February Roundup: ‘Buddy Systems’

Well friends, we’ve come to the end of another very short February, and to show my dedication to you, I’ve decided to spend today indoors to do this roundup even while a sudden heatwave is bringing temperatures as high as -7. No no, don’t thank me, that’s what friends are for. Y’know what friends are also for? Videogames, which is why we wanted to hear all about the ‘Buddy Systems’ that bring us closer together:

As competitive as games may be, they’re equally cooperative in nature. What do games do to foster teamwork? Which game characters can you only think of as partners? Which of your friends do you depend on to share med-kits in Left 4 Dead and fire flowers in Mario? How have you used games to bond with others? On the other hand, how do games fail to bring you closer to others? Do your friends take you for granted because you prefer support classes or are you tired of having to always carry everyone else to victory? Tell us about the friendships that captivate you on either side of the screen, the mechanics that foster human contact or the systems that pull you apart.

Jeb Wrench kicks us off at his blog, Jeb Writes, by pointing at the failure of games in portraying non-romantic friendships in their rush to include a love story. In his own words:

A deep, meaningful friendship can resonate along completely different chords to players. Unfortunately, friendship is usually just marked along the same axis as romance – a measure of points along a slider. Often just a level below romance. Which I feel misrepresents the importance of friendship as a relationship. A strong friendship can be just as powerful, just as important and as a romantic relationship.

The author then moves into a brief discussion of Saint’s Row IV to point out a videogame plot that actually cares about friendships.

Tom Holt looks on the friendships games create between players, citing some of the games that has kept his social circle in tact across long distances. Furthermore, Holt examines the kinds of games that encourage mean-spiritedness between partners and the kinds of trolling that ruins friendly competition, even by imitating it.

Over at Discover Games, Shawn Trautman takes a different approach, suggesting that the value of games can’t be decided by authority or community, rather that it is perfectly valid to approach a game personally and disregard the consensus. He hammers his point home with this gem:

This Wind Waker situation provides the perfect opportunity to illustrate this idea without being accused of simply knee-jerkingly defending my opinions and playstyles. Based on my experience with the game, the oft-lamented “giant fetch quest at the end” criticism makes absolutely no sense. There is no giant fetch quest at the end for me, and there didn’t have to be for you, either. But here’s the twist: that criticism is still valid.

Phill English also misses the days when he and his friends could saddle up on a couch and charge into a game, but he’s glad to find new ways to connect with friends over games:

LANs are a thing of the past, surrendered to the inconvenience of having to schedule weeks in advance, blocking out time around work and family to lug our rigs around to a single address for a day’s play. No, it’s far easier these days to admit that we’re busy (read: old) people and instead take advantage of moments where our online friends lists align.

Looking back into games, Stephanie Jennings, writing for Ludogabble, discusses how odd it is that for all the emphasis Pokemon places on social activity, until Pokemon X and Y, there is no effort to create any relationship between the player’s avatar and their pokemon. Jennings muses about how appropriate the pokemon-amie system originating in X and Y is, comparing it to Mattie Brice’s Pokemon: Unchained challenge from 2013. From Jenning’s article:

But I wonder if players would feel increasingly uncomfortable with the violence of battle if the opportunities to develop emotional attachments expanded. I wonder what a Pokemon game would look like if bonding were the central concern, rather than combat. I wonder what a Pokemon game would be like in which the point actually was journeying, getting to know others, seeing and experiencing the world, and learning how to selflessly care for one’s friends. I wonder if we’d notice more how disturbing it is that we are content with the myths of the values of battle in the first place.

Speaking of violent friendships, Leigh Harrison explores how the clunky, awkward violence in Far Cry 2 challenges how he relates to the avatar’s thuggish friends compared with the rest of the NPCs in the game’s world. Whoo. Dark.

The Rev chronicles the great battle on Google’s Ingress, a multiplayer augmented reality game where people are aligned in teams based on their real life cities. Our intrepid narrator then relates to us how playing to the game’s virtual goals are accomplished physically. Pictures of each moment as they happened in the virtual and physical worlds particularly point to how Ingress crosses the boundaries between each kind of play.

Finally, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and it looks like I barely made my own deadline. This month’s topic was an opportunity for me to talk about “friendly games” on my blog, bigtallwords. Unlike your garden variety co-op games, which just allow multiple players to occupy the same space in pursuit of the same goal, friendly games like Kirby’s Epic Yarn are structured to actually get players talking and cooperating with little risk of failure.

Well I better get going now, you know how it is. But I really had a good time. We should totally get together more often. Hit me up by putting the Link-Matic 5000 on your very own site:

Anyway, our good friend Lindsey will be along with the next topic soon, but in the meantime if you’re interested in what we do here, consider contributing a monthly amount of your choosing on Patreon. Thanks again for reading and happy blogging!