring a central server may find the server capacity lim-
iting); it's not uncommon for some games to support tens of thousands of players
online at a time. With an online game, players can always find other people to play
with at any hour of the day or night.
