There Is No ��I�� in Team

So, currently the biggest disappointment in my life��aside from every moment of every day��is that I couldn��t get City of Heroes to run on my wife��s notebook. No, I was not motivated by a sudden desire to draw the disbelieving, pitying stares of grande soy vanilla latte junkies by playing the game at the local Wi-Fi Starbucks. Instead, I was spurred by an atypical fit of responsible parenting: I wanted to let the 8-year-old razor-toothed homunculus my wife claims I sired play a game he desperately wants to play, but with me in the same game world, making sure no creep tries to become my son��s new best friend. But just as big a motive was this: I just really wanted someone to play along with.

I love City of Heroes, but in many ways it��s almost a single-player game. Oh, I��ve got a great big friends list, but they aren��t actual friends, they��re just people I grouped with once who weren��t totally incompetent and are worth the effort of seeking out the next time I log on. They��re less people than tools in a toolbox to help me get experience and new powers. COH��s fast-paced gameplay pretty much prohibits any deeper bonding, and frankly, I��m very OK with that. I avoid EverQuest because constantly resting to recoup hit points forces me to learn more about some guy��s lifelong struggle for continence than I would ever want to know.

I realize there are guilds packed with people in MMOs and clans for every RTS and shooter ever released, and to these people I say, ��Huzzah! You��ve got something almost akin to friends!�� But for all the touting of multiplayer in PC gaming, as more games are released with only multiplayer play, the more I think PC gaming is becoming an isolated experience. We��ve been gibbing each other in Unreal Tournament and other shooters for years now, and while human players are more challenging than bots, let��s face it, they��re just stand-ins for the bots. We never see who we��re fragging, never yowl in frustration in their faces, never get to dance a pants-free leprechaun jig of victory in front of them. We might be playing each other, but we��re experiencing it alone.

The best gaming memories I have all involve other people. I��ve played in softball leagues forever, and those games are more vivid to me because to this day, I can relive them by talking to my teammates. Who can I talk to about my stunning victory online in UT? My wife? She might indulge me, sure, but then she��d want to talk about succulents and/or our kids, and I need that the way I need to skin the bottoms of my feet. Real-life play rules, if only because trash talking is never as sweet as when you can tell your opponent to his face that you��ve spent the last hour shaving his mother��s back. Bottom line: All games are better with your opponents or cohorts in the same room. When the teamplay patch for the original Half-Life was released, this office rang with cries of ��Zombies to the bunker!�� eight hours a day. For three years, CGW competed in life-or-death High Heat Baseball leagues in which we didn��t just engage in hotseat play but also piled up behind the people playing just to watch. Thank God we did, or we��d have missed seeing former tech galoot Dave Salvator nearly break three toes kicking a subwoofer after a particularly bitter defeat.

Once upon a time, our electronic entertainment was played in a public space, in arcades where other people were watching or playing against us. Now we compete and cooperate, for the most part, anonymously online. How do we gloat satisfactorily? How do we rehash a spirited contest? A follow-up e-mail? The forced immediacy of hotseat play in a room more socially active than the home office holding the family PC has given console games a multiplayer enjoyability advantage for years. But now, console games are moving online, many with the millstone of live chat. Personally, I rank enduring the uninspired taunting of a barely parented 13-year-old right up there with eyelid excision on my list of Things I Hope Never Happen to Me, so don��t be looking for me on Xbox Live.

Is a console party game still a party game if the party is spread across the country and you��re alone in your living room? No, and this is where the PC reclaims real multiplayer. This weekend, you and your buddies get moving and haul all your PCs to one place and hook up a quick-and-dirty LAN. Replace STFU and LOL with the kinds of truly cutting comments you wouldn��t bother to type. Because every PC game can be a party game when you��re having a LAN party.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.