The Streets (and Save Files) that Raised Us

Video games can get a pretty bad rep.

It's not uncommon to see gaming characterized as a pastime reserved for reclusive fourteen year olds locked in their room with the lights off and a three-millimeter layer of Cheeto dust coating every surface within arm's reach. I can't say I don't understand where that stereotype comes from. The (visible) basis of interaction for many video games is between a player and a machine, so the social elements of video games are thus somewhat obscured, especially when compared to their less-maligned cousins in board games. 

Nonetheless, video games are—and have always been—a deeply social experience. Since the dawn of the modern video game industry, many games were designed to be played with (or against) another player. Back when coin-operated arcade machines were king, you could play Pong, Fire Truck, Joust or Street Fighter with a friend. The same goes for the beginning of the home console era (although the tech required to facilitate multiplayer gameplay took a little while to catch up); consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis are fondly remembered for their two-player offerings. My dad has never really been a big gamer, but he still effuses about playing the original Super Mario Bros. with his brother on the NES they owned as kids.

My odyssey into the world of video games began quite similarly. I got my first console—a Nintendo Wii—when I was six, as did seemingly my entire elementary school class. We'd all waddle over to each other's houses to play after school, and while I did play on my own from time to time, the idea of gaming was inextricably linked with friend hangouts back then. Part of that had to do with the console itself; a lot of popular Wii games in that era were designed around casual local multiplayer. If I'd grown up on more “hardcore audience” games like Uncharted or Mass Effect instead of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, I might have had a different perspective. But even as I got older and branched out to single-player and competitive games across different genres on PlayStation and PC, gaming with friends remained central to my teenage years. What were once playdates in my TV room goofing off in Wii Sports Resort became online sessions of Warframe or Fortnite (among many others), but the social aspect remained intact.

I didn’t like Fortnite as much as most people, but a full squad on a Friday night back in late 2017/early 2018 was peak

Multiplayer games are great because they afford you the ability to bond with other people, but what's more interesting is how they use this social interaction to drive their experience. With competitive multiplayer games like Street Fighter or Counter-Strike, this is a simple question to answer. The objective there is to win and climb the ranks—teaming up with or beating fellow players is the means to that end. But the possibilities grow exponentially when thinking about cooperative multiplayer (co-op) games in other genres. 

Take Hazelight Studios' Split Fiction—currently the darling of the gaming world and an early frontrunner for Game of the Year. Split Fiction, like the developer's previous titles A Way Out and It Takes Two (2021 Game of the Year winner), is an action-platformer designed exclusively for co-op play. Players control Zoe, a fantasy author, and Mio, a science fiction author, who become trapped inside a simulation of their own stories. Their worlds merge and become interwoven, and the two have to work together to return to reality. Each level has its own unique gimmick—one level set in Zoe's story has the two players riding dragons while another set in Mio's grants them anti-gravity boots—and thus presents a new challenge for the players to figure out how to best combine the particular abilities granted to them in that moment, whether said ability affects combat, traversal, or something else entirely.

Mio (right) is taking to that thing better than I would

I have yet to play Split Fiction myself—it's #1 on my list for the summer once I can line up my schedule with a friend. But with all the hype it's receiving, it's inspired me to reflect on some of my favorite co-op titles and how they were able to use cooperative mechanics to breathe life into their gameplay.

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Valve's Portal 2 is one of the greatest video games of all time, full stop. The puzzle-platformer centers on a portal gun that the player can use to set up two portals and move between them to solve and escape puzzle chambers. This gameplay mechanic and the game’s signature spatial puzzles are already historically excellent in the main single-player campaign, but cranked to eleven in co-op mode.

There are no fundamental differences in the gameplay mechanics between the two campaigns—the only thing that changes is that there's now two players. But this introduces so many new complexities that make it feel like an entirely new experience while maintaining the game’s underlying fabric.

