Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Cooperation and Story!

Co-op is a standard line item on game boxes nowadays with dramatically varying degrees of meaning. Some games, like Borderlands and Left4Dead, rely on it to define their gaming experiences while others, like Modern Warfare 2 and Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, use it enhance existing experiences. Some, like Dawn of War II, introduce co-op options that change the way the game is played with seemingly minimal benefit and maximum increase to frustration. But for better or worse co-op is something of a standard feature in many of the latest generation of games. And while it provides for some interesting storytelling experiences when a game is devoted to it, what impact does it have on storytelling in games where it is not the focus, where it is but a footnote on the greater experience that is the game?

I recently began playing the Spec Ops missions with a friend of mine. I’d previously spent time with them alone, the achievement hound in me desperately seeking out stars like some sort of star-starved stellar fiend. I was like a way less cool Galacticus, engaging in the most rote activities of Modern Warfare 2 (a game already steeped in repetition) in order to gain more “kudos” from a computer. The addition of another person to the mix, however, changed the game entirely. Something I’d done that previously made me a little bit sad for just how limited it was was suddenly special. It could’ve just been Ops before.

The Special Ops functions aren’t all necessarily made for two people. Two of them are, and the addition of another body makes them much, much more pleasant, but most of them work just fine alone. In fact some of the sniper missions work even better with just one person. But adding another person added dynamism to a series of stagnant set pieces. It added narrative. Moving under the cover of an AC-130 gunner and sniping with a friend led to some unexpected and frankly enjoyable events that the robots of single player would never have provided. A great deal of that, however, comes from the fact that Special Ops completely removes any traces of narrative from its filthy bones before it even begins.

It is, in a way, a greatest hits collection of levels that exist within the larger game. It is not a new experience, not in the truest sense. Instead it is a way to interact with Call of Duty 6 in such a fashion that the incredibly shitty story missions are stripped down to why people actually enjoy them in the first place: the gun play. You can even bring a friend, something the Modern Warfare games are very purposeful about preventing during their single player campaigns. You can’t feel like an action hero when you’re right next to another action hero, after all. The way they attempt to tell a story, the way so many games try to tell stories, would be completely destroyed by co-op.

To see a much better example let’s take a look back at Halo. The first Halo game featured complete co-op, which made for a great drinking activity with a handful of friends and a terrible storytelling experience which ripped the tendons out of the already weak legs of Halo’s story. But, unlike Modern Warfare 2, Halo’s story could actually stand on its own. None would mistake it for its literary or filmic counterparts but it had a rich backstory and plenty of subtext. The problem is that adding another person can easily distract from that. When you’re managing situations and exploring alone the surroundings take on prime importance to gamers. When you’re doing so with other people suddenly the dynamic changes.

Suddenly it’s less about the ancient writings or the hidden passage where you’ll find signs of battles fought in the past and more about the resources the two of you are consuming, the enemies you have to fight and the approach you have to take if you want to survive. It’s less a matter of finding hidden doodads and more one of finding points where your friend can respawn after they’ve been splattered by a Banshee. It made for a fun experience at times, but I’d be hard pressed to recite the story from the original Halo. Halo 2, a game I experienced exclusively through co-op, didn’t even have a story as far as I’m concerned. I think there was some shit about Earth in there at the beginning but after that there was a psychic plant and another ring and some space pope with a death ray and I don’t fucking know what. The competent, if somewhat dry, storytelling the Halo series offered up was completely annihilated by its co-op portion, something the developers were at best vaguely aware of. They’ve since attempted to correct it in slight ways with games like Halo 3, ODST and, potentially, Reach, but co-op remains a crippling factor in a game which attempts to tell a story with a conventional narrative.

Games have different ways of solving this problem. Command and Conquer: Red Alert III, for example, sets the story entirely outside of the game, offering it up in delightful little cutscenes. It also does the player the service of building the missions around the concept of co-op, something I’d love to discuss at length but can’t, having voted with my wallet, as Julian Murdoch might say, and not having played RA 3 in favor of reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. It was lose-lose. Regardless, my point remains that in RA3, a game with co-op listed on the box as a selling point, concessions were made to make sure that the game would be okay with co-op, that the story and gameplay would not just make sense but would be fun. While I can’t speak to the success of their efforts the intent was certainly there, and I think that alone is admirable.

The Left4Dead series does a much better job, completely excising conventional story in favor of building an iterative engine around generating stories for players to experience on the fly. The Left4Dead series is built from the ground up to generate unique play experiences while passing through the same levels time and time again, and it acknowledges and even relies upon its players to make as many mistakes as possible during the game’s play in order to make it more interesting. It offers up neat little statements when someone dies or falls down or need’s special help. When everything goes right, Left4Dead is quiet. When things go wrong the story unfolds. You aren’t just people walking down the street, you’re survivors desperate escaping an endless and unique siege.

These games are where co-op truly finds its legs. Not just because they don’t attempt to tell a formalized story. If that was the case Borderlands could’ve been a success instead of an ambitious (and entirely worthwhile) narrative flop. Rather because they rely on the players to make the story, providing them with tools instead of scripts, they allow for a degree of freedom normally reserved for the creators of games. Since play experiences are intended to be buried under additional iterations Left4Dead is built to generate the core instances of storytelling in games, instances of “that time” that most games rely on you only seeing once. By being unafraid of making the game bug out Left4Dead gladly allows you to fall off the side of that building or flee, leaving your friends to the zombie horde as you leap into the back of the plane and wildly unload your M-16 into the encroaching horde. They grasp the core of what games really have to offer as a narrative format and distill it into something you can enjoy with a friend.

That moment of realization, that constant pursuit and occasionally attainment of cool, is something that single player games have to accomplish through a different set of merits by their very nature. They can’t rely on you and your friend turning to one another and saying “fuck yes!” when you kill the tank. They have to make Sarah Lyons inspect her remaining troops, nod solemnly and trudge inside of the Galaxy Radio building. These scripted experiences which exist in order to drive narrative run contrary to what makes co-op great by their very nature. And understanding this duality of game, the fact that what is profound alone is silly when heard in a group, and that an experience is only as good as the characters you share it with, is key to understanding just how to tell a story in games. And until more games start to get this basic concept they’ll continue to miss out on the storytelling potential that co-op game play can offer to traditionally single player games. And that’s kind of a shame.