Left 4 Dead and Relearning "Gaming"

Cooperative gaming has been around for a long time, from Gauntlet in the arcade to Double Dragon on the NES. The draw of this style of gameplay is that you can play with a friend (as opposed to taking turns) in a non-competitive way. If you have a friend over who has never played Halo multiplayer, you can always play split screen co-op through the campaign and both have a good time. In addition to “story” or “campaign” co-op, modern multiplayer games usually include a “team” mode which encourages cooperation, modes like “Capture the Flag” or team “deathmatch” or “slayer.” In these modes teams benefit from working together against the opposing team. In practice, this often results in a competition to see who can get the most kills on a single team. Your “opponents” might technically be the opposing team, but actually every player in the game becomes (to some extent at least) a challenger to your score (whether that be flag captures or kills).  In my experience gaming, I have had only  few matches where I honestly felt like I was working together with a group of players to achieve something as a team instead of seeking a high score against other players. For Christmas, my (lovely) wife got me Left 4 Dead, and since that time my conception of cooperative game play, and gaming in general, have changed.

The conceit of Left 4 Dead is that you are playing one of four main characters in a series of four zombie apocalypse “movies.” The premise of each movie is the same (playing off of the campy-ness of zombie movies): you have to fight your way through an environment to an extraction point where some element of the government will rescue you; in other words, your job is to survive.

What makes this premise so successful is that survival is all but impossible (except on the lowest difficulty setting) without the assistance of the other three players. Taking a cue from 28 Days Later, the zombies (or “infected” as they are called in the game) in Left 4 Dead move quickly, very quickly, and are aided by “special infected” who have various abilities and greater health and stregth. If you get attacked by enough infected humans, or get pounced on, grabbed, or knocked down by a special infected, you will soon die unless a teammate comes to your aid. The item-mechanic of the game, which allows teammates to heal each other and give each other some items, also encourages teamwork and selflessness. What this means is that the player is constantly looking out for his or her teammates. The impulse to run ahead of the team so that you can get more kills is quickly tempered by the knowledge that if you get separated from your team, you will die fairly quickly.

Playing Left 4 Dead with my wife and friends over the last few weeks has taught me a bit about how I conceive of gaming as a past time. My most basic impulse in gaming is to win, primarily to win alone. If at all possible, I’d rather be the one player in a Halo Team Slayer match who holds up the entire team than to just do my share. In other words, whether I am playing a single player RPG or a multiplayer FPS, I am primarily concerned with my personal gaming experience. I might enjoy the company of the friends I am playing with, but to a large extent, my pleasure comes from my performance. Left 4 Dead has challenged this perception in me by forcing me to not be a selfish player. When I play the game, my greatest enjoyment comes when the team works as a unit, against incredible zombie odds, to survive a campaign.

While Left 4 Dead is not a perfect game and is not for the easily offended (there is a lot of blood—obviously—and some profanity), it does demonstrate to me that as gaming becomes more of a social act, what it means to “game” and the reasons we “game” will change. Ten years ago I played games to win, as a personal challenge. What Left 4 Dead shows is that there is a future in gaming that moves us away from a conception of “gaming” as a private (or at least privately motivated) action to a social event motivated by the desire to share a common experience.