In the co-op campaign, you'll play as the two adorable robots Atlas and P-Body

Single-player Portal 2 has you juggle portal placement, timing, and logic sequencing, and the co-op mode elevates these challenges by default—naturally so, since having four portals to work with instead of two exponentially increases solution possibilities, and also makes mentally mapping them more complex. But while many games with co-op simply have the players do the same thing side-by-side, Portal 2's co-op forces asymmetry; both players will often be working on different yet complementary tasks that must sync perfectly. The most common way this manifests is that one player will have to architect a solution while the other executes it, and then they swap roles. For example, one player might be floating in a tractor beam while the other controls their trajectory through a maze of portals. Elsewhere, one player might do the trademark Portal 2 infinite fall while the other player uses their momentum to launch them across the chamber at just the right time.

In that vein, Portal 2 also turns coordination itself into a game mechanic. Both players will often see a slightly different part of the puzzle, so they’ll need to share perspectives (literally and figuratively). And it doesn’t end with mapping out a solution in your head; verbally explaining its various spatial and temporal components to your partner—where you both have to be, what you have to do, and when you have to do it—is its own fun metalayer that doesn't exist in single-player. You're not just solving the puzzle, you're also solving how to communicate that solution.

The game also builds upon the mischievousness of player behavior in a unique way, namely in that it anticipates that you might want to mess with your partner and get them killed every now and then by aiming a laser at them, dropping a bridge from under their feet, etc. The narrator will even tease you both about it when your partner respawns, which makes dying feel more funny than frustrating, encouraging players to goof around without thinking that they're playing the game wrong.

Heh.

I look back on Portal 2 incredibly fondly. My middle school best friend and I speedran the co-op campaign on an extremely scuffed laptop-and-wired-controller setup: a core memory to this day. Every time we finished a chamber, we felt like we were the smartest people on Earth, right up until we ran into a roadblock on the next one and we wanted to delete the game all over again.

I wouldn't trade it for the world.

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My sentiments around Team17's Overcooked: All You Can Eat are... significantly less warm and fuzzy. But that probably indicates that we got exactly the intended experience from the game. 

Overcooked is a co-op kitchen management simulator where teams of up to four players prepare orders in all kinds of ridiculous restaurants, including floating wooden rafts, gold mines, and haunted castles. Players have to work together to gather, chop, and cook ingredients, plate and serve food, and then wash the dirty dishes. Simultaneously managing multiple distinct orders is chaotic enough, but kitchens themselves are also always shifting mid-game; walkways swap direction, floors split, moving tables block off certain areas, fires break out, and sometimes the entire layout of the kitchen can change (like the one level where a hot-air balloon crashes down into a sushi bar). The result is an overstimulating hodgepodge whose fun lies in that very mayhem. 

Overcooked’s core mechanics—move, dash, pick up/drop, chop, and throw—are deceptively simple. Using them together while everyone is running around like headless chickens is anything but. To that end, the game’s real test is all about coordinating who’s doing what, but also adapting when your original plan inevitably falls apart in the chaos.

Level 6-2 was damn near the end of my friend group

You'll probably fail the first couple of times you try each level, but they all have patterns you can learn and optimize. In our playthrough, one of my friends would notoriously stand in a corner doing nothing for the first twenty tries until he yelled "I GOT IT!" and proceeded to lay out an incredibly detailed plan that worked like a charm. 

Over the course of the entire campaign playthrough, you start to understand the rhythm between each player, which makes adapting to individual levels’ idiosyncrasies a lot easier. The experience peaks when everyone begins to develop an intuitive understanding of their partners’ timings and tendencies, giving rise to a nonverbal flow state. Players naturally settle into roles based on their strengths—a kind of fluid, emergent role delegation that can be rare in co-op games and thus feels incredibly satisfying when it crystallizes. 

Part of the game’s charm is that it's just as fun to lose as it is to win. Even when you fail, you’re entertained; people are raging about ingredients scattered across the floor, burnt patties, or out-of-control kitchen fires. In that sense, Overcooked is a great example of how games actively use the interactions between you and other players to construct their essence. There's nothing intrinsically fun about pressing two buttons to make a hamburger, but when there's three numbskulls yelling in your ear trying to figure out what to do about the literal meteor that just hit your kitchen, it takes on new life.

