i actually thougth about sports video games years ago with this idea in mind. It would be really cool if you could have one person controlling each of the 5 basketball players on the court competing against five other players on the same court each controlled by 5 oyther people.So a real 10 on 10 game. Each person at home online but all involved in the same game! that would be so cool and i do think it has to be in the near future. Imagine one person at home viewing the game from their screen and their perspective while another person at their place playing on your team but controlling another person with their own view of the game..it would be unreal..i think its a great idea, but like you i just dont know how you do it..

It is hard to propose what is essentially just one component (cooperation) in a video game. I think you need to build a game. I'd suggest leveraging an open source MMORPG library.
http://www.amazon.co...opment/dp/1584502436
http://www.amazon.co...opment/dp/1584503904

...I've read the first book, part of the second. They're excellent. Firing up the infrastructure to host a MMORPG is a BIG DEAL, but it is really the only way to create an environment to explore your idea further, and take it out of brainstorming and what-if phase.

Thanks for the comments so far. Gordon, I agree that this is at the moment only a concept rather than a fully-featured product idea but I'd like to throw it out here and see what people think of it as-is and if anyone has any great insights or ideas. If it's well-received I'll get to work on a more structured game design, post it in a later round and see if I can find people willing to help me work on it.

So what do you think, people? First off, does the idea excite you? What sort of games would you like to see this applied to?

I think some "war theme games" MMORPG have this in essence i just dont know any stat to support its success and details of its weakness why more individual RPG are having more popular considering its limited collaboration to play in real online alliances.

Red alert or General I think could have been better as team play but I guess its the online limitation that makes it less effective to this objective.

Honestly I like this, but how cooperative a player can be when everybody would like to take a shot for personal high and glory? I believe a young kid would not settle as spy or a medic when the other are playing as sniper and tank pilot? This also hold true I guess for an adult strategy player.

Your goal is interesting, but I can't see, in your proposal, any way to reach it.

Many combat games already clearly demonstrate to any player, provided that he obtained a good "command of the commands" (character movement...), that collaboration (teamwork) is of paramount importance when it comes to win.

Here is a learning path: select a FPS (a modern Quake 1 avatar is a good pick), let them play in DM mode (deathmatch, everybody fighting against any other players) and 1on1 (player against player). If some are already proficient change the worlds physics (server side) to have some 'handicap'.

Many will be hooked and quickly master their character and the world's "physics".

Then throw them into the same game but on a team-and-goal-oriented mode (a good example is CTF: Catch The Flag) with a 'prize' (in real life the loosing team somewhat 'pays' while the winning one gains), and deliver to them adequate means to communicate, because comms are of paramount importance when it comes to teamwork, which (remember?) is important for winning. Therefore teammates _must_ be able to speak to each other, thanks to some headset and integrated mike, connected to some audio conferencing software. It already exists, test and pick your choice.

Don't pre-set anything non technical, I mean offer them nothing more than means (game, headsets, stakes...) let them discover the proper conventions or even organization (a chief and his grunts? a full spanned hierarchy? a set of objectives for each team member? a mixed model?...), thru many games, on many different maps, with varying teams sizes (with some unbalanced setups)...

Don't explain/advise/coerce/interfer/.... Let them train on dm and 1on1, then state the stakes, gives them the softwares and comm devices and throw them into action.

The more motivated and smarter ones will pull/push the others, and you will obtain at least a fairly good pack. If not... well, forget about them. They are not motivated or dumb.

I "did" this (I only conceived it, friends built the thing and used it) and tt works very well.

As far as I know regular armies use somewhat similar approaches.

The real challenge is to leverage this. How about girls and seniors? How about non-combat context?

'Building' games (Civilization, Simcity...) are not pertinent (as there is no simple way to distribute among teammates the underlying empirical quest, nor to have a somewhat intelligent 'reaction' to team action). Nor are strategic ones, because the type of teamwork pertinent when it comes to strategy is of a very special kind, albeit the german army may offer a good way to use it, and there is no demonstrable "right answer".

vizminda - thanks for your comment. I agree that there is a danger of team members trying to "go it alone" but this is no different to the real world. As in the real world, some of these players will have the abilities necessary to make it that way; others will fail without the backing provided by a strong team. I don't see any problem with that!

As natmaka suggests, when placed in a situation where teamwork is a) advantageous (necessary?) and b) possible, people will naturally find their own way of working as a team to best achieve their objectives. I guess our aim would be to ramp the difficulty level to a point where surviving alone is difficult if not impossible while simultaneously providing players with the tools to team up.

natmaka - many thanks for the obviously detailed thought you've put into this. I agree that allowing players the freedom to work together as they see fit and decide amongst themselves will make for the most interesting gameplay. It removes a lot of the linear, prescriptive feel of many games and simultaneously brings player-player interactions closer to real-world interactions within teams.

