Competitive or Cooperative – How do you like to play with others?

I’ve mentioned recently in another entry that I’ve finally gotten into Steam and even started a small Steam group for the members of this site. One of the first things you tend to do with Steam is start playing more Valve games such as Left 4 Dead 2… which is where this entry comes from.

Thanks to a more robust online system for video games in recent years, we’ve all enjoyed a lot more competitive and cooperative gameplay in our games and it’s become an important inclusion for developers and publishers alike. The whole video game industry has become a much more social place thanks to various factors… though it’s interesting to see how people end up playing with each other in these multiplayer situations.

Back in my younger days, when the Internet wasn’t so readily available for me to use for online gaming, I relied on the multiplayer abilities of my consoles and a group of friends to come over and play games like GoldenEye or Perfect Dark to experience some multiplayer mayhem. In those days, I had a pretty mean competitive streak as well and the biggest reason why friends would all gather at my place rather than anyone else’s was because they all wanted to try and beat me.

That competitive nature of mine led me to play certain games religiously to practice tactics and manoeuvres as well figuring out what made these games tick, how I could take advantage of whatever game mechanics there were, etc… suffice it to say, I probably put a little too much time into the games I played against others than they ever did.

There were a few games that did have a co-op mode though… though that really didn’t end up any better since I’d end up running through and clearing all of the rooms with my friend trailing behind complaining about all the empty rooms and me replying “stop being so slow.” …Damn, I was so damn obnoxious back then… But years later, it looks like I’ve grown out of my competitive younger self and into an older, more cooperative me.

For quite a few years now, whenever it came to playing online or with others in general, it was always through some kind of co-op mode. For example, I’ve played through the entirety of Resident Evil 5, Halo 3, Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach with Jeff on the Xbox 360… and more recently I’ve played a few co-op based games including Red Alert 3 with Mav.

There’s lots of good fun to be had in cooperative games and certainly, Left 4 Dead 2 would continue that trend which is why I jumped straight in… only to find that it was I who was complaining about not being able to kill everything because everyone else had cleared the area before I could get a shot at a single zombie.

I mean, sure, it’s the first time I’ve played the game… and sure, I may not have played a PC FPS game since the days of Quake 2 and 3. I’ll get better and I’ll get used to PC gaming again, though I think the thing that’s most effected me is that I’ve lost my competitive edge I used to have as a kid.

I was more worried about trying not to shoot my own friends rather than killing zombies… and while they were all busy trying to steal each others kills, I was sitting there saying “oh wait, no need to worry Jeff’s taken care of that… oh wait, no Mav took down that Boomer… oh, cool, Sam’s taken care of the Witch.” I’m honestly not concerned about the scores at the end of the game as I am with getting through it and helping my friends out… but really, anyone who has played Left 4 Dead knows that it doesn’t really take that much to survive.

Sure there is a cooperative element to the game, but from what I can tell, it’s more about helping the other players not die so you don’t have to restart the level more than anything else. The rest of it is competitive mayhem in the form of who can kill the most zombies and how many special zombies they can take out before anyone else.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking back only a couple of weeks before when I’d send in my entire army over to Mav’s base in Red Alert 3 and watch them get wiped out trying to defend his base from an overwhelming attack and giving him a chance to rebuild his defences and forces. Hell, in Alien Swarm the character I ended up choosing was a Medic with my second weapon slot being taken up by the healing gun so I could make sure everyone else survived through the game.

It’s not that I mind the switch from being competitive to cooperative… it’s just that I’ve only really noticed the change in me now. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to be competitive in my video games ever again or if I’ll continue to remain a cooperative player. I do think cooperative is more fun nowadays though and can’t be bothered with all of the extra pressure of competitive play.

I dunno… what do you guys think? Are you more competitive or cooperative or have you somehow found a balance between both?

On a final note, thanks to Jeff for gifting me the US version of L4D2 so I could bypass the stupid censored Australian version altogether… it’s amazing this game is even censored. I haven’t seen anything in this game so far that’s anywhere near worse than what has come into this country completely untouched.