SINGLE-PLAYER/MULTIPLAYER
Single-Player/Multiplayer
A gulf habitually seems to separate single-player games from multiplayer games. From the start screen of a huge swath of games, the two paths diverge. In the first, a singleplayer campaign laden with narrative components unfolds. In the second, gameplay hinges on the actions of other players, whether oppositional combat in a fighting game, or co-operatively as in some sports titles. This perceived split manifests in a variety of historical and contextual forms: it emerges from the single-player games of the frenetic, quarter-driven arcades against the social play style dominant in early generations of home consoles; or, likewise, from the solitary, single-player journeys of role-playing games (RPGs) played in suburban dens to sprawling virtual communities of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). It often pops up in the interstices between the two, as in the local area network (LAN) party, alternating or asynchronous play, or local cooperative play. Without a doubt, understandings of single-player/multiplayer entangle both the context of play and type of game.
Approaches in game studies are not immune to the fracturing divide of single/multi, often bracketing off online experiences in studies of community, leaving design, narratological, and philosophical concerns in the single-player realm. Several questions arise from the slash of single/multi: what are, both material and cultural, the historic conditions that facilitate the rift? How do different schools in the loosely-affiliated field of game studies cultivate, approach, and defy the fracture? How do bounds of platforms, player action, methodology, economic, and marketing interests all shape the senses of single-player and multiplayer experiences? Moreover, if a great deal of what separates the two collapses, then what binds the two and how should we account for the multifaceted material, discursive, and cultural assemblage of single/multi?
The Scales of Single/Multi
There is debate as to what qualifies as the first video game. Often cited titles include William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two (1958) created for use on a round oscilloscope screen, games such as Nim (Ferranti, 1951) on the Nimrod computer program, or the electronic tic-tac-toe game, OXO (Alexander S. Douglas, 1952) built for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge. Some hold that video games require a raster display device and name Steve Russell’s Spacewar! (1962) as the winner. Many of these titles relied on alternating play between computer and player, which is unsurprising given their creation originates in the exploration of computational potential. Nim, for instance, replicated an existing math and puzzle game within an electronic platform to gauge processing ability. However, several games from the period did build upon the player-versus-player model found in Tennis For Two and Spacewar!, with the canonical PONG (Atari Inc., 1972) perhaps being the most celebrated. Similarly, single-player games also became a staple in the emergent arcade and home-console market, with titles such as Asteroids (Atari Inc., 1979) and Adventure (Atari Inc., 1979). The transition, from pre-Internet PLATO system games such as Jim Bowery’s Spasim (1974), to the Atari ST’s MIDI interface allowing up to 16 simultaneous players, to the breakthrough LAN games of DOOM (1993), shows how the single/multi divide evolved on several fronts, each having its own tactics and strategies in both gameplay sensibilities, social function, and marketplace concerns (Jansz & Materns, 2005; Williams, 2006).
However, a core question arises: do such teleological approaches attempt to build well-lit lanes on otherwise shady ground? Even prior to the development of video games, pinball and board games presented both sides of the play coin, but with ambiguity. Although the bouncing balls, dings, and rings may have been restricted to a single player, the competitive aspect of high scores operates as a player-versus-player operation. The idea of single-player competition certainly extends into alternating play associated with titles such as Asteroids and continues today with online leaderboards, achievements, and self-imposed difficulty such as speed runs (Yee, 2006; Medler, 2009; Parker, 2008). Moreover, it is not simply a matter of blurring a limit point. Many of these games and those that follow inhabit both sides with single-player play and player-versus-player play often revolving around similar mechanics. The introduction of network play, in all its varied evolutions, adds yet more layers of obtuse, murky confusion.
The point of the rhetorical blade slashes even deeper given the variety of contemporary online single-player/multiplayer experiences. Despite inclinations to subsume all MMORPGs under the acronym’s umbrella, the aesthetics, gameplay, community practice, and design of titles varies greatly. Compounding and exasperating these sketched complications is the sheer variety of multiplayer components. Although some conceptual frames may hold for genres such as first-person-shooters or individual titles such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004), this does not mean that they hold for online mobile phone games, or the eccentric multiplayer add-on elements of games created by studios such as Ubisoft, nor do single-player games function as a continuous whole. Thus we must see single-player/multiplayer in a continuum not only of experiences but also within multiple material scales and among incongruent cultural, material, and historical gradations.
