More than once, playing Microsoft's new Xbox 360 has made me remember what it's like trying to bicycle down a steep road slick with water and maybe even an ice patch or two.
It is a fond memory and perhaps one to keep in mind as Sony and Nintendo try to respond to the success of the 360.
When I was in elementary school in Woodstock, New York, in the early 1980s, the convenience store at the bottom of the hill had a single Gyruss game machine right by the door. There were a lot more games available at the Pinball Palace arcade down the street, but the high-school kids hung out there smoking cigarettes (and other things), so my mother forbade me to go.
I went to the Pinball Palace anyway, once in a while, but most often I played the machine at the convenience store. And I got very good at Gyruss (a cross between Tempest and Galaga). I didn't know I was any good, however, until I started approaching and then beating the high scores posted on the machine by my friends.
And once that happened, getting the high score became awfully important. During my sixth-grade year I tried to hit that machine at least four times a week, even if it meant riding my bike to school instead of the bus in the late fall and early spring. That way, I could ride down the hill after school, dodge the ice and make sure that my rightful place atop Woodstock's Gyruss hierarchy had not been usurped.
I didn't know all the other people who were playing that Gyruss machine when I wasn't there, but I sure knew if they beat my score. I'd ask the store clerk who the other big Gyruss players were, and he'd mention a late-night truck driver who would come in once in a while and a couple of kids from the other elementary school in town. I never met those other players, my rivals. We never played face to face. Nonetheless, we formed a tight, dedicated gaming community bound together by a simple device: the high-score list.
That was 1984. Soon after, my Gyruss machine was removed from the store. The Pinball Palace shut down. In the late 1980s, as home-game consoles and PCs became more powerful, arcades across the country disappeared. Gaming stopped being something that people did in public and became something that most people do at home.
And as part of that shift, gamers lost the powerful sense of competitive community that had thrived in the arcade, sustained by the high-score list.
Instead, for two decades video games have been categorized as either single-player or multiplayer. Multiplayer has meant only one thing: competing with or against other people in real time, either over the Internet or in your living room.
By contrast, single-player has generally meant that no matter how cool the gameplay, there is no good way to share or compare accomplishments. For example, I may have beat God of War for the PlayStation 2 or Baldur's Gate for the PC, but because those are single-player games I have no easy way to compare my achievement with another player's. I can't easily show off my characters or prove that I got more gold and killed more monsters than my buddy. Katamari Damacy, for example, is a fantastic game, but there is no way for me to compare myself to the best Katamari players in the world. Ever since the death of the arcade, "single player" has largely meant "in a vacuum."
The Xbox 360 has shown that it doesn't have to be that way. The 360's easy, seamless integration of the Internet with the Xbox Live service has revived the arcade-like sense of community that largely disappeared at the time Ronald Reagan was president.
With the Xbox 360, you create a persistent gamer nickname that tracks your accomplishments in all games. In a racing game like Project Gotham Racing 3, you don't actually have to be online at the same time as your friends in order to race against them. You can race against a re-creation of their best performances on a certain track. Or you can "tune in" live and watch the best racers in the world compete.
Or you can play Kameo: Elements of Power completely in a single-player mode, on your own time. But you then have the ability to easily compare how you did with your friends' performances.
For game makers, the big challenge will be to take full advantage of this powerful system. Next year, the new single-player role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, is expected from Bethesda Softworks. Role-playing gamers (like me) can be truly frightening in the amount of obsessive attention they pay to optimizing their characters and making them as powerful as possible. Until now, players in single-player role-playing games have rarely had a way to show off their creations with the wider world. (The Diablo series from Blizzard Entertainment has done perhaps the best job of combining single-player gameplay with an online community.)
With the Xbox Live platform that Microsoft has created, Oblivion now has the opportunity to pioneer a totally fresh approach to a role-playing game community. The core game may be single-player only, but players should be able to browse the top-ranked Oblivion characters from around the world -- PC or Xbox 360. I should be able to see if my friend has really killed as many demons and fiends in his game as I have in mine.
These are the ways that publishers can create powerful online communities even if the games themselves may be single-player. It is no coincidence that Will Wright, creator of The Sims, is embracing exactly this approach for his coming PC game, Spore. In Spore, the core game will be single player, but other planets in the game will be copies of worlds that other users have created in their own single-player experiences.
These are the things that should worry Sony, Microsoft's main gaming rival. Sony's console-game operation has traditionally played down online gaming, believing, rightly, that only a small portion of players really want to play head to head all the time. But Microsoft has shown that you can create a powerful experience by reviving the arcade sensibility, melding single-player games with online community functions.
So Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3), expected next year, may end up being a better pure game machine than the 360. Its graphics may be a bit shinier, but will the PS3 create a real sense of community online? For all the things that Sony does well, it is not a networking company. The company's recent debacle, in which its music operation embedded viruslike software on millions of retail CDs, demonstrated to a lot of people that Sony still doesn't understand the Internet.
It is the same blind spot that has allowed Apple to dominate the portable-music sector with the iPod and iTunes: Sony's inability to meld a consumer product with a compelling online service. Microsoft has figured it out. If Sony executives still do not understand, they just need to try to evoke that feeling of rushing out after school to get on the high-score list.
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