Rant: Online gaming

I must be your bizarro version or something.

I find multiplayer games to be a lot more "pick up and play" then singleplayer games. There’s no storyline to get involved in. I can leave after 10 minutes and not worry about breaking the coherency of the plot.

The Artificial intelligence in a lot of games just doesnt appeal to me. Distance triggers, line of sight triggers ..probability determined automatic lock on. I find the appeal of multiplayer games to be that plain, old fashioned nerves come into play. Thinking and reacting under pressure wether it be online chess or Battlefield.

Maybe this difference is just perceived but it is a difference to my sastifaction.

Dont get me wrong, I do play singleplayer games and enjoy them. But i don’t see online games as a cash in. I think of them as a welcome addition.

I do think singleplayer has become a lower priority though which i would assume to be obvious to everyone as a sizeable portion of games are multiplayer only now. Maybe that should be kept in mind.

It’s definitely an AI thing I think. Playing humans in Counterstrike for example is just a completely different game than playing against bots. This has been true since I first saw bots in Quake… they have certainly improved since then, but they still have a long way to go.

When I’m playing something like CS or Battlefield online, I’m taking actions depending on what I think the other guy is going to do. When it turns out that I’m right and I end up behind him, there’s so much more satisfaction in blowing him away knowing I’ve outwitted him as well! And knowing there’s somebody out there slamming their fist on their keyboard doesn’t hurt either :wink:

It’s not just adversarial gameplay either – anyone who has played Battlefield 2 in a decent squad that communicates and works together will know that the game is an order of magnitude more fun and interesting than just running around on your own. With the state of AI at the moment, there’s just no way this gameplay would be possible without having other people to play with, and failing a 24/7 LAN party, online is the only way to experience this.

Of course it’s always more enjoyable when playing against somebody you know, all the better if they’re in the same room as you (so you can see them slamming their fist!). But without that possibility, I much prefer playing against somebody who is intelligent and adapts their play to yours as opposed to an AI bot.

It’s definitely an AI thing I think. Playing humans in Counterstrike for example is just a completely different game than playing against bots. This has been true since I first saw bots in Quake… they have certainly improved since then, but they still have a long way to go.
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Hey Keith!

Here’s a question: let’s imagine we had the best AI in the world, I mean Turing test good in the widest sense. But here’s the rub – you know it’s an AI. Do you think you’d enjoy the frag as much?

Without getting into philosophical discussions around intelligence etc., I think that we simply enjoy the fact that the poor unfortunate you’ve just dismembered at the other end of the DSL cable has just taken you off their christmas card list.

And it’s been a while since I got a christmas card from an NPC.

Steve

like stevec said, its our competitive side of us, its generally more fun to win (or lose) against real people than it is against the computer. There is more felling of accomplishment beating a real person than A.I. (which is designed to be beaten).

a little off topic but, competitiveness and accomplishment is the reason achievement (xbox) points are so popular, its human nature.

so in conclusion, Ronny is either a) not human b) a noob that gets pwnd all the time

off topic: one time when I was playing gears online, a yank told me to play games from my own country, and he hated foreigners playing American games…. and then called me a N*****, a jew and a dirty mexican….nice guy!

Two things that about online MP games.

If you start playing and end up against people are are quiet good, its really hard to get into it. We used to play Battlefield 1942 at work and before that CoD, both of which I was completely rubbish at. But because it was in-office, the teams can be set up for player ability and you know its fair and you get the chance to become a better player and they the game becomes more fun. Online you can’t do that, you play with unknowns and you get massacred for being a noob, which really sucks :(

Also, as it’d been said, "it’s the competitive side of us". Judging from my girlfriend, it seems that girls don’t have the competitive edge that most boys have, so do online MP games have the same appeal to girls??

I think girls can be completive too, but maybe not in war games.

the good thing about halo 2 and also true skill, you more likely to be put into matches with people with in your own skill range. It works pretty well in halo 2 ( bar derankers and "2 free months" users)

some MMOs have quite a high percentage of women playing and maybe even girls..and they have combat and fighting in them

in some of the work I have done women prefer to compete against people they know than people they do not know…or compete in private contexts than in public spaces…it is not about competition per se.