Within Game Studies
Fortunately, the emergent collection of game studies scholarship continues to map several points in the mottled constellation that makes up the single/multi distinction. Although the lines are never clean, there are allegiances within sociological ethnographic accounts, design-oriented explorations, and among those whose focus is more narratological, literary, philosophical, ontological, or platform-based. Taken together, they comprise a topography of ruminations on just what constitutes “single-player” versus “multiplayer.”
The sociological conceptualizations of games focus primarily on the social nature of play and the role of games in society. Because they root ludic practice mainly in history and praxis, social actions ground understanding while the player operates both as a subject of, and an object within, play (Ehrmann, 1968). Expanding upon the work of Johan Huizinga ([1938] 2000), scholars such as Roger Caillois ([1958] 1961) illustrate the tendencies of this methodology. Pursuing the social meanings of games and the implications of their use, Caillois builds a classification system for games that distinguishes multiple-person play, which hinges upon competition (billiards or chess, for example) from individual experiences occurring in a wide range of backdrops (mimicry in role-playing or the pleasure of disorientation in activities such as sports).
The growing cultural presence of games and the rise of discipline-friendly multiuser domains (MUDs) and their heir apparent, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), drew more sociologists to games. Scholars (Ducheneaut & Moore, 2004, Hancock, 2006; Lisk et al., 2012; Schmierbach et al., 2012) narrowed in on the multiplayer dynamic as the driving element of their study. The mediation of sociality, whether in open, virtual exploration and world creation as in Second Life (Linden Research, Inc., 2003), or the more traditional task-orientation of Ultima Online (Origin Systems, 1997), quickly became the common investigative thread. This is not to suggest conclusions or approaches need to remain uniform. Examination weaves from elements of players themselves (exploring demographics and the ethnographic exploration of motivations) to their interactions (elements of role-play, competition, and cooperation) to in-game community formation (procedure and behavior associated with guilds). Despite these differences, there is the tendency of the field to continue to locate both positive and negative relations within larger social structures and behaviors.
Against these upward loops into the social sphere of game consumption, other scholarship traces games downward and backward to game creation. Theorization focuses on the design choices concerning players, interactions, and gameplay processes (Salen & Zimmerman, 2003). Design, in this regard, sets up player strategies against a procedural rule set, such as in a game of Solitaire, Pac-Mac (Namco, 1980), or Angry Birds (Rovio Entertainment, 2009). Alternatively, design may push players into the supposed “magic circle” of play, in which they use rule sets to test their skills against one another as in games such as Halo 4 (343 Industries, 2012).
Early examinations of games from a humanities perspective yielded interesting conceptions of single-player/multiplayer, focusing chiefly on story-driven, ostensibly singleplayer games. Janet Murray’s (1997) work, for instance, places readers and authors on opposite sides of the digital text, with active readers in an ongoing but heavily one-sided conversation with the procedural author. For Murray, the most important element of the procedural author is maintenance of the reader’s liminality; that is, keeping them immersed in the active game world. Yet in the context of rich gaming experiences, the procedural author is always negotiating the tension between giving the reader too much choice (resulting in a disjointed or rather shallow story) and too little choice (resulting in very little reader participation). Seen in the light of this “narratological” dialogue between the procedural author and the reader, video games operate as a kind of mixture of single-player decisions and indirect, asymmetrical “multiplayer” authored actions.
From these initial simple concerns, an intertwined dichotomy of considerations and conceptualizations branch outwards in game studies literature. With some scholars asking if designs—in this case, the virtual worlds and games—can themselves be creative actors, given their hugely substantial creative and play functions (Maher et al., 2005). Teasing these ideas further, we might begin to wonder if game engines and virtual spaces are players in-themselves, playing equally-weighted roles. Along these lines, Klastrup (2009) encourages researchers to view MMORPGs, and virtual worlds generally, as complete worlds, full of individuals, objectives, laws, social norms, technologies, and regulators. Rather than allowing the single/multi divide to operate as a launching point for distinct and separate types of play, interaction, and affect, opening the definition of active “player” creates a gradation of multiplayer “presences” in the cultural and technological assemblage of the video game.
