I’m traveling to Atlanta tomorrow to attend the Living Game Worlds conference at Georgia Tech. I’m on a panel on Tuesday to talk about Collaboration in Virtual Worlds and Games. I thought rather than get all academicky I’d talk about the kind of collaborative fun behavior I’ve seen in Day of Defeat, a FPS shooter multiplayer game I helped develop with Valve.
The game in a nutshell is a team based multiplayer shooter centered on territory capture. The players can be either “Axis” (German) or “Allies” (US). The team that captures all the flags in the game map wins. The game maps are relatively small recreations of typical WW2 settings (French towns, Italian towns, etc.) and are pretty richly filled with detail. They also include a lot of “physics objects” - small and large props such as tin cans, chairs, potted plants and even pianos that are movable if hit.
So here’s the curious bit of spontaneous and emergent gameplay that I have seen happen once in a while…
Sometimes, people will join a game server and find it empty - they are the only one there. Rather than just quit, they decide they are going to “herd” all the physics objects to some central place in the game world. It takes a lot of work and is pretty slow, but somehow fun to have this huge stack of potted plants, tables, pianos, barrels and more in the town square.
What inevitably happens is someone else randomly joins the game server, and asks “what’s up?”. Once they see what’s going on, they join in and also help start moving objects. Pretty soon a few more
people join and THEY join in. Now keep in mind that this is a shooting game - you get points for killing other players. But nobody is shooting, everyone (Axis and Allies) are working together to get everything together. Sometimes someone will join in and start shooting, and everyone will yell at the new player to stop.
In the end, once pretty much everything has been moved, sometimes people gather for a screenshot. Then often everyone will on the count of 3 toss all their grenades into the pile at once, and it all blows up (as do the players), everyone laughs, and then the game is on for real.
It’s a really curious and fun thing to watch (and do). People really get into it and have a lot of fun out of it. And I think it’s fascinating that these complete strangers are collaborating, laughing, chatting, etc. in a game where really they should be shooting at each other. They are all running around with virtual loaded guns, but all of them are working together and not shooting each other. As if by some unspoken agreement, everyone has fun in a way contrary to the game’s goals. And also by unspoken agreement, everyone knows when it’s over and time to get on with the game.
Here is a gallery of players participating in this kind of activity…