I also like the tough love approach to team building you describe, particularly in a commando-style war game. If, as you suggest, the method is used in regular armies we should research that to add some authenticity and realism to games.

I don't however agree with your assertion that building and strategy games are outside the scope of this idea. Your argument seems to be that dividing up responsibilities and leadership is complex and lacks a "right answer", yet above you've given these very arguments in favour of using teamwork in FPS games! The mechanism for allowing teamwork could be as simple as giving each player the communication tools and full control over the civilisation in the same way they would have in a single-player game. One player can then concentrate on building up the capital city while another leads the military to explore and later conquer the rest of the world, for example.

On a more sophisticated level, many games divide up actions and responsibilities using eg different interface screens (transport, industrial production, labour, trade and diplomacy in Imperialism, for example), different computer-generated 'advisers' (Civilization) or any number of other methods. Simply let each player take control of one or more of these aspects and you have the beginnings of a cabinet government...

natmaka has some good points. I've played a number of FPS games and when you get on a server against a number of good players it's a slaughter fest. Players learn the physics and the mazes and how things react and then they wipe the floor with the other players.

I think it would be better if there was more randomness in these types of games. Like guns misfiring or just because a trap in a room reacted one way the last time you were there, have it act differently each time.

When you play in teams you are forced to help your teammates and watch out for them too!

It would be interesting to see the games resulting from this idea.

Sorry, meaning PhillipH's idea.

> dividing up responsibilities and leadership is complex and lacks a "right answer", yet above you've given these very arguments in favour of using teamwork in FPS games!

I gave this at the tactical level, which is very different from the strategic one. For example an efficient FPS team only does local and immediate problem resolution implying a single players or, at most, a squad/section (most coordinated actions imply less than 4 people). The problem-solvers are plunged into the action, they often speak to visible teammates and there is nearly no 'useful sacrifice' (gambit-style) beyond the trivial "if I'm doomed I try to 'take' with me as many opponents as possible". They have no real "command and control" problem beyond rare multiple simultaneous different events justifying many simultaneous teamwide broadcasts attempts, which fail and have to be regulated thanks to some simple convention.

Headquarters, at the strategic level, face totally different challenges: they try to win the war, which often implies loosing some battles, they are very distant from any local action, which leads to major reporting and broadcasts/prioritization/latency-related problems...

Moreover by pitting several teams against each other you create a way to assess their respective performances. At the strategic level there is no such option, it is often very difficult to declare that a given team devised the "winning plan", the one which will resist to the "friction of war"

> The mechanism for allowing teamwork could be as simple as giving each player the communication tools and full control over the civilisation in the same way they would have in a single-player game.

Granted, but results assessment may be difficult. At the end different teams will build different civilizations... so what? Which team wins? Team building needs adversity and results comparison.

> let each player take control of one or more of these aspects and you have the beginnings of a cabinet government...

... and the usual problem when it comes to assess a government action!

PeeHayEl> when you get on a server against a number of good players

That's true, one needs to (technically) suppress all tricks (rocket and grenade jumping, bunny hoping, automagically triggered scripts...). This is easy if you control the entire chain (server, network, client).

PeeHayEl> guns misfiring

Random is OK but it has to be very uniformly distributed among teams (truly random!) in a single game timeframe (which leads to calculations about its occurrence frequency), and not too frequent to avoid transforming the game into a lottery.

I think anything that is collaborative in our 21st century reality is a GREAT idea.

We love to play games and we need social contact. GO FOR IT

I also think that this will do well over time. As TV and internet become one your opportunities for marketing and creating more involved games will increase. FYU Google just announced its collaboration with Panasonic and will be rolling out its first internet video/photo enabled television this spring. Sony made a similar announcement and will roll out their TV this spring as well.

Just food for thought

I am not sure what games you think don't exist, but it seems that most platforms have some sort of "collaborative" game

http://en.wikipedia....iplayer_online_games
in particular:
http://www.footballm...titial/en/index.html

and despite its problems:
http://www.easports....m/maddennfl/home.jsp

great idea for kids games too

Lots of comments - thanks everyone! To answer some of the points raised:

I don't have any problem with several teams competing against each other; in this case, the victory conditions can be the same as in any other empire-building game - complete annihilation of the opposition, furthest technological advancement after a given date, whatever. All I'm suggesting is that each team should have several players. So thanks natmaka, I possibly didn't make that clear - I agree that it's the competition between teams that makes any game interesting.

