What is good cooperative gaming?

Enrolling newbies: First of all, the games have to be engaging and the basic ropes of roles should be very simple to learn, in order to engage new players. This is required so that the newbies get up to speed, and become functional for the team easily. Certain roles like being a grunt in a FPS or a grunt producer in RTS, should therefore be accessible. Getting into the details of carrying out bombing runs or producing advanced troops can be saved for later, as they become familiar with the game and actually DESIRE to increase their mastery of the game.

Be objective: Second of all: the game should provide clear-cut objective that are highly visible to all players. In SWAT 3, you had to kill every single bad guy and save the hostages. That was clear to everyone from the beginning to the end, and the tension was incredible.

Provide the means for cooperation: Some game just sit and demand cooperation. Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory seems to be one of them, because of an aggressive class system that differentiates clearly each one’s function, and because of an aggressive map designing that demands use of the classes (a team without an engineer is as good as dead usually, and being undercover spy for the other army is just fun). Often, some situations are what the doctor prescribed: in SWAT 3, very often the realistic environments offered so many vulnerabilities for the team that was entering the location that we just HAD to cover every angle and hope to press the trigger at the right moment to protect the rest. Achieving that coordination becomes a goal, and is something that will be remembered after the game.

Motives for playing cooperatively:
1) Lack of participants: In my case it was very often because we were not enough to get a team deatchmatch started (just 3 or 4 of us).
2) The desire to work together: playing with my brothers and friends together in a team made so much more sense than shooting each other. [OK OK, from time to time, a little deathmatch is also enjoyable.] At some point finding out who is the fastest-baddest-greatest shooter is just not something desirable. It is being together that is attractive.
3) Sheer cooperating pleasure: The human being is naturally sociable, and wants to work together not just to ensure survival, but also to achieve something higher/bigger than himself. Working together and reaching common goals is naturally enjoyed.

Enemies: The enemy should be common: everyone attack! Sometimes situations happen where the enemy of one is not the enemy of the other (in RTS which have some form of diplomacy integrated), but workouts can often be made, such as delivering resources, or blocking the path. Computer animated bots, with good AI are a must here. [A good bad example is the Delta Force series, while I enjoyed the solo play, there was a cooperative mode that we tried to play with my team, and the result was unequivocally the same: a rush to see who got to kill most of the stupid enemies. Novalogic has a deserved terrible fame in creating AI, which is a shame because the rest of their engines –in my view- was very good.] Sometimes, when enough players are around, 2 teams with conflicting goals (i.e. terrorists-counter terrorists) can keep the cooperation flowing… What went wrong with Counter Strike?

AI: So AI becomes very important in cooperative games, as a team of players can get really creative and spread out on the map to go achieving their goals. Can the CPU react to that? Can the bots respond to different situations like throwing a grenade to a group that is walking in a tight formation, or snipe each individual team member on a loose formation? The AI is a big requirement, because otherwise you fall on using other restrictions to control the situations such as a restrictive map design that allows only a player at a time through a corridor. True, it could happen in reality, but reality usually also offers so many more possibilities. The deployment of a SWAT team would normally include at least 3 or 8 positions: 1 or 2 sniper positions with good views to the crime scene, 1 central command station, and 1 to 3 teams going in. And in order to keep the game challenging, the AI has to be able to counter the sometimes massive firepower of a coordinated team: 5 machine guns can do a lot of damage, and bringing them down will in turn require coordinated action from the AI. What i mean is: good AI is challenging and keeps the gaming team on their toes.