FUNDAMENTALS OF GAME DESIGN, SECOND EDITION
Online Gameplay Versus Local Multiplayer Gameplay
Multiplayer gameplay, whether online or local, offers great flexibility to the game designer, allowing purely competitive (everyone for himself), purely cooperative
(us against the machine), or team-based (us versus them) play. In online play, a network 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 multiplayer 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 capability, 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.