PeeJayEl, I like the idea of an element of chance; it's a separate idea to the main concept here but of course there's no reason we couldn't incorporate it into our games. Many games based on Dungeons & Dragons-type rules roll a virtual dice to determine whether an attack hits and I think this is supposed to blanket include all kinds of things that could have gone wrong, but in a FPS for example it could be made more explicit. Chance does materialise as random natural disasters, attacks from wandering bandits and so on but I agree, we're now at the level of computing power that we can easily incorporate it at the more basic level of guns misfiring, etc.

tlyden from what I can see, the games you've linked to give one the opportunity to play AGAINST your friends rather than ON THE SAME TEAM as them. If I'm wrong, please do correct me, and my apologies in advance.

maddie40 and herodot, thanks for the encouragement! I agree, cooperation and collaboration are the things we need to teach children and society today, rather than violence and competition.

Teamwork succeeds with the right incentives. I personally would not play for "virtual incentives."

Cooperation in gaming is really an area that needs to be enhanced. At the moment, there are games that encourage you to do so, I'll talk about two examples :

Guild Wars ( RPG )
and
Counter-Strike ( FPS )

== GUILD WARS ==

CONCEPT
You need to team up with other players to do quests. There's many classes you can choose, and you need to balance your team if you want to succeed : for example, make sure you have a monk that can heal you.

PROBLEMS
The way the game let's you team up with others is that you join a room and than ask others by clicking on their avatars to join their team. Most of the time, you're teaming with players you don't know. Also, you can disband at any time, so it happens very often that players quit in middle of a mission and you won't be able to achieve the objectives, so you will have to restart from the beginning, which is REALLY frustrating.

== COUNTER STRIKE ==

CONCEPT
Half of the players are playing Terrorists and the other half Counter-Strike forces trying to dismantle a bomb before it explodes or saving hostages. The game is fast paced and you need to coordinate yourself with others to avoid being trapped or shot from an angle you're not looking at. You can also use the microphone to speak to others.

PROBLEMS
While there are servers which are playing this ways, on most of them players are going one-man-army style. The reason : While the team scores are being showed, the players with the most kills are put on the top of the list. So most players don't care about others.

So, what can we conclude ? First, that if you want people to play together, you need them to be able to know each other and feel like a team ( that means lobbies, microphone usage, mailboxes etc. ) but also enforce the team play, so players can't flee in the middle of the game without caring.

Remember, much of what is important for team-play takes play before and after the game : Briefing, strategy planning, taking a beer after the game etc. That needs to be made possible on Internet also, and at the lowest possible cost, or else it's vowed to failure.

By the way it's my first comment on Cambrian House.

Leif-

Thanks, Leif, for a very useful comment - and welcome to CH! I'm not very familiar with either of those games, but it's nice to know that collaborative games are out there in some form or another.

I think the Counter Strike problem is easy to solve: I'd always imagined victory being with the team rather than any individual. If the teamwork objectives are well-defined, each player in the team will have had to contribute in order to win and the winners will be the team with the best average skill and teamwork rather than the best individual players. In this situation, publishing individual players' results tends towards being meaningless.

The Guild Wars problem is one that would exist in short-lived combat/FPS/quest-based/etc games in which a mission is completed in a single session, but perhaps could be avoided in longer-term RPGs or empire-building games where the action is continuous and takes place over a period of weeks or months. If a player starts the game as part of a team, each time he/she logs in he/she will resume his/her place in the team and carry on with the objectives.

As for how to address the problem in the shorter-period single-mission games... I don't know. Perhaps your suggestion of taking a beer after the game isn't as crazy as it sounds - if we give players a small profile each and an out-of-game chat area and/or forum, hopefully relationships between regular teammates will build and a core of dedicated gamers will become known to each other. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Team score: it's easy to do on a CTF-type mod by only granting points to the whole team, and only for caps (flag capture, or flag keeping during a given amount of time, in some version), not for frags. Any clever team will then focus on strategic goals, and this fuels teamwork.

Another hack may lead to a better "constant balance", reducing differences in performance caused by a better mastering of the gameplay (physics, character control...) by one of the team: a logic constantly evaluates frag performance, and somewhat dynamically balances when some player if blatantly much better, at the tactical level, either by
* placing him in a weak team (swaping with a weak player). I don't like this because its bad for teambuilding, but it may be ok if players don't know each other
* allocating less resources to him (less maxspeed, less money to buy stuff, whatever)

In the 'real world' version of games like this - whether it's building a government, fighting a war or leading a covert commando operation - it's rare to find a situation that can be better handled by a good individual than even a reasonably mediocre team. In the gaming world however, experienced individual players can often skew the balance of games - as you point out.

