Cooperation
January 27, 2022 | ≈ 885 words | Meta
Thoughts on Cooperation in Games
Written on November 2nd, 2020
I feel like everybody’s got their opinion of what cooperative board games should be like. Opinions like “They’re bad”, and “It’s not real cooperation unless you have the option of working together”. These opinions are similar in that they’re both wrong.
First, if you think co-op games are bad then you need to get off your high horse. Like literally everybody who I talked to who has this opinion says the exact same shit. “It’s basically just a solo game but with multiple people”. No. In solo games you don’t get to talk to other people and talk about what they want to do. You don’t have multiple brains that want to do multiple things. You can’t simulate multiple people playing simultaneously with hidden information. You are a BadMan who has a bad opinion for no other reason than you literally don’t want to play a game with other people. I bet you hate watching movies with other people too. You’re not playing a co-op game if you just tell someone what to do just so you win. That has more to do with you than the game, fortunately.
I’ve also heard people say: “It’s not real cooperation unless you have the option of cooperating.” Unfortunately I can’t glean the precise meaning from this statement, but the spirit of it seems to be “Forcing Cooperation Is Bad” which is a perfect statement to work your way backwards from and come up with perfect anecdotes to prove it, but also it has nothing to do with what makes a good co-op game. It’s a pretty good model for healthy cooperation, but this applies to games that aren’t co-op games or team games. Good cooperation in games does look a lot like people who purposely collude, and it does look a lot like people having fun, but it doesn’t really say anything about what cooperative board games should be like, besides the fact that people should purposely collude and have fun. But I’ll give it to Quinns, I think we can both agree that the working together should feel like an expression of the players, not a requirement of the game.
A long time ago I used to have a friend that said that co-op games sucked because the only way to juice out that cooperative spirit and really squeeze everyone’s brain together is to prevent players from being able to do everything themselves, in both the game and in the meta game. They hated co-op games because, normally, the games they liked allowed them to build things in a way that gives them those huge dopamine hitting turns; but in (otherwise good) co-op games, the game would handcuff them to only partially build things, making them feel like they couldn’t really do anything themselves.
And they were right. Good co-op games really have to beat into players heads that they have to work together, and it seems like designers figured out if it was impossible (or at least kinda hard) to do everything themselves, then players would naturally begin to join together to solve the puzzle. But the issue that my friend was having was that the game showed you all the fun things and options you could do but only let you do 1/N things “for balance”. It sucked to know what you could do, what you had to do, but only do half of anything. They would rather a 3-legged-race over a relay race. But what they really wanted was one of those giant multi-lane water slides.
But that really is the point. Give some people a common adversary and spend some time solving a problem together. Personally, I find joy in teamwork. Splitting up tasks, finding roles, optimizing the critical path, etc. Like any good board game, it’s like working but in your free time for fun. The point isn’t to feel constricted on your own turns, the point is to feel constricted but rely on your teammates to give you help. Aid you. Help you solve your problem. The rare joy that comes with solving a problem together, either from someone directly helping you or indirectly helping you, is something that is captured when you feel like you have overcome the difficulty game and defeated it. You were given an adversary to defeat. You were meant to lose. You have to work together. And then you literally worked together to win. That is co-op games.
I started writing this back in 2020 because I was playing Townsfolk Tussle at the time and this was a kind of companion piece to the one I wrote back then. Personally in games, I find a kind of joy when I see the progress someone makes in understanding and realizing particular solutions in games that I also in the past understood and realized. It is a great moment in shared joy of understanding, and the best moments in co-op games for me is when seeing new players as a kind of puzzle, where I navigate players to these revelations and suddenly with an “Aha!” they are completely engrossed by the game. To me, these problems in co-op games may already be solved, but with new players, I’ll always enjoy having this puzzle to navigate.