Another classification of games can come from the number of players. Players’ relation to others or the game itself becomes relevant when analyzing the social context of the game and how it is played.
God of War: Ragnarök is a game I only just recently started playing. There aren’t any technical multiplayer or co-op features in this game; yet, we classified it as a Single Player Cooperation, a game with familiars. During most of the fighting scenes, you are able to also play as Kratos’ son. The mechanic is very simple and not detrimental to your play, but it exists.
Some people, like myself, will rarely rely on this character to make it through battles. I did research on a gamer who decided to take the opposite approach. He tries to beat God of War only using Boy (I’ll link the video below because it was really entertaining and very well edited). In the video, he strategizes how to use his in-game currency and switches between difficultly modes to save time and not take 30 min to beat a troll.
At the beginning of the quarter, we talked about how people can play games very differently than others. More notably, I recall a Reddit post about a guy who played GTA to use the bus and drive around the open world, following the correct routes. A lot of games don’t take this into account. In God of War (from the video I linked), Kratos still ridicules Atreus for being weak, even though he was the one to defeat all the enemies. This shows that the developers did not intend for Boy to single-handedly defeat enemies to that extent. In GTA, however, if no one thought someone would want to use the bus routes, they would not have implemented it into the game. Although God of War is nothing like GTA in that it doesn’t really give players the ability to “do whatever they want,” people still find ways to modify gameplay.
