What early 2000s child didn’t play Fireboy and Watergirl on coolmathgames.com during free time in elementary school?
Fireboy and Watergirl is a browser-based game designed to be played on the computer. There are two player characters, Fireboy and Watergirl, who are respectively controlled by the arrow keys and AWD keys (as shown above). The typical set up would be two kids in front of the school desktop with one on the left and the other on the right, both hunched in front of the screen.
Multiplayer games have been a part of the videogame medium since the beginning with Pong and others. Like Witkowski details in the chapter we read, the competitive game aspects of sports translated easily to the screen. Racing games on both the personal console and the arcade have been popular forever. At least for me though, I found both of those sorts of games inaccessible — either because I didn’t have the hardware required or because I found the controls too difficult.
In contrast, flash games and other browser-based games seemed much more open to someone like me. Easy access to a computer browser combined with easier interactions (limited to keyboard or point-and-click) made these sorts of games much more approachable to me. coolmathgames.com specifically was a common name in the classroom due to its facade of educational nature as well as to its genuine child-friendliness.
Most of my early videogame experience was multiplayer: party games on the Wii console system. Friendly competition dominated defined my original encounters with videogames. However, Fireboy and Watergirl rests on cooperation. Again in contrast to MarioKart and its ilk (to me), both players use the same “console” (the computer keyboard), adding an extra degree of cooperation as two people have to work to orient themselves around a desktop or even laptop.
The physical aspect of having your bodies in the same place and coordinating them as well as having to coordinate the on-screen characters is an interesting dynamics.
I’m glad you’re bringing up the accessibility of multiplayer games! While games that allow players to connect over the internet are great for obvious reasons, it’s a shame when they don’t support same-device multiplayer (both shared-screen and split-screen). Internet multiplayer typically requires multiple devices (obviously), multiple owned copies of the game, special subscriptions (on consoles primarily), and stable internet connections for all parties involved—all of which may be difficult to acquire for various reasons.
Steam’s Remote Play Together is an amazing step towards accessible multiplayer, though unfortunately I haven’t actually seen anyone use it…
I would definitely say Fireboy was my favorite game during elementary school and I appreciate you bringing up the accessibility side of the game. I would like to further your analysis of its accessibility to the social and profitability aspect of this game. I think cooperative games in some ways are the best social games due to their accessibility: they are easy to understand and easy to play so even players with little gaming experience can learn to play in a relatively short period of time; they are easy to purchase so it can spread quickly in friend groups. I would say building a cooperative is a great business: high margin, fast growth, and low capital expenditure. Maybe the lucrative nature of cooperative games is why almost all games now contain some form of cooperation between players.
You make an interesting point about how multiplayer games that require you to be in the same space physically provide a different dynamic. I am very thankful for games designed with this intention because when my family only had one computer, these were the only types of games my brother and I could play. Nowadays supporting multiple players on a single platform often seems like an afterthought. Split-screen gameplay in most of the games I have played is just the same game but significantly less enjoyable because half of the standard gameplay is cut off. However, physically playing a game on the same platform that was not designed to be played that way can also provide a uniquely fun experience. For example, having one person control half of a game’s inputs and another person control the other half introduces a new way to enjoy many games that do not support multiple players on a single platform.
Your comment about accessibility and the popularity of flash games with people our age really hit home for me! My elementary and middle school were right next to our town’s library, and so it was very common for groups of kids to go there right after school ended to “work on homework” (play video games on the computers). While you could play games like Wizard101 or Minecraft, that would mean that you would have to wait a p a i n f u l l y long time for the software to download on the early 2000-2010s PCs, and also have an account/membership. Orrrrrr, you could go on websites like y8 and cool math games and find tons of games that required almost no load time (how well those games would run is another question, but most would be able to run okay). I remember sharing a keyboard with my school friends to play 2-player cooperative games like Fireboy and Watergirl and Boxhead, as well as competitive games like Super Smash Flash. There were also a few games that could be played with friends over a shared server, like Club Penguin, but, again, questions of membership accessibility come into play. Still, flash games were definitely a huge part of my early video gaming experience, and I think that why and how they were so popular is a great question to do some research on!
I liked your comment on how in addition to working together to complete a level, players must also share a very close space. I think adding that collaborative aspect in a physical way makes it much more fun to play games. I also grew up on collaborative Wii games and I think many of them share that “shared physical space” dynamics that Fireboy and Watergirl has. For instance, I love to play Just Dance for the Wii, and even though it’s primarily a competitive game, players still have to work together to share the space with one another. I think having that tension makes the gameplay experience a little more fun because players must still be cognizant of one another, so everyone can enjoy playing.