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How
Many Players?
by Brian A. Roddy
Solo Games:Playing with
Yourself — Part one of a series of articles examining
the social and strategic differences in games for varying
numbers of players.
Suppose you happen upon a stranger playing a game by him
— or herself. This lone individual is rolling dice, examining
cards, and moving pieces around a board, without any opponents
to hamper their progress. There are no allies for the player
to trade with, no enemies to settle old scores with. There
is no "with" at all.
Would your reaction be "look at the pathetic person with
no one to play with?" It would for most people. Such
is the undeserved stigma of the one-player game. Let's try
to debunk the misconceptions.
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Single-player games are an internal activity, like reading a book
or writing a letter (and who would be thought pathetic for engaging
in either of of these?). They lack the interactive dynamic of multiplayer
games, but aren't necessarily any less interesting, challenging,
or rewarding. In a way, one-player games are the purest of struggles.
In a two-player game, you try to beat your opponent, through the
structure and filter of the rules and game system. In one-player
games, it's just you versus the system, player vs. the rules, human
vs. machine.
Games for one player are more common than most people realize. You
may not be able to name any one player board games — at least,
not until after you've finshed this article — but I'm sure
you know plenty of one-player card games (Solitaire), word games
(crossword puzzles), or video games (most of them).
The line between one-player-games and puzzles is extremely fuzzy.
In both Solitaire and a Rubik's Cube, your goal is to move from
disorder to a finished condition by manipulating physical objects
into a pattern based on color. Yet you "win a game" of
Solitaire and "solve the puzzle" of a Rubik's Cube. Similarly,
when you conquer the final level of a video game you can say you
"finished it" "beat it," or "solved it."
Solitaire is the most aptly-named one-player game (although
in England it's known as Patience). What seems like a rather mechanical
excercise of matching colors and numbers actually works as an engaging
activity, enjoyed with cards or on a computer screen by millions
of people every day. A free download I discovered professed to offer
350+ variations of the game, and I don't doubt it.
Yet few of us realize what a phenomenon Solitaire is. By the nature
of the game, you can't have Solitaire competitions or tournaments
(What would you do, give every contestant an identically-shuffled
deck?). It's a sleeper hit, so prevalent that we take it for granted.
Is it even possible to buy a Windows-operated computer that doesn't
come with Solitaire installed?
As varied as the many species of Solitaire games are the many kinds
of printed-page word games, including word searches, crosswords,
double crosses, and cryptoquotes. Most challenge your brain on multiple
levels, demanding a knowledge of trivia, a large vocabulary, a good
deal of deductive reasoning, and the ability to figure out the puns,
jokes, and half-clues. Even if there were only ten newspapers and
ten websites that featured a new daily crossword puzzle, and five
weekly and five monthy magazines with crosswords, that's still more
than 7,500 new crosswords a year! (And you'd still have to solve
twenty a day to keep up!)
Most handheld puzzles are one-player games that focus on
the movement of pieces. They can be grouped into two categories:
"direct manipulation" and "indirect manipulation."
In direct manipulation games, you physically touch the pieces, trying
to move the large block out, or jump pegs until there's only one
left, or slide tiles to unscramble a picture. Rush Hour Traffic
Jam is a recent popular example. Your plastic car token needs to
cross an obstacle course of blocking vehicles, set up on one of
forty scenarios, ranging in difficulty from simple to astoundingly
difficult. If those aren't enough, three expansions add 120 more
setups. Games of this ilk demand strong visual thinking, and the
ability to picture the results of a move, several moves before you
make it.
Indirect manipulation games challenge you to roll a marble through
a tilting maze or coax a ball bearing into the hole, without letting
you to touch the object. Instead, you must rely on gravity, magnets,
jets of water, or bursts of air. While direct manipulation games
need strategic thought and analysis, indirect manipulation games
require a steady hand, quick thinking, and even quicker reactions.
One-player gamebooks tell a story through a series of programmed
encounters. This game type includes solve-them-yourself mystery
short stories, choose-your-own-adventure books, and solo-modules
for role-playing games. ("Pick your path" gamebooks still
exist, though they have been superceeded by computer games in the
wake of Zork and Myst). These books are linear stories with branching
paths. Once you solve them, replayability is all but nil, unless
a) you want go go back and see where other twists and turns lead
you, b) you're curious to experience every possible ending, or c)
you have a bad memory. This same problem carries over to "solve
'em" computer games. Myst III or Pikmin may be beautiful to
look at and fun to play, but once you complete them, they sit on
your shelf. The Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy series alleviate
this by presenting enormous worlds and dozens of side missions.
It's possible to complete the story aspects of these games but only
experience half the challenges.
Some tabletop wargames contain one-player scenarios, pitting
you against board-controlled enemies. You have to roll the dice
when the enemies attack, of course, and move them around yourself.
But their actions are dictated by behavioral instructions in the
rules. These adaptations of games designed for two or more players
translate to solo play with mixed results.
But there are solitaire-only wargames, designed for one. Battle
Platform Antilles is a free download, consisting of five pages of
pdf rules, a map, a chart, and counters. The player pilots seven
assault ships, with nine turns to destroy or disable the menacing
battle platform. The Antilles, in turn, defends itself with missiles
and regenerates its shields. You can check it out here
(there's even a sequel in the works!)
Heftier than freeware is Ambush!, a game system that puts you in
command of a squad of troops fighting their way through war-torn
Europe. Playing each scenario once would take at least ten hours,
and as you complete missions, your soldiers gain experience and
improve their skills. But, like one-player gamebooks, the missions
aren't really replayable, unless you shelve the game so long you
forget that enemy soldiers lurk behind the fence and the barn is
empty. Four expansion sets added new scenarios, but each still had
preset environments. Although popular with wargamers in the mid-80's,
Ambush! has not been reprinted.
