After reading the Emma Witkowksi piece and watching the Terrarium video, I thought a lot about games and how they are often the platform for collaboration.
Often times when thinking about multiplayer games, there’s an inherent connotation of competition that comes with them; however, co-op games have a much more different emphasis– success is predicated on your ability to work well together with your teammates. Emma Witkowski gives the example of Left 4 Dead in her piece and mentions that collaboration in the game “is nothing short of necessary for survival because your “life” depends on other players’ persistent attention to “watch your back.””
The Terrarium project also reinforces the theme of watching each other’s back; students worked extensively and did so together in order to decipher the messages in the emails and other communications that they received. The only way to make any sort of progress was to collaborate.
Knowing that this class challenges us to think about games in a way that has implications for the world around us, I can’t help but feel like the core of collaborative games is to remind us that meaningful progress only comes when people are willing to help one another — whether it’s something like solving climate change, or even the process of creating games itself. Thinking back to my post about video games and community, collaboration is one of the most important tenets of building it in the first place; in a way, collaborative games are an invitation to practice collaborating and achieving more than we could ever hope to on our own.