In fact if you have ever watched/played women’s hockey or other sports you would find it hard to argue that women are not competitive! I don’t buy the women are not competitive argument.

Aphra.

Indeed!

*gets coat*

In fact if you have ever watched/played women’s hockey or other sports you would find it hard to argue that women are not competitive! I don’t buy the women are not competitive argument. [/quote:930806c175]
True, I’ve play GAA in school where it was the boys team versus the older girls and they’re vicious. Maybe its just my missus…

Here’s a question: let’s imagine we had the best AI in the world, I mean Turing test good in the widest sense. But here’s the rub – you know it’s an AI. Do you think you’d enjoy the frag as much?[/quote:67936b3f7d]
Heheh that’s a good question… well if it so good as to be fit for the Turing test, it’s probably got a serious superiority complex so I’d still get some satisfaction from it! But no; I guess when it comes down to it, you get that little warm glowing warming glow from knowing that somehow, somewhere, someone human is pissed off at you.

On the other hand, I’d be more than happy to play coop with a proper AI if it was smart enough (and had some personality – like Jules said, personality goes a long way), as on average they’d be much more reliable than human players and would work better in a team.

Does it say something about me that I would prefer playing against humans, but with machines?!

On a related note, check out "The Crossing", theres an article in this months Edge about it, where online multiplayer and singleplayer cross over, lads who want to play deathmatches online can act as soldier NPCs against you in the singleplayer game, which would be far better than bots

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8F_ik8A1I

http://www.arkane-studios.com/en/the-crossing.php

Personally like both formats to stay separate. I enjoy the storytelling aspects of a game when I have time to kill, and for me it’s kind of like reading a good book . I stop and start at random times but I never get bored of it until I’m finished. (assuming it’s a good game!)

Where as online gaming is if I want a short sharp burst of kicking someone’s ass, or just simply a change from the game that I’m working through. I’m only hooked up to xbox live a month now, and I’m enjoying it in a different way to play online. i like the feeling of playing games such as wrestling / soccer / beat-em-ups with a controller over a nice enough interface with similarly skilled players, but in the long run I much prefer a good FPS with a mouse and keyboard. I’s all about which I prefer at that moment in time.

Although because of the fact that Microsoft are going to charge people for playing internet games on PC now when Vista Live is released in the Summer, this discussion will ultimately have a different twist on it come this time. we may all be far happier with our offline single player games because it’s nicer to our wallet.

Here’s a question: let’s imagine we had the best AI in the world, I mean Turing test good in the widest sense. But here’s the rub – you know it’s an AI. Do you think you’d enjoy the frag as much? [/quote:a0746c34dd]

If it’s frag-only we’re discussing, then in my case probably, because I’m not really bothered whether I play (say CS1.6 or BF2) SP with bots or MP with a clan or unknowns, so long as I can enjoy a good carnage session.

See, as enjoyable as I find playing SP BF2 with 70 bots or so, even on veteran with all the available tweaks and whatnot, the AI remains very dumb/basic, because of what appears to be the overriding logic: one flag after the other, in geographically-closest-to-farthest fashion, no defending capped flags, no spawning from capped flags, etc. = there’s no AI strategic/tactical initiative, such as to be found with humans online. So if you propose AI which is ‘that’ clever, then for a game such as BF2, it should be just as enjoyable offline as online.

Minus the gloating of course, but where’s the satisfaction, really? So you’ve pwnd =<o>=r0x0r [DE] on a ranked server, so what? Who the f* is =<o>=r0x0r [DE]? Why does it matter at all? To me, it only matters because of the context of the game: I stopped =<o>=r0x0r [DE] from capping the flag/blowing up the CP/sniping my team.

But then I believe that’s the "aging player with less & less play time" syndrome – if gaming still represented as big a part of my leisure time as it used to, my reply would have been different – no doubt I would be much more competitive and have a marked preference for online MP.

So, I think there’s a "gamer age" (or "gamer dedication" or gamer… I dunno… maturity?) angle to that question/the whole online gaming thing, at least in terms of fast-moving action games, e.g. FPS.