Well I was busy, and I still am. So in the meantime just a quick teaser on the next topic on social gaming I wanted to write about: cooperative games! As the teaser I wanted to link up a brief blurb that Michael Fitch wrote a few years ago trying to argue why cooperative modes are harder to make than one might think.
Well it goes in hand with why some game devs have argued that competitive modes are easy to design. One offloads all AI concerns onto a non-artificial intelligence. But that not the topic.
Certainly fact is that there are loads of games that are either solo or competitive but one has to look to find your favorite coop game. There is a horribly incomplete list of coop games on wikipedia, but even if it was more complete the list is way shorter than what is published or what has competitive modes. As for interesting coop games over time and some guesstimations why these are rarer than others will have to wait until I have more time again.
Thoughts on Moroagh - MMORPGs and other distractions 