Multiplayer gaming is the way of the future, or at least it ought to be. People are social animals: we like playing together. From mancala to tabletop roleplaying, players have gathered together for centuries to cooperate and compete for leisure. While many games can be played solo (solitaire, mahjong, etc) as many and more take two to tango.

That’s why it should be such a surprise that it took 30 years of video games before multiplayer started really catching on, especially among consoles. For decades, consoles shipped with only two controller ports, with expensive and underutilized peripherals the only possible expansion. However, while the default number of ports has grown and wireless technology makes it still easier to gather friends around the TV’s loving glow, design standards still conspire to keep gamers locked safely in their basements, alone.

That Guy Syndrome
Probably the worst fate that can befall a multiplayer game is that guy syndrome. If you’re already a multiplayer gamer, there’s a good chance that you already know what I’m talking about. Once you’ve gained enough expertise to consistently crush your fellow players, you’ve become that guy (or girl), and nobody is likely to want to play with you any more. So suddenly you find yourself back in the basement, cuddling the latest iteration of Final Fantasy, because at least it will never hate you.

It turns out that it matters how often you win or lose when you’re trying to have fun (thanks science), so if you’ve become the undying master of the secret ninja trick, the game gets boring for you and frustrating to everyone else. Did you set out to upset this balance? Probably not, but the game probably strongly encouraged you to do so.

To see what I mean, let’s take a recent gaming example: Super Mario Kart Wii. While you can pick up and play this game with friends straight out of the box, only about half of the playable characters and usable vehicles are unlocked from the outset. About a quarter of the game’s courses are locked as well. This isn’t really a problem in itself, but if you picked up the game to play with friends, you’ll probably be progressively annoyed that it doesn’t seem to matter how many multiplayer games you play, those rewards remain locked. In fact the only way to get at those courses, karts, and characters is to sit down in single-player mode and keep playing until you’ve completed a series of increasingly difficult tasks (think Xbox Live Achievements). By the time you’ve finished unlocking everything in the game, you’ve outraced the hardest time trials on every course and beaten every grand prix with a high ranking.

Suddenly, whether you meant to or not, you’ve become that guy, and your multiplayer game might as well not be.

Unlockables
It’s not like Mario Kart Wii is some kind of abberation from a neophyte developer; it’s a venerable franchise from the company that resurrected video gaming in the 1980s. The problem actually seems to be more closely linked to unlockables and the single-player mentality that goes along with them.

Ever since someone decided that games have to be long to be good, developers have been padding to reach the golden forty-hour mark. While this sometimes amounts to changing the walking speed or irritating minigames, you can also offer concept art and intergalactic bounty hunters in bikinis to encourage gamers to replay for mastery. These bite-size rewards are sometimes charming, especially for fans just looking for an excuse to keep playing, but as soon as the unlockables start horning in on gameplay, there’s a risk they’ll compromise the game.

Nowhere is this more apparent in Super Smash Bros.: Brawl. It’s been said elsewhere that the game plays like a love letter to Nintendo fans, however what may surprise you is that half of the interesting new characters aren’t playable right out of the box. Players who heard that they’d be able to settle old playground Mario vs. Sonic feuds were disappointed until they had more or less completed the game’s story mode.

Well, that’s not entirely true, and it shows a place where Brawl does multiplayer right, and in a way that ought to be emulated by other multiplayer games. In addition to the story mode, Sonic can be unlocked by playing 10 multiplayer hours, 300 multiplayer matches, or by clearing classic mode with 10 characters. None of these is exactly trivial, so that childhood grudge will still have to wait, but at least it lets different players with different gameplay objectives get at the gameplay unlockables. It’s a rare treat to see a multiplayer unlockable that can be obtained in . . . multiplayer mode.

However, even though Brawl nearly gets it right, the unlocking process is still pretty ill considered. One of the charms of Smash Bros.: Brawl is that you can sit down and play a quick game whenever you want. So it begs the question why the designers of bite-sized gameplay thought it’d be a good idea to make potentially casual gamers wait so long to get the game they bought. If you sit down for an eigty hour RPG, you’re basically making a tacit agreement to spend a while getting at all the content. However it seems like no one who bought Brawl for a two minute game really signed up to spend ten hours getting it. Multiplayer unlockables need to consider their context before just picking big numbers out of a hat. You just spent seven hours of minimum wage labor buying the game. Is there any justifiable reason that you should pay another ten?

In fairness, teaching players to play the game takes time. Portal spends nearly half its total length just getting the player acquainted with the finer workings of its mind-bending gamepay. However, it doesn’t really seem like you need to play 300 games before you can beat the snot out of an Italian plumber.

That said, this time-guzzling design paradigm would be a lot more reasonable if designers would just let uninterested players opt out of the grind. Guitar Hero, for example, is designed to repeatedly drag the player through increasingly difficult versions of songs they’ve already learned to prepare them for the next grueling set. However, if you’d just like to play the harder songs on lower difficulty settings without ever really learning them on expert difficulty, you can just tap an unlock code on the main menu to get at every track in the game. It’s a little kludgey to enter the code every time you want to play, but at least it gives the player the opportunity to ignore the designers and play the game as they like.

One Of Us!
These annoyances haven’t kept the World of Warcraft from accumulating ten million players (many of whom are that guy), and they haven’t put Nintendo out of business. However, they are playing a role in any trouble you’ve had getting a few friends together to play video games for an hour or two. Designers and marketers should take note of this problem, because if core gamers aren’t drawing people to multiplayer games, word of mouth isn’t selling games like it should be. All that really needs to be done is to keep an eye to the fact that multiplayer doesn’t have to be the icing on the game design cake. It can be the throbbing heart that makes gamers keep coming back to see one another and the world they’re exploring together. Stop trying so hard to keep players out, and maybe they’ll come in.

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