We have Multiplayer at Home
Lots of developers want to make multiplayer games, some commercially and some just to play with friends. A simple concept: make a game which multiple people can play together. But what makes something multiplayer? The game or the players? We have a look at local multiplayer and its evolution over the last 60 years.
Multiplayer at Home
Let us start with multiplayer as it began, locally. This was not inside the home itself, but at the arcade.
The first forays into multiplayer did not start with the split screen format we associate with local play now. The format was certainly desired, but hardware constraints on performance made running multiple instances of a game simultaneously unviable. During the infancy of arcade games, making a game multiplayer was an even greater feat than it is today.
One of the earliest arcade games Computer Space (1971) encountered these technical limitations for some time while trying to match its inspiration, the computer-based game Spacewar! (1962). Meanwhile, a sibling of the same inspiration, Galaxy Game (1971) did manage to achieve a multiplayer connection of up to four players, across two separate screens. Unfortunately this was at the cost of their commercial budget. Early on, multiplayer was possible but at such a high development cost that it could make or break a studio.
Hence the arcade multiplayer was initially split between two options. The first was running one instance of the game but with two separate inputs: a joystick held by each player. This is what we might view as standard single-screen multiplayer, manifested in gameplay like Pong (1972).
The second option is difficult to even classify as multiplayer. One might equally dub it 'competitive singleplayer', 'pass-and-play', or 'alternating-turns'. There is not adequate terminology to describe it in terms of its multiplayer element. If the game involved any sort of racing, one might refer to it as a time-trial. However the format could encompass any game whose completion resulted in a numerical value, directly linked to the player's success during that session. More often than not, we would describe this value as the player's score.
The conundrum with referring to these sorts of games as multiplayer is that they are only circumstantially so. A single player could complete a session of the 1976 game Sea Wolf and pay no attention to the previous player's high score. Meanwhile two players could each play a game session back to back, and be in direct competition with one another by comparing their scores at the end. Conceptually, this principle could be applied to almost any singleplayer game - play the game, complete it up to a fail state, and compare the degree of success with another player, using an arbitrary value. In this type of multiplayer, the onus is on the person playing the game to make it multiplayer.
What makes a score-based game significant is that it is also often accompanied by a shared scoreboard. That is to say, there is a transference of persistent data from one player's game state to another. In essence one player has done something in their game which has altered the game of another player. Although not playing the primary gameplay loop together simultaneously, the players themselves can still be playing against one another. The temporal displacement is not significantly dissimilar to any turn-based game. The gameplay loop is simply rendered at a larger scale, to include a game's repeatability and shared commonality as part of its scope.
This is a Local Game, for Local Players
Although the era of arcades is very much over, local multiplayer does still persist. The types of connection differ greatly however. The most standard connection is using the splitscreen format: with a single machine displaying the same game, on the same screen, but using two different perspectives. The multiplayer connection is hardcoded into the game itself, interpreting two different inputs. This lends itself primarily to console games, in that larger consoles were designed to work with multiple controllers. PC games have always struggled with multiple inputs by comparison, relying on all inputs to be shared from the one keyboard. Games with a standard WASD could reliably use the arrow keys for a second player, however any games with more complex controls, or over three players, would have to begin stretching for more non-standard keys. Four or five players could feasibly use IJKL, the number pad arrow keys, or even implement mouse control movement comparable to the keyboard movement. However four or five hands on a single keyboard, looking at a single screen, is not the most comfortable position. So many local PC games often necessitated the use of controllers, like their console counterpart. Hence the split screen format, although a great solution for quick local multiplayer, is not ideal in every scenario.
A second degree level of connection is the next best solution for platforms which could not support splitscreen. This category included handheld consoles, such as Nintendo's GameBoy, released 1989. Small screen consoles initially required instead a wired connection between two separate devices, with separate instances and game cartridges too. Each player was playing the same game by transferring data across a peer-to-peer wired connection. Subsequent handheld console releases would see this become a short ranged wireless connection. One innovation which Nintendo receives significant praise for was the inclusion of single-pak multiplayer, later becoming DS Download Play. This allowed a lighter version of a game to be transferred to a second console. First a link was established from the host device to the client, transferring the game itself, then a peer-to-peer connection system was used for the multiplayer gameplay itself. Unlike splitscreen this connection was no longer contained within a singular game, but externally connected two separate instances directly.
