I am now tracking coopertainment as a phenomenon. The latest seed to blow through the door is Spore, a game designed by the creator of the Sims series. This is a PC based game and it involves cooperation, but in some interesting ways. (one | two | three) Of course, it won't be out for over a year.
Spore basically takes five or six different game genres and mashes them into one long evolving game. You start out in a 70s pac-man universe, move into an 80s Ultima universe, then into an Art-of-War style universe ... where the video game concepts evolve along with your creatures. They start out as hunter gatherers, move into loose tribes, then into agrarian societies, and so on. As your beings evolve, so does the game type and so does their relation to cooperation.
Initially you start in a kill or be killed / eat or be eaten environment. A pac-man mentality (You're either with me or you're with the Ghosts). Then you learn to cooperate with those close to you and that cooperation is a basis for survival. That's the internal cooperative element of the game.
But the game is also based on external elements as well. As your groups grow in the ability to migrate, communicate and explore, you begin to meet other groups in the "world". The characteristics of these groups are largely defined by other people playing the same game - but not necessarily at the same time. This isn't another MMORPG, but a game that can evolve on its own merits.
The Spore platform, apparently, allows users to create entities from scratch, have them evolve and then leash them upon an unsuspecting (but anticipating) game universe. This means that the ultimate outcome of the Spore experience is largely unknown to its creators. It is the community that experiments with Will Wright's new universe that will guide the reality there.
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