Forget Online Multiplayer, Give me Four TVs All in the Same Room

My friends and I aren’t the usual student type. Instead of going out to drink, we usually order pizza, sit in the house and play videogames. To many readers of Nukezilla this won’t be a shocking revelation – most gamers do this. But to those on the outside, The Others, this isn’t the norm. In fact, four grown men sitting in a house with four PlayStations and four TVs is somehow ‘sad’.

Harry has written about this more eloquently than I could, but the point remains that for the majority of the time socialising with my friends amounts to sitting in front of TVs.

Over the last decade or two of gaming, something has happened that has revolutionised how we play games. Instead of them being solitary experiences for most (although they still can be) the emergence of online play has morphed them into a multiplayer experience where you and your friends who live down the street can kill Americans for fun.

Games like the Call of Duty series are on the border of cultural sensations and they only seem to be becoming more fun and engaging. My game of choice for a while has been Bad Company 2, a game that has that little bit more realism and depth than its Activision brother. This article isn’t about the comparative differences between the two though, in fact the game doesn’t matter.

The online play included in these titles has become so integral to the creation and sale of videogames that it feels like we’ve forgotten how much fun playing games with people in the same room as you can be. As we play across the internet on Xbox Live or PSN, actually sitting and playing games with people across the same room seems to have fallen away.

This problem really became apparent a few nights ago as three friends and I sat down to play Bad Company 2, a game only I had played before. After setting the game up and teaching them the basic mechanics, we all settled in for our first match where I put us on Arica Harbour on Squad Deathmatch, a map known for sniping. We all sat in a row in my friend’s living room, sound blaring from four TVs and began the match. After lots of deaths we all made our way to the same building, all picked a window and then began taking the out the enemy as we saw them. We’d start calling out:

“There’s one near the red building!”

“Which red building, there’s four of them!” I’d reply.

“The one with the water tower,” somebody would shout back.

So from then on, that particular building would be the “red water tower one”. From this, each building or area got its own name, something that we could all shout out and easily identify. On one map we even assigned buildings with letters. As my novice friends began to get to grips we started to get good. We’d call out enemy positions, spot and snipe for each other and generally get kill after kill using communication, often using each other’s screen for help.

We’d huddle up in a building, calling out to each other the enemies we could see. We’d congratulate each other’s kills with calls of “saw that, nice job” and taunt when a person missed; then inflicting the ultimate embarrassment: taking the kill from him. “Don’t worry, I’ll do it for you” was a standard insult. This sense of team work, even camaraderie, is just not something that I feel as much while playing with your friends online. Not being in the same room you don’t share the kills, the deaths or the emotions. There’s a feeling of detachment that seems very hard to get over.

Crappy mics, lag and other things don’t help this, of course. In my home town I have a friend who lives about four miles from my house and for years we could never be in the same game lobby as each other. People from Newtown to New York, no problem. But Newtown to Hodley? Not happening.

Now you may be thinking “is this guy just now realising playing games with people is fun?”, to which I reply of course not. The problem is that this sort of gaming is slowly being pulled away as the online component becomes more and more focused. Bad Company 2 doesn’t even have System Link, which I find insane. LAN parties are great fun not because you’re playing the same game, but because you’re playing the same game together.

Four TVs and four copies of Bad Company 2 all in the same room is a brilliant way to play multiplayer games and was probably the most fun I’ve had playing videogames in a long while. Online play might let you play with folks in America and beyond, but it’s hard to beat playing with folks in the same room as you.