FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
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 competitive ("you versus 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 somewhat 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 singleplayer 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 partner 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 competition 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.