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Helldivers II, a PvE shooter developed by Arrowhead Studios, is no stranger to chaos itself, although its interperetation thereof is a lot more… explosive. The game sees you and up to three other players take the mantle of the titular Helldivers, elite soldiers tasked with completing military missions on hostile alien worlds. The game is well-loved for its over-the-top sci-fi action and wonderfully satirical jingoist worldbuilding, but it’s also one of the most complete and complex strategic co-op games I’ve ever played.

Helldivers II emphasizes that you can’t always go in guns-blazing and blow up everything in sight; strategy and coordination underscore every mission from start to finish, especially since respawns and supplies are limited. Even before your squadron of Helldivers is airdropped into enemy territory, you have to build a loadout of weapons and tools that cover various needs. One player might focus on airstrikes to wipe out large hordes, while another focuses on shielding and turrets to shore up the defense. One player might bring railguns to take down larger enemies, while another brings supply packs to make sure everyone’s stocked up on ammo.

Balanced loadouts win games. That doesn’t stop everyone on my team from bringing the 500kg bomb anyway

Each mission has a primary objective that can range from destroying enemy nests to extracting precious minerals or escorting civilans to safety, as well as a handful of secondary objectives and points of interest scattered across the map that either make the primary objective incrementally easier or provide handsome currency rewards. The specific combination of primary and secondary objectives in any given mission defines the strategy you’ll employ. What route will you take through all the objectives? Will you do everything together, or split up to cover more ground? If you’re running low on time or supplies, what do you prioritize? Whose loadout(s) is/are best suited to tackle a specific objective?

Helldivers II also employs procedural generation, which means no two maps or missions are ever the same. Sometimes you get dense forests that limit visibility or cramped canyons that make orbital strikes risky, other times open plains that provide little natural cover. Plus, enemies spawn randomly based on noise and player behavior. This randomness prevents players from relying on memory or repetition—they must instead constantly strategize on the fly. 

This is the part where you yell something cringe like “FOR DEMOCRACY!” before hitting the Bile Titan with a massive space laser.

The most distinctive aspect of Helldivers II insofar as how it encourages players to build strong teamplay is that friendly fire is always active. Every bullet, grenade, airstrike, or automated turret can—and often will—kill your teammates, which forces constant communication and awareness. I can’t count the number of times one of us has died because we stepped on a teammate’s landmine, walked in front of their drone’s line of fire, or stood smack dab in the middle of their aerial strafing run.

Helldivers II, like many great co-op games, directly ties your success to how well you’re able to coordinate with your team. But where other games allow you to build on your familiarity with your teammates’ strengths and the task at hand, Helldivers II throws you headfirst into an entirely new, randomized challenge every single time. It’s able to use social interaction to create almost an RPG-esque element (in a game that is not explicitly an RPG); players are encouraged to constantly think about what their individual skills and loadouts help them accomplish relative to that specific map and those specific objectives.

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Oftentimes, when people ask me about my favorite movies, I think of Avengers: Endgame pretty high up on that list, which is somewhat peculiar. The movie isn’t some kind of cinematic masterpiece, nor am I a huge Marvel Comics fan. But one of my best memories from high school is watching it in theaters with a large group of friends. The vibe that day, with everyone going berserk for every other scene, remains unparalleled. That alone made the whole experience so special.

Great stories can always touch the core of your heart, but the ones you experience with people you care about are the ones that truly endure in your memory. Some of the best games I've ever played were critically acclaimed single-player titles; games like Batman: Arkham Knight, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and God of War Ragnarök were masterful works of game design and storytelling that genuinely moved me. But when I look back on my fondest gaming memories, I'm hard-pressed to come up with many that don't center on moments of chaos, laughter and camaraderie between me and my best friends.

That said, if they throw my games one more time, there WILL be consequences…

To see more of what I’ve been playing, check out my Playlist account.