MTV's Stephen Totilo recently advanced a theory that Nintendo is moving away from single-player experiences. Gamelab project manager K. Thor Jensen examines the ramifications of that decision in this essay.

In a recent essay on his Multiplayer blog, Totilo puts forth an interesting theory on the future of Nintendo's software development - that the company is moving away from traditional bread-and-butter singleplayer experiences like the Legend of Zelda games towards a strategy of multiplayer-focused titles. In reading this, I wondered what the long-term ramifications of that strategy would be, both for the console market as well as the casual downloadable game market.

One of the most common complaints about the Wii and DS software releases to date is that the consoles don't offer enough for the "hardcore gamer," the market of players willing to sink 60+ hours into a Final Fantasy or a Resident Evil that dominated the gaming mindshare over the last decade or so. Most Wii games are easy to learn experiences that offer exciting, fun gameplay without a great deal of strategic depth. And most of those games contain a multiplayer element, whether competetive or cooperative. The most interesting of these create new forms of co-op play, from Super Mario Galaxy's allowing the second player to move the star pointer around with a second Wiimote to affect the game, to Animal Crossing's massive social world. Wii games especially emphasize the experience of playing socially with friends in the same room as you.

Interestingly enough, many "hardcore" games are also embracing cooperative play - first-person shooters are just as likely to have co-op multiplayer as competitive multiplayer, and most are being designed from the ground up with co-op in mind. Of course, the major PC genres have always incorporated competitive multiplayer, and games like Team Fortress 2 fold both types together. These robust multiplayer components extend the lifespan of a game many, many times beyond the traditional single-player story, making them a significantly better value for the consumer.

But if multiplayer is so successful in other genres of gaming, why aren't more downloadable casual games including multiplayer elements? For one, it's much more difficult for more than one person to operate the same computer at once, removing the real-world socialization element from play. Some developers have tried to create games that use multiple mice, for example, but none have been successful. That leaves Internet-based multiplayer, which would seem to be a fertile area to develop into - look at the popularity of Web-based Scrabble, chess, card games, and the like on Yahoo and MSN. These games have hundreds of simultaneous players daily. Why aren't original casual game developers building games with them in mind?

The most obvious answer to this is that almost all of the existing digital multiplayer games were multiplayer before they were digital. In fact, up until a few decades ago, there was no such thing as a "single-player" game. Games were by default played with, or against, at least one other human being. But with the advent of arcade games, the CPU took the place of the second player, and the essential backbone of game design changed. No longer were game rules created to put all "players" on a level playing field. Instead, the game's rulesets were built to create a steadily increasing ramp of challenges for a single player to overcome until they reached a narratively-defined ending. Once the player's skills grow to the level necessary to complete the game, there exists no other reason to play the game. Today's casual downloadable games generally hew closely to this model, with a single-player “story mode” and occasionally a “challenge mode” where the narrative elements are removed.

Adding multiplayer features to games is generally seen industry-wide as a good thing. Returning play to a social experience, rather than a solitary one, is a noble goal. But can that be done while still preserving the essential elements that we play games for now - the tension, the challenge, the characters and narratives? Cooperative play is one way to have the best of both worlds – because players are not competing, the game is still balanced to be gamer against machine.

If casual games are going to change to embrace this trend, the design philosophy behind them will need to change too. Will Nintendo be the company to lead this process? I don't know, but I'm interested to see where they're going.

By K. Thor Jensen, Project Manager.

Discuss this article in the Forums.