Hi. I’m Syn, and this is my corner. I want to talk about games. To be more exact, with each of these articles, I would like to take a specific title and use it as a point of analysis of its underlying ideas or mechanics, almost as if it were a case study. It may be a bit experimental, but I think it should prove fun for all parties involved. And feel free to start up a discussion below, I’d really love that.

Make no mistake. Brink is not an excellent game (though it has become a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine over the past few weeks or however long I’ve been trying to write this). Those reading who indeed read other game sites have inevitably seen a plethora of disdain thrown its way, but as I stated in my last article in this series, I’m not here to review the game. I merely want to talk about it. And this game in particular made me think of something worth talking about. Multiplayer. Its place in games. How it can potentially move beyond where it is now and in what ways Brink hints at that prospect (while simultaneously falling on its face in other regards). What Brink attempts has been referred to by the vomit-inducing moniker “crossplayer.” That is, the seamless blending of singleplayer and multiplayer in one experience. Only one game and its sequel (Left 4 Dead and L4D2) have ever achieved this with any degree of success in my mind, though many in recent years have tried. Before we start talking about the game at hand, however, let’s start by breaking down the respective functions of singleplayer and multiplayer in games. A touch academic, I realize, but there are some important points that I want to throw out there before getting into the kernel of this article.

Before I go any further, I should openly state that I don’t really have any preference for game or game type as long as it’s well designed and has something to say. That said, I think that multiplayer games have one very big advantage over the way that current-generation single player games are designed, which I’ll explain in a bit. Though, as we know they serve different purposes and often cater to different audiences.

The modern single player game has a few distinct purposes. First, they are generally designed to convey a narrative. This is one of the aspects of the single player game that is most fundamental but also perhaps most difficult to effectively achieve. I don’t want to dwell on this too much (I’d like to devote an entire one of these articles to game storytelling regardless) but seriously, how many game stories do you think are either inherently good or told well? I can probably count one one hand the number of truly meaningful game stories I’ve played through. It is a difficult feat for a number of reasons, but I think chief among them is the misappropriation of games’ strengths as a storytelling medium. However, aside from the story I think people come to many single player games because they are sort of like excitement engines. Many games (even nonlinear ones) are designed in such a way that players are practically accosted with cool stuff to see and occasionally participate in. Like think of God of War for a second: pressing the square button to eviscerate a minotaur doesn’t actually add anything to the gameplay, but it is really cool to experience regardless. I’ve noticed that this is the most apparent in games that have the express purpose of telling a solid story. Only rarely do you see a game with really interesting mechanics wrapped in a really interesting and well conveyed story (e.g. Portal, Amnesia, etc.). Part of this I think is derived from how we process experiences but as I already suggested, that is a discussion for another time.

Multiplayer games have to be designed in a very different way as they serve alternative functions. This is where my argument might get a little weird, so bear with me. On the surface, multiplayer games exist to provide players with the challenge of facing down human opponents as well as elongating a given player’s stay with the game, which is an ingenious move on the developer’s part if it’s designed and integrated well, as they don’t want people to tire of their game too quickly. However, there is something else to them that I want to discuss that does not get brought up with multiplayer too much: Player agency. For those of you who do not know, agency refers to an individual’s ability to feel as if they are in control their own life, or at least the controllable aspects of it. When I mention player agency in games, I am talking about a player’s ability to feel as if they are making meaningful choices. And this goes beyond deciding to choose the “evil” option in an RPG conversation tree. In recent years, there has been a big development initiative to make games with multiple paths through them and/or multiple ways to play. That’s great, but it’s not quite the same as true agency (which might in fact be impossible), because the choices you make (and, more importantly, their resolutions) therein essentially exist even before you put the disc into your machine. Games like Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain employ some very clever techniques to secret the seams between branching paths, but you as a player still know that they and all the potential other ways the game can play out are still there hiding in the game code. Multiplayer games have traditionally not hinged on story as their singleplayer brethren have, so the focus of design has been squarely on play–perhaps the only design element that is unique to games. Historically, that is what a game is: An exercise in play either with or against a group of others constrained to a particular rule structure. And therefore, multiplayer developers are basically giving players a ruleset and tools with which to act inside of rather than a path (or multiple paths) to walk along. This renders player choices made as meaningful to the players since their outcomes have not yet been determined. I’ll give you an example from Brink. I was playing and saw a teammate get gunned down by enemies. I ran out from cover and into the line of fire in order to revive him, dying in the process. Now, we know this action was not meaningful to any of the characters in the game world and the world didn’t change because of it. However, to the players involved, it might have been at least somewhat impactful. I remember mumbling “You better not die now,” even though I knew he couldn’t hear me. This can also be observed in just how furious people get over multiplayer games, but we can have that talk at a later date as well.

