When my girlfriend and I play together on a single player game, we pass the controller to each other, sometimes within a level as we did with Fable. We’d sometimes stop and talk about what the next step should be, and this talk was fairly deep talk. I really didn’t know this was a trend.
But ace scribe Evan Narcisse took the controller away from N’Gai Croal at
Newsweek’s Level Up blog to talk about the trend. In an essay about Single
Player Coop Play, Narcisse says, when he plays the casual/hardcore game Portal,
“By my lonesome, I might've chalked up my occasional
frustrations to poor design, frazzled reflexes or my own cognitive bottlenecks.
Playing co-operatively with B allowed me to take some of the pressure off of
myself and let the game seep in.” Narcisse speaks about many things in the piece. But the main thing I
come away with after reading the thoughtful story is an occasional need – a
veritable yearning -- for community within single player games, along with the
need to stop and take stock of what’s happened and what it means before one
plays again.