One way of moving beyond a single/multi duality is to look at a game’s hardware, software, manufacture, and social context, which has been the goal of platform studies (Montfort & Bogost, 2009; Jones & Thiruvathukal, 2012; Maher, 2012). In the case of the Atari VCS, the ways in which single-player and multiplayer were embodied and acted on links to the constraints of the chipset’s memory and the ability of the electron gun in a CRT television scan lines. As a consumer product, the platform design reflects contextual use in the various living rooms and dens of average middle-class American families, as the wood grain aesthetic attests. In the process, video games continued to march down the road toward domestication in living rooms and dens across America, a journey that began with Magnivox’s Odyssey console in 1972. This domestication took place in a dialectic with public places such as Andy Capp’s Tavern and Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatres (Harvey, 2012; Montfort & Bogost, 2009). Simultaneously, players across the United States competed for high scores in these semi-public spaces in an manner best described as indirect (through high scores) or in head-to-head competitive play with other bar patrons, while home consoles normalized play exclusively against those in the same physical space of the living room. Here we see the intersection of physical spaces, marketing strategies, and hardware in an assemblage of single/multi.
Assemblages of Multi/Single-Play
While there is clearly no lone understanding of single/multi in game studies, there is a tendency to divide the realm of games into this duality. It is clear that MMORPGs make up an immense constellation of ethnographic research projects oriented toward the social, that have close allies in projects focused on interaction in player-versus-player titles, whether fighting games or first-person shooters. Research projects examining platforms and design tackle bits and pieces of the same game titles, while more literary-based research pursues the player through the terrain of procedural experience. Nevertheless, there remain jagged, disconnected ends. Against this toothed separation, we wish to conceptualize single/multi as assemblage: a mesh of objects and relations, including, but not restricted to, the collective bodies made up of human players, marketing strategies, commodity chains, intentional design goals, and hardware limitations.
The term “assemblage” originates in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ([1980] 1987), who employ it to speak of the “machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions; an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another” while simultaneously operating as “a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements” (p. 88). It gains, among other things, a particular theoretical usage through the neo and vital materialism of Jane Bennett (2010) and Manuel DeLanda (2006), both of whom are particularly interested in the agency of a widened and full scale of actors. They imbue innumerable things with autonomy, such as garbage, architecture, or electrical power grids. In assemblages “efficacy is then distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than a capacity localized in the human body or in a collective (only) by human efforts” (Bennett, 2010, p. 23). These assemblages have no head and thus have uneven power distribution and emergent effects. Nor are they singular, as components of an assemblage enter and exit relations and functions in other assemblages. Individuals in the assemblage have power, but the power of the assemblage is distinct from the individual. Moreover, as Deleuze and Guattari articulate: the capacity to effect is both material and expressive, thus operating in a plethora of ways.
T. L. Taylor (2009) has made inroads into game studies with assemblage theory, calling on researchers to attend to what she calls the “assemblage of play”:
Games, and their play, are constituted by the interrelations between (to name just a few) technological systems and software (including the imagined player embedded in them), the material world (including our bodies at the keyboard), the online space of the game (if any), game genre, and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game and situate us outside of it, the emergent practices of communities, our interior lives, personal, and aesthetic experience, institutional structures that shape the game and our activity as players, legal structures, and indeed the broader culture around us with its conceptual frames and tropes.
(p. 332)
Taylor notes that assemblages do not simply operate along methodological lines, but rather function as an ontological framework. In this way, she evokes the work of Bruno Latour (1987; 2005) who relies on the individuals or actants in assemblages to draw and direct research. Trailing these cues, single/multi is neither a duality nor concurrent processes, but rather a dynamic set of individual voices that may link loudly in a chorus while maintaining forged alliances with parts barely audible and competition against disconnected fragments singing different tunes and chords.
