Competition vs Cooperation

I haven't had much time in the last year or so to play video games, compared to the four or five years preceding, in which I spent an inordinate amount of my life on various Half-Life, Battlefield 1942, Aliens vs Predator, Unreal Tournament, Red Faction and Halo type games (all First Person Shooters, for anyone who cares). I went from virtually no interest in video games (birth to mid-thirties) to becoming almost obsessive about them for a few years (and Vicki would no doubt question the inclusion of the word almost there). Then my interest peaked and began to decline: I started seeing the same patterns of game play and format, had fewer and fewer new experiences, and felt less excitement for each new game that would come along. And of course there were lots of other activities competing for my time, so it wasn't like I needed gaming to fill my days.

And that wasn't the only competition factoring into my pulling away from video games. I've come to realize that, in gaming as in Life, I'm much more interested in cooperation than I am in competition. Maybe it's simply because competition always involves someone losing, and often that someone is me, and I certainly don't enjoy losing (who does?), but I think it's more than that. I like to see people overcome obstacles and achieve goals. It's how I've lived my life, for the most part (when I don't slide into self-pity mode, that is), and it's the kind of literature, comic, TV and film stories I enjoy the most. So the thought of actually working with someone, to accomplish something, appeals to me so much more than fighting one another does. It's probably why I love superhero team-ups so much in comics, and why I enjoy stories where the villain redeems himself or herself in the end, and helps the hero save the day.

Which is not to say that video games never allow for this. Some of the best games have Coop mode, in which two or more players work together (often against Artificial Intelligence characters controlled by the game; sometimes against other live players). And what I found was that I started gravitating more and more toward those types of gameplay. When a bunch of us from work would play Battlefield: 1942 online, for example, I'd always be pushing for us to all get on the same side so we'd be able to help each other, instead of delighting in blowing each other to Kingdom Come. But of course you always get the odd person who doesn't want that, because he (and it's usually a he) only gets his jollies by being the one who creams everyone else. Which became increasingly harder for me to enjoy (as did the recurring role of creamee!).

All of this came back to mind last night as Tammy and I spent a great couple hours racing around in Halo 2, in Coop mode. I hadn't played it in probably a year (or more), and I doubt Tammy had much more recent experience on it. So it took us a few minutes to even remember how to jump, what weapons to pick up, and the fact that if we died we needed to tell the other person right away, so they could run for cover long enough for the dead player to re-spawn (if both of us died, the level started over). But once we got past all that, we had a great time, just like we always used to, backing each other up and blasting the Hell out of whatever got in our way.

It's really too bad that sort of thing wasn't the default for video games, in a way. They might not get quite so bad a reputation, for one thing, and they might promote a slightly better world view in which you work with others to accomplish things instead of rewarding selfishness and self-preservation. Or maybe all of the young houligans would play video games and then go out into the world and be even more likely to form gangs. What do I know?