Cooperative Control: Hello Whirled!

I believe it was 1983 when I first played TRON Deadly Discs on our Intellivision. It was, as most games were at that time, a pretty simple little game really but it had one feature that made it stand out from any other game we had ever played. Both controllers worked to control the same main character. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing the design decision to do that was more to do with the combination of it being a single player game and the fact that it was hard to tell which controller was which than it had to do with designing the game to be played cooperatively. The controls for the game were actually pretty complex, especially for the time - there was a directional pad of sorts at the bottom of the controller that determined which way you ran, and it had essentially a number pad at the top of the paddle which determined the direction you threw your Disc. There was also a block button which I believe was the #5 key. Once you threw your Disc, you could have it boomerang back to you again by using the key pad as well. If you're having problems imagining this - you should check out this great write up about the Intellivision controller - www.classicgaming.com/features/articles/intcont/

Anyway, this meant that you could move and shoot independently of each other. And since they were independent, and each function could be controlled equally well with either controller - guess what we did? We played the game cooperatively, one person running (and usually blocking), which the other person was responsible for shooting. This allowed each person to focus entirely on an individual task which is really the way my mind works best. It was such a unique idea, that we played that simple, repetitive game for what I'm sure was hundreds of hours.

Again, I'm not sure how much cooperative play figured into the design process for TRON Deadly Discs, but one of the reasons it was so much fun to play cooperatively was that there was a single resource - the disc - that both players were in competition for. Being at the other persons mercy when it came to running around or when it came to destroying the enemies was one thing, but when one person couldn't "do their job" because of what the other one was doing with the disc led to a lot of the fun... and a lot of arguments too.

I was so profoundly impacted by TRON that to this day I go out of my way to find and play cooperative games. The trouble is, few really have rivaled the experience of TRON, with the very notable exception of Halo, which I'll get to in a minute. For example, we played a lot of games like Jackal on the NES, which was a cooperative shooter where each person controlled their own Jeep, or Contra which is really one of the gold standards of cooperative play even to this day... but none of them really tackled the cooperative experience in a way that caused both players to be controlling different aspects of the same on-screen character. And that one difference had a huge impact on the game play. Some may consider it limiting, but it was so important to us that by the time we got our first PC with a keyboard, we did everything we could to make single player games into a cooperatively controlled experience by splitting up the keyboard and having each person being responsible for different aspects of the game. Spy Hunter was one of the more memorable examples.

I know we weren't alone in this, as I've heard other people talk about doing it too, and I was reminded strongly of how powerful and fun this control scheme was when my wife and I first played Halo. One person driving the warthog while the other fired away on the chain gun - it was a riot. I wanted more and I got it as the last half of the last level was, as far as I'm concerned, the best ending of any game I've ever played. So it boggles my mind that it seems like game designers, even to this day, have largely ignored this control scheme. We're working on changing that. We've developed a prototype - called Whirled! using XNA and we entered it into the DreamBuildPlay Warmup Competition. This simple mod of the XNA Spacewar starter kit was most definitely inspired by TRON, but we want to take it to the next level. Obviously the 2 week development period we had to develop the game limited what we could do, but I think it demonstrates really well the concept of what we are calling "Cooperative Control".

The key elements of Cooperative Control are as follows:

- Two or more players are responsible for different aspects of the same in-game object. The most obvious example is Pilot/Driver and Gunner of a vehicle, but we want to extend this control scheme beyond the basic vehicle concepts as well. If you want to say this more abstractly, there should be an inseparable interdependence between the players.

- The control scheme is such that there is added depth to playing cooperatively versus controlling the object in a single player environment. I certainly realize that gaming is a solitary experience in many cases, so to be commercially viable, I think single player control is crucial, however there should be aspects of the control that makes it advantageous to play it cooperatively. For example in Whirled!, the Right trigger will fire your blade, by default, in the direction your ship is facing, but by using the Right analog stick to aim and then pulling the right trigger, you get much more control. Now, is it possible for one player to control both sticks and be pulling the trigger at the same time? Sure... but it's pretty difficult.

- There should be independent goals in addition to the mutual goal of survival/success. This is really something that is lacking in games that weren't designed from the ground up for Cooperative Control. What usually results is one guy is dodging/blocking while the other is shooting. And while those are independent goals, additional elements should be added to create a sense of accomplishment for each player. For example, running over an Elite while driving the Warthog. It's not simply about positioning the Warthog in the right place for the driver, it's possible to take out enemies all on your own. We are actually still working on this in Whirled and we'll hopefully have more to show with that soon.

- Ideally, the two players should be competing while cooperating - say for number of kills or competing for the same resource. This isn't strictly necessary. Halo, for example, really didn't have any contention between the players over anything except where the Warthog was going. So it's not a hard and fast rule, but it's something to bear in mind in your design.

I also believe that Cooperative Control needs to take place throughout the majority if not all of the standard single player experience. So while Halo may demonstrate aspects of Cooperative Control, and while it's great that you can play the entire single player experience cooperatively, I'd hesitate to categorize it as a truly a Cooperatively Controlled game. Bonus points go to the game that utilize Cooperative Control in a multiplayer competitive environment.

Okay, so for those that have made it this far and want to try out Whirled! - here you go: whirled.greatgamesexperiment.com


I'd love to get some feedback on the prototype or on games you've played that really qualify as Cooperatively Controlled (even if they weren't intended that way :) )

-Andrew Douglas
theoreticalgames.com