Genres: Unfamiliar Points in the Assemblage
The heavy focus in game studies on MMOGs and popular online shooters makes sense given their cultural presence. However, games such as EVE: Online (CCP Games, 2003) or Call of Duty: Black Ops (Treyarch, 2012) only enjoy such success by cornering significant portions of the marketplace. With development and marketing budgets in the tens of millions, they can afford expanded content and software updates. Similarly, these games lean upon their large player base to create vibrant communities, generating in-game sets of normalized behaviors, player-to-player policing of play practices, paratextual walkthroughs, and unofficial discussion forums. In terms of assemblage, the size of these networks affects and is affected by material elements. For instance, a huge benefit of having a massive pool of similar games using established network servers and a sprawling player base means that elements such as “matchmaking” services allow players to use “playlists” and jump into a game without waiting too long for servers to play on. Lowering the technological barriers of negotiating “server lists” ensures well-populated online communities that in turn generate financial incentives for developer’s ongoing support. From these material components, expressive functions grow; for example, preferences for types of gameplay within certain servers. Conversely, these material elements can break down the strength of the assemblage: attempts to funnel games through the unpopular content delivery “Origin” service by game publisher EA strengthened alliances to rival services such as Steam and GoG, or community pushes toward private servers. With each step, all of the actors and forces in the assemblage face changes, revealing networks of relations under these seemingly-stable instances of play.
Despite the prominence of these larger titles in game studies, there are many outliers.
As action-based multiplayer games saturated the console market, the French-owned multinational video game developer Ubisoft began developing unusual multiplayer modes. Rather than compete on the same terrain of the considerably more successful military-themed shooters in the Call of Duty franchise, Ubisoft has consistently dabbled in creating online multiplayer games that, for the lack of a better term, are weird. Their action-stealth franchise Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (Ubisoft Shanghai, 2004) introduced a “Spies vs. Mercenaries” mode involving two asymmetrical teams engaged in combat over the control of a series of computer mainframes. The mercenaries team operates in a first-person perspective using assault rifles, multiple vision modes, and tripwire mines against the spies, who manoeuvre their characters in a third-person perspective, unarmed save for a series of gadgets such as smoke grenades and a taser.
Ubisoft inserted some unconventional forms of multiplayer play into their Assassin’s Creed Series, with Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft Montreal, 2010). The initial multiplayer modes borrowed heavily from existing traditions such as escort, assassinate, or chest capture. However, the following release, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (Ubisoft Montreal, 2011), expanded gameplay and attempted to align the experience to the narrative components of the series. Rather than using bots as stand-ins or replicants of human actions, players in deathmatch mode gain tactical advantages by not using special abilities and blending in with the stiff, robotic actions of computer characters. The topographic map of this genre reveals a hybrid form, laden with tensions among a slew of actants in the assemblage: marketplace conditions (separation against existing titles), genre expectations (third-person and first-person action games), and the phenomenological experiences of players (versus peers and bots). Exploring the various corridors, passages, conflicts, and alliances of these assemblages, not only does single/multi become a multifaceted notion dependent on material and expressive effects, but also the idea of competition fall into crisis. Akin to the problems encountered associated with genre, starting to overhaul any overarching notions allows concepts such as co-op or peer-versus-peer to be understood in orientation to specific material conditions, precise relations with actors, and individuated instances of single/multi.
Platforms: Shifting Terrain of the Assemblage
A key aspect of any assemblage is the way it exercises different sets of capacities, which can lead to macro-assemblages or micro-assemblage with individual capabilities. Thus, just as a wide net is required to understand how the Call of Duty and Assassin’s Creed franchises operate against (or with) fiscal pressures, user expectation, and established gameplay mechanics, types of multiplayer and single-player games are both strengthened and weakened across platforms. With the ongoing proliferation of games for mobile phones and tablets, the particular propensities of single-player/multiplayer games change. Although the entry into the market may be smaller than consoles and bear more similarities to the PC, the mobile game market remains highly saturated, meaning individual titles and games attempt to gain consumer visibility on several fronts.