Some solo-only games, such as Last Frontier: The Vesuvius Incident
and Chainsaw Warrior, alleviate the replayability issue with a sytem
of random stuff placement. In these, when a character enters a new
area, you draw cards or chits to see whether you discover helpful
supplies or hordes of monsters. Both games urge you to explore quickly
by adding the pressure of a ticking clock: In Last Frontier, an
alien-infested research station is plummeting into the atmosphere;
in Chainsaw Warrior (unrelated to the Texas-centered film series)
the demonlike Darkness will destroy your city in 120 turns. Better
hurry!
While the exploration feature does add uncertainty to these games,
it also can make it very hard to win. In a game with human opponents,
each player gains influence and power at roughly the same speed,
and though one opponent might be stronger than you, it's unlikely
you'll be pulverized on your first or second turn. In a solo draw-a-card-and-see-what-happens
game, if you run into the alien queen in the first room of the dungeon,
it's time to reshuffle and start again.
(One solution for this is to divide the enemies and equipment into
different stacks, and draw from the low-level pile for the first
four turns, then combine the first and second pile for the remainder
of the game. This ensures that you'll have a fighting chance to
develop your character before facing the Big Guys.)
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 Star
Wars: Battle for Endor is a solo wargame that works quite
well. In this recreation the ground battle at the end of Return
of the Jedi, the player controls Han Solo's strike team
and the Ewoks, while an alert level table indicates what the
Imperial Forces will do each turn (which targets they attack
with priority, whether they head into the woods or regroup
at the bunker, etc.). This game would not work with two players
simply because the player controlling the Empire would just
concentrate all firepower on decimating Han, Leia, Chewie,
and the droids, leaving the Rebels heroless and unable to
enter and destroy the bunker. The alert level simulates the
confusion of the Imperials, running through the forest wasting
time attacking Ewoks, before they can figure out what's going
on.
The game, like Vesuvius and Chainsaw, uses cards to keep every
game unique. An event deck changes the balace of the fight
(reinforcements, when Imperials change tactics, and how close
the rebel fleet is to being obliterated, ending the game),
but event cards are drawn with random frequency — on
average, one event happens about every ten turns. The action
deck instructs which characters may move and fire, and because
you don't know what card will appear next, every move is a
gamble: it's very dangerous to move Han close to a Speeder
Bike, since the "Speeder Bikes attack" card might
come up before the "Han attacks" card.
Battle for Endor is by no means a heavy, strategic game, but
for being a solid solitaire wargame and capturing the mood
of the property it represents, it gets high marks from me.
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Though more and more video games have multiplayer modes
(arena, cooperative, mini-games...even link modes to plug your Game
Boy into someone else's), most still focus on the one player experience.
Any genre of game, any type of challenge imaginable can be woven
into a computer or console game: shooters, puzzles, simulations,
sports, movie tie-ins, abstractions, and even things that look nothing
like reality. Even real-world one-player games have crossed over
into the digital realm (again, Solitaire being the most prevalent
example).
But what about adapting multiplayer games into one-player computer
games, with the computer taking the role of your opponents?
There are two instances where this seems to work best. The first
are games built around analysis of advantageous placement, where
a computer can be taught which move is the most beneficial. Chess
and tic-tac-toe are both position games (on opposite ends of the
complexity scale) with moves that an electronic brain can analyze.
While playing these types of games against a computer may give you
practice in positions and strategies, most competitive players would
agree that the best training is to play against a human opponent.
The second are two-player games that are really "one player
builds the puzzle, the second guesses" activities — games
like Mastermind and Black Box, where one player tries to determine
a hidden condition in a limited number of guesses. While the guessing
player is active and must deduce the condition from trial-and-error
guesses, the first player is entirely passive, and spends the game
just responding to the guesses. The player in-the-know chooses the
end pattern, and gets to snicker when the guesses go astray...and
that's the only interaction in these supposedly two player games.
These are perfect for the computer to take the role of puzzlemaster;
some games of this genre are original to the electronic arena, such
as Minesweeper, a sort of reverse cousin of the two-player Battleship.
Games for more than two players make the transition to one player
vs. AI's less successfully. People do play Risk on screen against
four computer-controlled opponents — all with different preprogrammed
play styles and aggression levels — but it's nowhere near as
rich an experience as throwing down with live opponents (and often
boring watching computer opponent 1 beat up computer opponent 3).
Besides, with network and communication technology as spiffy as
it is, you could probably find four human opponents and play online
just as easily.
Stepping away from the computer and turning the telescope the other
direction, many solitaire games can be adapted into multiplayer
activities. Crossword puzzles can be a team effort, combining knowledge.
The decisions in Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books can be made by
discussion, and you can add house rules to Ambush! or Last Frontier.
Sometimes, however, this just doesn't work. The Battle for Endor
would require major revision to keep the Empire from slaughtering
the rebel leaders. I once overheard a hilarously heated discussion
between two friends trying to work a "slide the block out"
puzzle together. They aren't speaking anymore.
The mechanics and challenges of some games work best for one, just
like some dramatic plays work best with a small cast and an intimate
theater, and some melodies sound better on a lone guitar than when
performed by an orchestra. Bigger isn't always better. Sometimes
it's the more the merrier, and sometimes too many cooks spoil the
soup.
Instead of changing what one-player games are, let's enjoy them
for what they are: challenging and intense...and, perhaps, no longer
misunderstood.
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Connection, LLC. All rights Reserved.
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