Turning Singleplayer Games Into Multiplayer Experiences

Reading Clara Fernández-Vara’s “Number of Players” section helped me to develop an initial, concrete idea of the standard ways for a single player, or multiple players, to interact with one another and the game they play. The examples given make a lot of sense and do build a good overall model for categorizing games by the “number of players.” After all, most games these days – both mainstream, triple-A and indie games – have settled into pretty standard styles of number-of-players gameplay. Genres like “multiplayer” and “singleplayer,” or “co-op” and “competitive” exist for a reason, of course.

But, just for fun, I wanted to think about examples of things that bend these rules and may lie somewhat outside the seven main categories Fernández-Vara described – or at least combine and remix them. Is there any way to still innovate past these relatively rigid configurations? The answer is a resounding, enthusiastic “yes!”

Speedrunning is one sort of situation where the line between some of the “number of players” categories gets blurred. The core philosophy of speedrunning is purely competitive: the goal of a speedrunner is to be the one person who has beaten a game of choice in the fastest possible time, ahead of everyone else. Yet, the games that are speedran are traditionally single-player games, where it’s just one player and their game. Think of games like Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario 64, which have some of the most well-known speedrunning scenes. Here you have a case of multiple people competing with one another for the fastest completion times in games played by a single person, where it’s technically possible for none of the players to ever interact with one another (beyond seeing someone else’s name on a public leaderboard online). 

Further complicating this player configuration is the fact that speedrunning is actually a collaborative effort, too. Within their communities, speedrunners for a game constantly share new tricks and routes with one another in an effort to increase the skill ceiling and potential for their games. Top speedrunners for a game will sometimes spend hours, days, or weeks labbing and sharing potential new strategies with one another, even though they’re technically supposed to be in direct competition with one another. In fact, communities will often name notable new tricks after the person who discovered them in honor of their contribution to the scene. Despite the competitive nature of trying to achieve the fastest run of a game, speedrunners also collaborate with the common goal of finding ever faster ways to master their craft. Thus, speedrunning is also sort of its own metagame involving multiple people playing single-player games simultaneously and competing with one another, while also working together at the same time. It doesn’t quite fit into any single “number of players” configuration that Fernández-Vara described. Rather, it’s a unique combination of multiple concepts.

If you’d like to learn more about how much collaboration can actually go into speedrunning, I recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg4oTMu5Yc, a documentary on the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning community’s quest for absolute perfection. Or, look up a “World Record History of [Game]” video. There are a lot of good ones out there!

In 2014, an Australian programmer hooked up a system on the streaming site Twitch.tv, wherein any people watching could directly control a streamed game by sending simple messages in the chat. That game was the 1996 Gameboy classic Pokemon Red, which is a game traditionally played by a single person. All stream viewers simultaneously controlled a single avatar by sending messages simulating the inputs a player would make on their Gameboy, like “up,” “down,” “A,” “B,” etc. 

The goal was for each person to work together and beat the game at the same time. The important thing to note is that every single input was counted and inputted into the Pokemon Red game. What initially was a simple experiment ballooned into something extraordinary as its popularity grew and word of mouth spread. Very quickly, tens of people became thousands – and eventually tens of thousands. Thousands and thousands of people simultaneously attempting to control a single character resulted in the avatar clumsily running in circles, bumping into walls, and repeatedly opening and closing menus. Every action that would have been simple for a single person to do in Pokemon Red became a herculean effort, with thousands of people’s inputs competing with each other while trying to achieve a single, common goal.

In fact, the community got stuck in one area for over 8 hours due to a single, one-way ledge, known colloquially as “The Ledge.” The avatar had to walk through a narrow pathway a couple of squares long, directly below which was a one-way ledge. They then just had to walk up to continue progressing through the area. If the avatar jumps down this ledge, they have to run all the way back around and start the simple obstacle course over again. This was a place a single person would have breezed through in a few seconds. For over 8 hours, the Twitch Plays Pokemon hive mind struggled to get through this single obstacle, where a single person inputting “down” would force everyone to start over. The “down” input didn’t even have to come from a troll trying to sabotage everyone on purpose. Stream delays and other technical latency factors could turn the input of a well-meaning person – someone trying to help the avatar get down to the path in the first place – into one that ruined yet another attempt at crossing the ledge path. How could the community hope to not only navigate the large world of Pokemon Red, but also catch Pokemon and defeat the hundreds of required trainer battles needed to progress through the game?

The experiment became even more interesting when the programmer running the stream introduced a mechanic that allowed players to vote for either “Anarchy” or “Democracy” mode. If a majority of votes for Democracy was reached, Democracy mode would activate: every 30 seconds, the most voted-for option would be the single input the game took. This was introduced to help the community with overcoming some difficult sections where they might get stuck (i.e. narrow ledges). Otherwise, if enough people voted for Anarchy, the default way that the game was being played would continue. A large number of people who objected to Democracy mode – believing it ruined the purity of the original, chaotic experience – would spam the Democracy mode vote with input options that stalled progress if it was active (like opening and closing the main menu repeatedly). People were constantly voting and battling for the input mode they preferred.

Somehow, some way, the thousands and thousands of people that made up the Twitch hive mind were finally able to beat the game after over 16 continuous days of common struggle. Back in 1996, Pokemon Red was intended to be an adventure experienced by a single player. But, through some clever programming work, this single-player game became a massively multiplayer, collaborative experience. At the same time, it was also competitive, due to some people trying to troll and mess with the hive mind’s progress. All these fascinating aspects of Twitch Plays Pokemon’s format make it one case that especially stands out from Fernández-Vara’s player configurations.

I was fortunate enough to have participated in the Twitch Plays Pokemon phenomenon when it happened live in 2014. It was truly something special to have witnessed, and I’m glad I was there to see it. It was definitely a real “broke the internet” moment in my book. Following the speedrunning communities for some of my favorite games is also a hobby of mine; it’s always a pleasure to see what new tricks are discovered, and what new record times are set. As a result, this post is personal to me as well. Fernández-Vara’s set of “number of players” configurations is certainly a robust and useful set of guidelines for categorizing and analyzing games. However, I hope that with these two examples, I’ve demonstrated that there is still a lot of room for games to be innovative and exist outside these concepts.