The interactive entertainment company Kabam makes free-to-play games that mimic mechanics of popular MMOGs. Their title Arcane Empires (2012) designed for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices draws upon the city-building play of strategy games with players constructing different sets of buildings, raising armies, and managing population resources and happiness, while the game also angles into MMOG systems of peer-versus-peer battle, alliances, global chat, and so on. Temporality is a key aspect of the game system, as most tasks rely on elapsed real-time counters, which purchasing ingame coins can circumvent. Unlike PC MMOGs that rely on complex control schemes, titles such as Arcane Empires must develop key schemes based on a touch screen. One element recurrent to many multiplayer titles, especially MMOGs, is extended play sessions allowing multiple player tasks and community actions such as raids to play out, which conflicts with mobile gaming’s function as frequent and temporary entertainment. Granted, iPads and mobile phones garner great attention for prolonged periods, yet popular titles often function equally well between bus stops or for hours at home.
Economic choices (the free-to-play price but pay-for-convenience structure) and gameplay elements (simplified control structures) attempt to draw in the widest swath of players through hybrid game types, employing aesthetic styles that hold some cultural cache (in the case of Arcane Empires, steampunk), and all of these aspects effect a game’s development, advertising, lifespan, player interactions, and so on. It is tempting to align the popularity of single-player titles such as those of the Angry Birds franchise to the playful aesthetic or simple controls yet this overlooks a wide network of factors. Equally, while the charms of the briefly popular Draw Something (OMGPOP, 2012) may seem to be the delight of player-to-player exchanges against the limits of the drawing palette, there is an array of factors at work. On multiple fronts, mobile titles frequently perform a balancing act of capitalizing on assemblages with strength (game type, aesthetic trends, temporal player tastes, familiarity or curiosity in the casual game market, and so on) with simultaneous attempts to destabilize others in order to gain traction, especially in gatekeeper distribution platforms such as the iTunes store. Seeking out how spaces of play (from desks to train seats to sofas), the borrowing of other platform styles, and the rebalancing of them against the limits and abilities of a platform, drive yet another questioning of monolithic categories such as cooperation or competition, while opening new avenues to think of material and expressive effects at work.
Conclusion: Assembling the Actors
There may seem to be a danger in refusing a central hub, single determining force, or widely-cast net in an attempt to tow such a wide assortment of gradations of active actors. The power of the assemblage lies in its open ontology. Rather than approaching single/multi as an epistemological case to solve, rummaging through the vital properties within an assemblage unearths the effective power as a larger accumulation. “Single-player” and “multiplayer” do work as large-scale assemblages. As the brief sketching here shows, they develop individual deployments with other particular entities: among different players, developers, economic conditions, platforms elements, aesthetic systems, socio-political conditions, and so on.
As DeLanda states in A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006) “capacities do depend on a component’s properties but cannot be reduced to them since they involve reference to the properties of other interacting entities” (p. 11). Moving beyond single/multi as a bland, immeasurable throng of elements, the work becomes mapping among all the irreducible, multi-tiered, and changing elements and relations. Elements such as cooperation change game-to-game meaning. Sports games cannot be lumped with MMOGs or casual mobile titles; equally, a concept such as competition bears weight in vast numbers of game assemblages requiring larger connects.
Although we propose a few key components here, to elucidate the full assemblage of single-player and multiplayer requires ongoing recognition of ordering and imagining of entities (ideas, networks, people, and organizations), all of which hold the same clout of veracity. Individual titles reveal key aspects but we must also connect these games to other assemblages up and down the ladder of scale, size, and scope—developers, microchips, players, power grids—orient understanding to other assemblages, bearings, and flows. Moreover, by seeking all heterogeneous elements ingoing or breaking apart from relations with other objects (human, non-human, material, and immaterial), flops, and failures, the strange and unusual power to change the assemblage emerge.
What forms is not a massive, muddled painting globbed with too many colors because the assemblage foregrounds the process in which elements are “naturalizied.” To remove the given that the material conditions of the iPhone operate causally to create the player’s experience of touch is to seek how such expressive ideas operate and become stable among developers or players or communities or material parts. On this point, the assemblage gains political force, and to speak of multiplayer gaming in its current form is to speak of communities that frequently employ sexist, racist, and homophobic language; to explore single-player experiences is to subject oneself to recurrent misogynist tropes and mechanics of violence. By leveraging outward to the components of assemblages of games, the borders of the spaces of play open to larger and smaller uneven flows of power and privilege. In turn, we can challenge, destabilize, and disrupt the alliances that propel them in all the varied single or multiple forms.
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