Perhaps then we need to look at how to better define objectives and victory conditions to reflect this difference? My instinct would be that the more things there are to be done simultaneously, the less likely an individual will be to beat a team. One player may be able to capture a flag but capturing the opposition's while defending their own is a job for two at least. One leader might be able to invade a foreign country but trying to balance the economy and deal with a restless population back home should start to stretch him/her. (I do realise that many games ask you to do this now, but only to a level that the average player can cope with single-handedly. Allowing multiple players on a team will allow us to build in more complexity and hopefully me for more interesting games!)

Obviously if we're going down that route then a few soft start levels to build teamwork and confidence will be needed, but that's not a problem. Any thoughts?

By the way, thank you again natmaka for your continued interest. It's useful to have someone put this much thought into testing the idea.

> In the 'real world'
> it's rare to find a situation that can be better handled by a good individual than even a reasonably mediocre team

I beg to differ: for most matters which are to be done as quickly as possible, are difficult (not solvable immediately by most), 'quality'-oriented (abstract, not solvable by raw 'brute force'/muscle) and not very dependent on contingency parameters (time and space) a good individual is often better than a reasonably mediocre team. Think "fix ASAP a software bug", "play blitz chess", and so on. On a classic CTF game (TF-style) it will for example be the case for most spy work. However we probably agree on the main matter: in our strict "collaborative team" context games will not be made of a string of equivalent-and-maximal emergencies, nor will they induce very abstract problems (difficult to solve, for example not solvable by most without any documentation)

> In the gaming world however, experienced individual players can often > skew the balance of games

I was mainly thinking of players who master the "simulator", the game itself. An ideal game is totally "transparent", it does no imply any learning process, and therefore does give impede the 'work', during a game, of any beginner (who search for a command, cannot bunny hop nor rocket jump, and so on...). Life is full of hacks, too, and we call them 'experience', but they are of the very same nature than the problems at hand. A perfect game does no add to its simulation of real life something artificial and unwanted.

> One leader might be able to invade a foreign country but trying to balance the economy and deal with a restless population back home should start to stretch him/her. (I do realise that many games ask you to do this now

... by reducing the ratio (simulated time/wallclock time) for some aspect, somewhat slowing down or even "freezing" it, while the player cope with the others. This lets one single player 'simulate' multiple ones.

> Allowing multiple players on a team

And more than two teams, then variable context (day/night...) and reactions (something critical changes during a game, slowly or abruptly: "no one will ear anything during the next 5 minutes...", "in 10 minutes there will be no cap possible for blue during 3 minutes, then for red during 3 minutes (meaning: a team plays offense, the other defense. Or maybe meaning 'as the other team will think he knows what we will do, let's do something else' ) "...), enabling alliances between teams...

"Computer games have long been accused of producing competitive loners with no interpersonal or social skills, despite the fact that they usually place players in situations that would in the real world bring them into contact with many people."

I did not read all the comments but, probably a virtual world ala Second Life would be a nice platform to carry this ..on the contrary hundreds of strategy/role playing games are tuned into collaboration specially on the rise of online games. I been observing several gamers from different age group I would say "social networking " is being exercised since a chat tool bar is present. In most level up quest interaction and alliances is necessary to upgrade weapons via trade, ecommerce, and friendly tips on many "how to" inside the game.

If you have another thing in mind i think a higher specific hadware requirements will be needing to eventually lead to this such as a 3D environment and multi screen view (or larger) the way an arcade video game attracts clients. On second thought, isnt buddy system type collaboration already around? But, yes there are more room for better team experience in strategy games.

Goodluck!

Agrees with that Counterstike example..

But dont agree much with comment:

"In this situation, publishing individual players' results tends towards being meaningless"

Other games have the "MISSION" selection and this is where I think an enhancement feature should be augmented.

As the voting round draws to a close, thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions.

natmaka: I like the point of view that the game environment itself should be as transparent as possible. That's something I'd definitely want to aim for in any game produced using these ideas.

diMa_doNna: Thanks for your contributions and welcome to the discussion! The observation that many gamers are already forming loose alliances to swap tips etc is very interesting, and I think shows that there is scope for this sort of thing to be successful!

this is a great idea, i had one that was similar, with a small layout of a game idea. I just may post it! and again really great tips :)

thank you