The warm, gooey centre of Left 4 Dead

Cooperation. Working together. It makes the world go around. Without cooperation, man would have never walked on the moon. There would be no Summer, Winter or Special Olympics. The Berlin Wall would still be standing, wolves would be terrible hunters, short people would never be able to see parades, and there would be no such thing as Buddy Cop films.

Historically, video gaming hates cooperation.

Games have typically been objects of great power and secrecy, hidden in basements and worshipped alone. Gamers would sit inside and play with imaginary people, because real people are scary. Sometimes they would congregate in large halls to discuss better ways of isolating themselves from society.

More recently, multiplayer has become Like So Totally In. This does not mean cooperation; it means bloodsport and endless competition. Multiplayer gaming developed as a way for people with no marketable skills to take ownership of other humans by shooting them in the face.

Deathmatches, capturing the flag, King of the Hill, and many other modes tap into that deep (male) desire to be better than other people. So gaming becomes a vent for aggression and dragging your genitals across the face of your fallen foes (a process known to game-kind as 'teabagging' and known to everyone else as 'sociopathic tendencies'). Competitive multiplayer isn't a way to play with other people, so much as a way to murder a more realistic kind of sprite.

Cut to the present (okay, 2008) and we have Left 4 Dead, a zombie killing simulation with the bizarre idea of playing with friends. Four players working in tandem to take down eleventy-hundred billion undead from point A to point B.

Every part of the game relies on the fact that you count on your team. Go ahead on your own and die; fail to strategise before a fight and die; forget to duck when someone yells duck and die. When you DO die, only your fellow survivors can help you up. You can only carry a pistol and one other weapon type, so you need their backup. Enemies are pansies for four people and pants-wetting horrors for three or fewer.

This I like. As much as I enjoy being better than everyone, there's a lot to be said for teaming up to achieve something awesome. It's the hardcore gaming equivalent of an emotionally stirring tissue commercial.

Now I can get together with a group of friends or total strangers, share a common goal AND blow some testosterone out my barrel. More cooperative games please developers.

If you haven't played Left 4 Dead then I don't even know you any more, man! My gamertag is Zwuh.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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wiremu   #1   09:32 pm Jan 28 2010

Very funny.

Munchie   #2   08:05 am Jan 29 2010

I play L4D 1&2 all the time except since xmas I've found too many kids ruining the game for everyone else (It's R18 PARENTS). They love to grief others >.> makes me angry panda.