Opinion
Echoshift And Friends
Steven Poole argues that playing with yourself is nowhere near as rewarding as playing with others.
‘Self co-op’ is an apt description of the way you must choreograph the actions of your previous selves in gradually iterating a solution to each level (the concept has been seen previously, in arguably purer form, in the Flash game Click*10). Yet the mournful surrealism of ‘self co-op’ also represents a truth about an atomised, mistrustful society, where the only person you can really trust to cooperate with you is yourself.
In the classic prisoner’s dilemma of mid-20th-century game theory, cooperation is for losers: the ‘rational’ player is expected to betray his co-accused. Subsequently, indeed, neoliberal economics ensconced and somehow naturalised a pessimistic and paranoid conception of the ‘rational’ actor in society - someone who, by definition, cares only for himself, and views everyone else as at best a pitiless rival and at worst a full-blown enemy.
It is only natural, then, that in a world where loyalty, altruism or empathy are mere sentimental illusions, the notion of cooperation with another person should be reduced to that of a temporary alliance of self-interest and no more (that is the original idea behind the spectacularly ugly coinage ‘co-opetition’, first recorded in 1913 by the Sealshipt oyster company, trying to reassure its various dealers that they had a common cause). Only natural, too, that the solitary individual thus thrown back on his own resources in the jungle of the ‘market’ should become masturbatorily fascinated by his own abilities for self-advancement, to the exclusion of all else.
The term 'self-help' (the generic name for a huge industry of exhortation catering to the monstrous egoism encouraged by modern society already splits the self in two: there is the self to be helped, and the self doing the helping. Echoshift’s wry phrase ‘self co-op’ merely takes this to the next logical stage, where your self can be split into two, or three, or ten, all happily working together in a completely solipsistic universe. We would not be at all surprised to learn of a new inspirational bestseller entitled Cooperate With Yourself!.
But the possibility of real cooperation with another person is, of course, somewhere at the root of our social being. So are my thoughts led from Echoshift’s delicate allegory of a modern Everyman as psychic castaway - doomed to trudging repetitively numberless rat-traps of stairs, doors and switches, to no higher purpose than that they are, simply, there - to the possibility of true cooperation in videogames.
Now, to an extent, all competition is cooperative. We cooperate in agreeing to play by the rules of chess, or tennis; we cooperate in keeping score; we cooperate in trying to make it a ‘good game’ for reasons aesthetic as well as competitive. But playing against a friend seems to be becoming less compelling than playing with a friend, or so you might assume from the rise of designed-for-co-op games such as Left 4 Dead, Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light or Modern Warfare 2’s Special Ops mode, a far more important and groundbreaking achievement of design than its singleplayer campaign or its polished but unsurprising standard multiplayer. Contrast the unsatisfying ‘co-op campaign’ of World At War, which is hardly co-op at all: rather than having to plan and act as a team, you just both happen to be playing the same level at the same time.
A standard Marxist critique of videogames would say that they are in our age the opiate of the people: industrial products of dazzling craft whose function is to keep the masses hypnotically distracted from their true condition so that they do not act to change it. But to this gloomy analysis one could oppose a more optimistic reading: why cannot games also be training grounds for collective action?
After all, cooperation in a videogame is not somehow less ‘real’ or authentic merely because the world is imaginary. Blocking out all but the last few Spec Ops missions on Veteran, my friend and I have shot thousands of pretend men in the face, and blown up cars and aeroplanes that were merely gossamer pixel dreams, but the intense camaraderie we felt was as real as any social emotion, and the whole experience far richer than any competitive fragfest. Cooperation, in that sense, is its own reward. Videogames that offer themselves as arenas in which it may flower could help, in their own tiny way, to combat what is so powerfully depicted by Echoshift: the isolation that ideology seeks to impose on us all.