The world of multiplayer gaming. It’s brought us all together in an digital orgy, only for people to bellow out written and spoken cries of “noob”, accusations of being cheating bastards, and give birth to 10,000 “your mum” jokes.

It’s come on leaps and bounds over the last 15 years, from the simple beginnings of Doom over an IPX connection, to the full realisation of the online console arena, where facing your foes in a virtual world has never been easier to do. However perhaps all this great progress has come at a price?

While conversing with a friend who had just quit from a session of Modern Warfare 2, he stated that a change from the usual multiplayer blood bath would be welcome.

I simply stated that it wouldn’t be a problem and we started to work our way down the list from the Steam games browser to see what tickles our collective fancy. What we initially thought would be a simple task, was not so simple after all. Why is so much of the titles on offer, offer the same thing?

Looking at the collection of games that gather considerable dust on the shelf, it’s easy to see a pattern develop.
Assassin’s Creak, Beers of War, Call of Doodee, Splinter Cell, Left 4 Dead 334, Bioshock, Metro 2033, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, even World of W**kers… all of these games feature heavy doses of violence using a variety of devices that would make UN weapon inspectors crazy.

After further research (and by that I mean watching TV while eating Doritos) we come to the conclusion that there are two main types of multiplayer fun at present; the first is mass murder.

Only being a dictator of an evil country or playing games offers you a way of beating the crap out of random people without the danger of getting arrested and sharing a room with a nice friendly man called Bessie. We can’t get enough of it, in fact, some genres seem to be merging as a result of this trend.

The obvious example is “First Person Role Playing” games such as Fallout 3, where you simply roam a wasteland acquiring shiny things and fighting against big hairy mutant nutters, or as others may know it as; going out in Brighton, and Borderlands, where again you roam through another wasteland acquiring shiny things and fighting well, less hairy nutters, which as it turns out is the same as shopping in Tesco.

It seems since the dawn of time, hurting fellow human beings has never lost its appeal. We still drag our knuckles on the ground, grunting over every little thing, but instead of carrying a club, this handy device has been replaced with a game controller. So the question remains; why do we love shooting people in the face over and over again?

Instead of wanting to just get on with our fellow (wo)man, further the boundaries of our knowledge, seek out new civilisations and other things which I’m not going to continue to plagiarise, we take joy in dishing out and observing misery, often the German word “schadenfreude” springs to mind. It’s a whole topic which gives the hardened psychiatrist a headache.

It also doesn’t help that the world is a dog-eat-dog arena of competition, where you must work your way to the top of a dustbin, have a wonderful family and a holiday home in Hong Kong or you may as well crawl into the ground now.

It’s just what was happening in the good old days of caveman bashing, just instead of your hunting prowess proving how good you are, you now are judged by what car you drive. That drive for competition has leaked into the gaming world more in recent years, helped by big cash price tournaments, and while we pretend that “it’s just a game”, we secretly all want to rule the roost, fuelling the rage that dwells within.

What about creating a nice neighbour simulator with the new range of sex toys soon to don our front room bound hardware, where you raise your controller to wave at other people, or indeed lift your hat to say hello to the nice friendly butcher, who for once, is not a butcher of entire villages, but sells quality produce at low prices? Nah, I thought it wouldn’t fly either.

So if hurting your fellow man is the first type of gameplay, being drunk is the second.

Now granted, you can play games of mass destruction when you’re thinking that wearing pink underwear as a man is a good idea and making fart noises, but in this case, the reference goes to occasions where groups of people pretending to be friends all gather together, discussing things which no-one cares about or even listens to.

At some point, someone has the crazy idea of breaking out the Xbox and trying out some of the fun things they now have, which you all will just love. But it’s not the traditional games, now it’s a raft of different experiences everyone can enjoy. Hence “party video gaming” was born.

Some of the releases over the years have truly been something different, such as the proper interactive game show, Buzz on the PlayStation, in which you all had game show buzzers and can amaze each other on how little useful knowledge you really know.

But the vast majority (not naming any “Guitar Heroes” here) seem to revolve round another collection of quirky fisher-price toys that you play with when you’ve downed the last bottle of scotch and destroy “Midnight Train to Georgia” in such a way that Gladys Knight thinks about ending it all.

Of the two worlds described here, it comes back to one fact. Familiarity. We as human beings tend to fear change, therefore am happy to subject ourselves to the same thing over and over again. We may want that from our lives, but is this what we want from our entertainment too?

Don’t get me wrong, the enjoyment to be had is all too clear, and the reasons why they are successful are too numerous to mention here. But one has to wonder if there is room for a third type of multiplayer experience that doesn’t require gallons of blood on screen nor alcohol to enjoy?

The only possible way forward on the horizon which might move us into a different world while maintaining a foothold in traditional gameplay to keep us happy, is Valve’s upcoming Portal 2, where two players work together to solve a range of puzzles of varying difficulty, in turn flexing their collective brain power.

Perhaps some more titles could encourage players to work to together to solve more complex puzzles or create new ideas given a suitable cyberspace that take us away from the mindless slaughter of not only 7 year old prats groaning into microphones, but also our own bodies too, things may actually start moving forward again. Yes, the whole point of all this is that we should all start thinking, it may hurt for a while, but we’ll feel all better for it.