PC gaming went in a similar direction, however required the more heavy duty LAN (Local Area Network) for its multiplayer data transfers. One of the most notable games to use this system was id Software's 1993 classic Doom. Using a modem to connect, the multiplayer data of up to four players could be shared within the same network. The nature of this connection remained peer-to-peer however. Information was simply being relayed from one game to the others by the modem, essentially making it no different in its multiplayer architecture to the wired/wireless play of the handheld consoles. Following the turn of the millennium, LAN gaming also branched out to include server-client architectures, where one machine would host the game instance, while sending and receiving data from other players via the network.
It's a Small World. Is the Internet Local?
Although we have been looking at local multiplayer. We should ask ourselves what constitutes local play, is it the players or the game? Moving to the present day, the popularity of LAN, handheld, and splitscreen is dwarfed by the online multiplayer space. The reach of an online connection has always been impressive, the ability to play with people worldwide from the comfort of your own home. Now with the time, money, and resources invested into the increasing internet speeds, local multiplayer is beginning to lose the advantages it once had: of speed and reliably over online connections. There still remains an inherent reliability in wired and local network connections, however we are no longer in an age where a rogue landline phone call can cut the internet connection of an entire house. Hence we now see local multiplayer style games, to be played with friends in the same house, but with online connections and servers.
One platform we have neglected so far in examining multiplayer history, is mobile gaming. As the youngest form of gaming device, mobiles and tablets are designed almost exclusively around online interactions. Short distance wireless data transference like Airdrop, Quick Share, and bluetooth is available but often creates unnecessary cross-system hassle, when any smartphone can instead connect to prevalent free Wi-Fi and 5g networks. Local multiplayer still exists in a sense for mobile, with more classic genres of game mimicking handheld consoles, like Minecraft: Bedrock Edition (2016) which has LAN capabilities. So too party games, like The Jackbox Party Pack (2014), could easily be recreated as board and card games.
Nevertheless, for the vast majority of games, local play on mobile very much follows the same format of online web games. Though you may be playing physically with a friend, you are on an online server with countless other people. The decision is often the player's, whether they choose to make the experience primarily local, by interacting mostly with their friend, or primarily online, by interacting with others. Often games targeting a local-play audience will accommodate more local-play modes, such as offering private rooms, lobbies, or servers, to isolate a group of players from the rest of the online space. Online being the default and local play being a variation upon that structure seems to be the intention going forward. This approach not only minimises the cost of development but also from a commercial standpoint allows game studios to retain proprietary rights over the online digital platforms.
Multiplayer in the Wild
The most interesting innovation of mobile multiplayer to me was in 2016, with the release of Pokémon GO. Specifically the 2016 release. Although Pokémon GO only added their official multiplayer group play, called Party Play, two years ago in October 2023, the game was arguably multiplayer long before that. Even before it introduced trading, like the main series games, in 2018. The game was functionally singleplayer at the time of release, and yet conceptually became the gestalt for a local MMO. Although primarily singleplayer in its gameplay, with everyone's game state being their own, the Pokémon spawning was deterministic. This meant that the game state guaranteed one player would encounter the same Pokémon in the same place as another player. The nature of the game localised players into specific areas in the real world, to catch their favourite Pokémon. The game data was not shared, but the world was. The data transference about Pokémon locations occurred not via game code, but via people. Much of this data transference was not truly local, in that key locations of gyms and Pokémon would of course be shared online over social media. Nevertheless, the gameplay necessitated that people go to the same place, playing the same game, to perform the same task, often at the same time. If there had been a shared score for each Pokémon a player captured, the mobile game would be akin to the classic scoreboard arcade games.
Instead of a score per se, the mechanic of gyms is what provided the game with rudimentary multiplayer. It allowed for captured Pokémon to be inserted into a defeated gym as its new defenders, not only showing off the capture but altering how the next player would find that gym. Like the scoreboard based games, the multiplayer interaction within the gameplay is minimal, but the localisation of players into the same place where they can talk and share information was what had players gaming together.
This sort of real-world multiplayer is perhaps a fluke; emergent from an AR game, published by an already highly popular franchise. However it bears the question of what other new genres and breeds of multiplayer might be possible with not only the progression of technologies, VR, AR, and AI, but also progression culturally. The number of multiplayer games is certainly on the rise, as tools and engines begin to support developers better. Yet even within local multiplayer alone, there are already many different ways to enable people to play together.
To any developers considering now what it takes to make a game multiplayer, the answer is very little. Even the most minimal transfer of data from one player to another can be enough to change not only another player's perspective on your game but also how they play.
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