So, to the question at hand. What does Brink do to try to bring together these two seemingly antithetical styles of game design–narrative-focused singleplayer and fast-paced competitive multiplayer? The short answer: Not enough. But here’s the long answer. Brink is a game that seems to have way too much content in some parts than in others, making it awkwardly uneven. It is easy enough to write the game off as a boring Team Fortress 2 knockoff, but I think that’s partially missing the point. In spite of what the rest of the internet says, I found the part where you actually shoot guys in the face to be pretty enjoyable. However, the way Brink is assembled makes it problematic. The story progression is in a completely separate sphere than the shooting part, and few things in game design bug me more than not using gameplay to tell a story or vice versa. It would be extremely possible to not even know or understand anything about the story (except for the fact that the guys you’re playing as live in a pretty messed up place) while playing this game, and as a result, the game relinquishes about half of what it had originally set out to do. The story is conveyed through a little dialogue voice over followed by a cutscene at the very beginning of the mission. This mode of storytelling works (if only slightly) in some circumstances when a story does not pretend like it matters, but this one tries to act important. One way that the developers try to give the story a sense of weight is by injecting the players’ custom models into these cutscenes when appropriate. As such, you may see yourself or your human teammates chatting it up about their mission as opposed to the nameless generic stock models. This could be an effective way of letting the players participate in the story, but its where that sort of player-narrative connection ends. The rest of the narrative seems hastily told and only exists as exposition for whatever mission it prefaces, as opposed to being threaded throughout the rest of the game. By doing this, the game actually lessens the amount of agency each player may feel, because in spite of how well a person performs in game, none of it really seems to matter. It’s easy to see that story tries to carry weight–characters question the motives of their mission, are cognizant that their actions may ultimately do more harm than good, and everything has an air of moral grayness–but all this is relayed to players in such a little amount of time that it comes off as forced and unnecessary.

This leads me to the point that the game itself does not actually support much of the story. Ideally a game set in a dystopian future with two warring factions (neither of which is really in the right) would try to explore some of the complex decisions either side would have to make in order to further their goals but simultaneously retain some semblance of humanity. As mentioned, the narrative elements hint at this but never really flesh it out in a compelling way. The game however completely washes over it. Many of the objectives are fundamentally the same from mission to mission, albeit dressed up differently. Depending on the role your chosen faction takes in the given scenario (i.e. attacking or defending) you will in most circumstances be given something to either attack or defend. It is usually an object, such as a utility robot, but sometimes its a teammate (e.g. you need one of your team’s operatives to hack a console and the rest of the team has to defend him). I didn’t get much sense of why any of this was important while playing, it just boiled down to something that I had to do in order to win. Worse yet, this type of attack/defend dynamic along with the game’s level design sets up some nasty (maybe intentional) choke points that just bottleneck the entire flow of the match into what feels like a glorified game of tower defense. The game’s focus on teamwork should not be overlooked, however. Brink is quite good at pointing everyone in the right direction, and giving players rewards for helping others rather than helping themselves. For example, as a medic I get an experience bonus for healing a teammate but none for self-healing. From a radial menu, players choose what objectives they want to participate in, immediately bringing up a waypoint marker on the HUD, which helps centralize the action and gives players more control over how they want to go about helping their team. Even with these modifications to the formula, the game ultimately feels like just another multiplayer shooter. The type of agency that I mentioned before is certainly provided–especially in how objectives are delegated–but it still doesn’t ascend to anything beyond being a pretty okay FPS. The shooting and running around bits are fun enough and it has a wealth of character customization options, but still it fails at bringing any kind of impelling force to the game beyond the desire to continue fragging people and leveling up your character. I suppose true crossplayer is still a ways off.