I Am At The LAN Party

written on Friday, May 29, 2009

That is all.














Well, okay. I guess I could say something about the LAN party. It's been years since I attended the first one. They were a different affair back then. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was a game high on the agenda, and everyone played. Moms and dads and kids and grandma.

Honestly, I think I partly ruined it. I wanted some basic competence out of whoever was on my team when we were playing Counter-Strike. When I got killed and my teammates standing right beside me had no idea who was shooting at me and from where, my patience went poof. It's irksome when no one has my back. So I got mad. The parents and grandparents left. And we stopped playing deathmatch or anything more competitive than racing games. I'm not egotistical enough to think it was entirely my fault, but I didn't help.

I miss the older folks. They were fun. But we also don't have games for them. The industry still mostly produces bang bang kill kill. They could join us for Nations at War, since that's co-op against bots, and as long as we leave the bot count the same, who cares if they're not being super effective? (Heck, I often spend my time in N@W just messing around with high explosives.) We could also include them in Flatout 2. I wouldn't want that many people for the stunt events, as Flatout 2 makes everyone wait while one player takes a turn. But the races and demolition derbies could be fun.

There doesn't seem to be anyone making family friendly multiplayer on any platform that isn't the Wii. Well, there's a couple shameful 360 games, but it still seems that almost no one but Nintendo is willing to put their A teams on family friendly stuff. Marketers seem to be confident that badass outsells wacky regardless of how much badass is already out there. I think wacky's underrated, personally, but I don't have a degree in marketing, so maybe they know better.

Truthfully, though, it's a challenging design environment. You need to make luck a big enough factor that weaker players stay engaged, while making skill important enough that better players feel rewarded. You don't want people to be eliminated from play, or they'll get bored and want to do something else. Ideally you want the game to scale from one to many players, and even allow drop-in drop-out play. Variety is very important because different people like different activities. And lighthearted fun is not what devs are used to. It's not an easy transition for everyone.

And ideally what we'd want for the LAN parties would be playable on PC by more players than the consoles (which are where the money is) support. Yeah. That's never happening. Our best bet might be organizing virtual events in Free Realms, or freaking writing a game ourselves. :P