gameslol

“Massively singleplayer” is an apparent oxymoron that’s been floating around for a while. Will Wright has on occasion half-jokingly called Spore a massively singleplayer game because of how it spreads content amongst users. Other people have used the term to mock MMOs that can be played entirely without interacting with other players.

But could massively singleplayer be a real type of game? Actually, there are a number of games in which multiple people control the same avatar in the same game experience. In other words, singleplayer games that are played by lots of people simultaniously.

In fact, we have played such a game at Idle Thumbs, where forum user Erkki programmed a bot to play text adventures on the Idle Thumbs forums. Any registered forum user can become a player by posting a command in a thread, which the bot then interprets. It then replies with a response from the text adventure. You can read a playthrough of Zork here, or check out some coverage it got on Joystiq and GameSetWatch.

Of course, part of the fun is just messing around with the limitations of the game. It’s easy to take the game hostage by constantly attacking the nearest grue without weapons. But most of the time participants are genuinely working towards a shared goal.

Another wonderful example can be found in the monthly collaborative playthroughs of Civilization held on CivFanatics. One person is in charge of playing the game and posting screens of its current state, while dozens (possibly hundreds) of other forum users engage in elaborate bureacracies to collectively determine their next moves.

Each player has a different role within the player government, such as council member, or minister, or map maker, or embassador. Their forum interactions ultimately result in a single person executing their decisions and reporting back the results. In other words, massively singleplayer. (Or perhaps more accurately: massively co-op.)

This method of playing Civilization evolved over time. When I first saw it a couple of years ago, all participants on the forum were part of the same government. Currently the metagame has expanded to include four different governments competing in multiplayer mode. When a civilization is defeated, the players in its government become refugees and may be assimilated by the other governments. Various other such metagame rules have been established.

Both these examples have emerged from online communities. But could you design a game that already incorporates this concept in its core gameplay? Imagine playing an MMO version of Civilization where you can’t declare war without approval from the military advisor, who is an actual person. Or where trade negotiations are not with an AI, but involve talks between two delegations of actual players, each with their own negotiation skills and agendas.

Of course, this is just a ‘what if’ exercize. I don’t know if such a game would be actually viable. There might be far too many dependencies between players for it to work outside existing internet communities. But the thought of playing an MMO style game in a very cooperative way I personally find quite appealing. And that’s all I really have left to say for this post. Yeah.

What do you think? Does any of this make sense?

(P.S. I’m also reminded of a version of Pong in which players collectively control the two paddles and the game uses the average of all user input. Sadly I’m unable to find this Flash game anymore.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.