This guest post is written by Isabel Ravenna.
It was well past midnight on Wednesday night when my boyfriend, Greg, and I defeated the snarky cult-leading twins in “Borderland 3” — again. And right on cue, Alicia Keys “Girl on Fire” filled the speakers. It was our third time completing that campaign, and we were finally ready to move on. In search of our next game to become consumed by, I turned to the experts… Reddit. But when the anonymous gamers repeatedly suggested the same few games we’d either already completed or grown tired of, I started to lose hope.
So we traveled to the only other place that would most certainly have the answers we sought: Gamestop.
“Excuse me sir,” I asked the cashier. “What epic, combat, adventure games do you have that we could play together? At home? While sitting on the same couch?”
“Have you tried the Borderlands games?” Yes.
“I takes Two?” Yes.
“Split Fiction?” Yes.
“Hm,” he pondered. “They don’t really make too many local co-op games these days.”
He was not the first Gamestop employee to respond that way and, unfortunately, he wouldn’t be the last.
As two working adults, there isn’t much time left to thoughtfully spend together, let alone play our own respective games. Not to mention the fact that most gamers can attest — a single gaming session can easily consume an entire evening or afternoon.
But as products of the Golden Age of Shared Screens, we enjoy visiting a friend, grabbing a remote and launching whatever game on whatever console they had — the Mario Brothers games on Gamecube, Halo on Xbox or Call of Duty on Playstation. It might’ve looked different, but one constant remained: we’d share a screen.
Even so, there’s no question that the shift away from split-screen gaming was also a shift to cater to modern gamers. Generations Z and Alpha made friends through screens — at home, socializing online. It’s a shift found more convenient for players while simultaneously benefiting the companies that sell to them, with online multiplayer generating significantly more revenue through microtransactions and downloadable content.
After all, when people play together online, from the comfort of their own chair — not couch — publishers can sell multiple copies of a game and whatever subscription services go along with it, rather than having four players share a single copy on one sofa, or couch. It’s a symbiotic relationship; a perfectly transactional trade-off.
Today’s tech, in its primarily online format, increasingly connects gamers to distant, likeminded people with similar interests. They can meet anywhere in the world; from Fortnite to outer space, with entire universes and endless possibilities for a child to escape off to after returning home from school, safe from within the bounds of his bedroom during a time when real-world third-spaces are rapidly shrinking.
But where we’re connecting to distant people, we’re disconnected from those nearby. It’s an interesting paradox because, while you will never have to play alone again, the cousins might not make it to the epic semi-annual sleepover, since they can play anyway.
Some of my most beloved childhood memories featured the groggy, disgruntled voice of my mother saying, “It’s two in the morning,” like we didn’t know — demanding that we return to the bedroom we escaped from just to play a little longer. But beyond nostalgia, gaming offers relationships real bonding experiences.
In safe, low-stakes environments, loved ones accomplish goals as a team, and in doing so, identify strengths and weaknesses that might not show up so explicitly in daily life. It’s also a safe space to fail, which like in real life, can be frustrating — whether you’ve done the failing or have been failed by another. And whether it’s the fourth, fifth or even sixth attempt to defeat a challenging boss, the simultaneously increasing determination and aggravation might bubble to the surface when Player 2 presses the wrong button, accidentally throwing themselves into the digital void, restarting the battle.
But that’s precisely what makes the art of couch co-op so special. At its core, more than a fun time, it’s a safe space to build together, let each other down, fight unto death or save one another from it.
And while there’s certainly beauty in sharing these moments with a complete stranger on the other side of the world or with a friend thousands of miles away, what matters most is engaging in your existing relationships this way — implementing these moments into a relationship that sees so many other sides of life with you as well.
Because, by the time the trials of real life inevitably rears its ugly head — whether at work, at home, or in bed — there’s something so precious about the handshake of exchanging controllers, joined on a couch, hitting “play,” and escaping into the same world, together, while your bodies sit near one another.
The reunion of a celebratory high-five after an epic feat, the couch’s vibration when one body jolts from excitement, and the intangible, energetic understanding when it finally comes time to call it quits, is all lost in remote play.
So the hunt continues. I’ll revisit the same Reddit threads, and each time we pass a Gamestop, we’ll stop in to ask anybody that’ll listen if they have anything new.
And perhaps the next era of gaming will take place in a virtual reality altogether. But maybe the world will undergo a split-screen renaissance, returning to its rightful place — a coach.
Image Credit: “Split Fiction”
Video Game Town 