Taking the Big Step Online

I have been questioning myself for a while. My Xbox Live Gold account recently gained a little ‘1’ at the top. I have been Gold for a year. I should be proud. But I am not, because up until recently I never really used it. For a while, I was spending £15 every 3 months on technically nothing.

Why? That’s silly, isn’t it?

Well, yes it is. The main reason was the fact that I was very nervous to play online. I had the impression that to make it online you had to be excellent at everything and better than everyone. Of course, with most games, this is your aim, but I think I took it a bit too literally. You see, it isn’t that I am crap at games. I think I can be a decent player. The problem was that I feared becoming the name at the bottom. The one who had achieved no kills, perhaps blew herself up with her own grenade. I have conquered Insane on Gears of War 2, and on, er, half of 1 (I’m working on it!). I have beaten Realistic on Rainbow 6 Vegas 2, Veteran on Resident Evil 5, and more. Yet I still got nervous when matched to the skill of real people. The irony is that it was the nerves that made me play badly.

I realised after a while that I had two options. I could retreat back to a silver account and not get the full benefits of my Xbox 360, or I could come out of my hidey hole and try to relax about the whole thing. I was curious, though. Was I the only one with reservations like this? I was guessing not. Yet I know that there are also a lot of people who are completely comfortable playing online. I wanted to know the opinions of a variety of different people on the world of online gaming, and to see if there was anything to be done to make it all a bit easier.

I wanted to get a general feel of the opinion on online gaming, so I asked a few friends and relatives, from casual to hardcore gamers, from younger to older, male and female. I got a little group together to discuss the subject, and asked them a few questions.

Alex, 7, plays online now and again and knows everyone on his friends list from either school or as family. I asked him what he thought of online gaming and if he found it to be a daunting experience. ‘Not really. If I do play with other people online it’s usually when I’m in a party with my friends and it’s more fun like that.’ This made me think a bit. A child can play and not be scared off if he has his friends playing too. I asked Wayne, who is 24, the same question. Although he plays a lot of games, he doesn’t really venture online much, so he has the disadvantage of not really having a lot of friends added. ‘I find that you get ridiculed for being new, or if you’re not as good as them. The thing is, I expected to find people who just wanted a friendly online game, I don’t really want to play with people who are too serious about it all.’

I could see already that having some friends to play online with could relax you greatly when it comes to playing online. There was something else I wanted to investigate though. I must admit that being female was a contributing factor to my apprehension. I’ve heard of the sexist behaviour, the abusive messages when women don’t accept friend requests. I wanted to get the opinion of a female who played online often. Leanne, 18, likes to play online a lot, knows about half of her friends list personally and the rest are people she came across in lobbies/after matches. I wanted to know if it really is that bad for females. ‘At first, I was concerned that being a girl would affect me, like I had more to prove. I was also worried that I would get more abusive messages because of my gender.’ I asked if she thought females get much abuse. ‘Sometimes it happens, but then sometimes it happens to everyone. You’ve got to learn to laugh about it.’

What I really wanted to find out, were ways to make it a less daunting experience. What could make it easier for the people who are new to it, or for people who just wanted a casual game, and not feel like they were letting other gamers down if they weren’t doing so well? Wayne pointed out a problem that I have come across myself. ‘If they had a better match-making system it would be a lot better.’ Leanne added ‘I can agree with that, because when someone who is a very low level comes into your lobby, they can become targeted as people naturally assume they are not very good.’

There are some games that have a levelling up system, like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Gears of War 2. Other games have medals and other things that generally mean you’re rising up the ranks. No matter how good the match-making is though, I have found myself in a lobby at level 1 surrounded by level 65s a fair few times. It makes me wonder where all the beginners are. Surely there are people with similar levels to me somewhere? These multiplayer veterans can’t have started at level 50? If more could be done with the match-making system to make sure we were all at a similar level I think it would ease my mind knowing that I won’t stick out like a sore thumb, being targeted as an ‘easy kill’.

Next, I wanted to know what the people who make the games thought. I asked Fed Kassatkin’s who works at NaturalMotion in the QA department why he thought that online services have become a necessary part of modern gaming.

‘For me, it’s increasingly the social aspect or rather, I think it always was, but a slew of modern games have actually accommodated those desires. And I’m not talking about MMOs either, or at least not exclusively – my only truly positive MMO experience has been with Guild Wars which cunningly provided practically all of what I’d want from an MMO. For references, I am mostly talking about Left 4 Dead (& L4D2), Team Fortress 2, Guild Wars and secondarily about an assortment of others (Call of Duty: World at War, ArmA 2, Men of War, Battlefield 2).’ It’s true, online gaming used to just be about the games, now I feel vaguely embarrassed if I play and don’t speak – it seems that talking (and trash talking) has become an integral part of online gaming. Fed explained why he thought this change had taken place: ‘These days, when gaming on the PC, there is a decent array of VoIP instruments available to the online player. There are lots of these built into games, and some of them actually work very well, if they don’t then we have the magic of Team Speak, which handily runs in the background and connects you up to all your buddies for chat in-game. What this means is that there is an excellent opportunity to talk to people during the game and this is very attractive for online gaming in my opinion and experience.’ It also means that games like Section 8, Team Fortress 2 or even the Left 4 Dead series can have very limited storytelling or stereotypical characters, and the entertainment is developed by the online component.

I asked Fed what he thought the social aspects added to gaming. ‘Talking to the people you’re in a game with is a mixture of tactical discussion (OMG! There’s a zombie eating Jim’s head! Let’s er… stop it doing that) and random conversation (I hear a crocodile ate your sister… condolences mate). Oh, and screaming (AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!). You are not alone – not only can you see and relate to the visual avatars of the other players, but you can actually hear them speak and interact with them in a crucial way. This makes online gaming not only social, but easier – it’s easier to discuss plans, keep people together, or insult them when you blow their head off…’ Wait a second… that’s what the majority of Xbox Live is like. A load of 15-year-olds running around shouting obscenities and being… well… 15-year-olds. That’s not really a fun way to enjoy online gaming in my opinion – I don’t like playing with dicks. The second reason I enjoy a fair bit of online gaming is because I know people who can be roped into (and can rope me into) a variety of games we all enjoy. Sure, not everybody’s perfect, but you get used to these people, and they bring the virtue of 99.99% of people not being idiots.

Team Fortress 2? Fun, balanced, simple, engaging, and with a half-dozen or so people you know in the same game, all chatting together on Team Speak – oodles of fun. It’s fairly simple and straightforward, but stories are told, battles are fought, and a lot of time crazy stuff is done. Actually, a favourite of the people from the two forums that I regularly play with, is for everyone to change their names to something themed (e.g. variation one someone’s nickname, Bond Films combined with Ice Cream and so on) and then pile into one of our favourite servers. Thus, we not only have a good time in the game, but provide entertainment for others.

Left 4 Dead? Immensely fun for the story-telling, the co-operative and competitive challenge, all the things that it does right. And zombies. Between Team Fortress 2 and the Left 4 Dead games, I think I’ve got the most ever online gaming. Team Fortress 2 came as one part of the Orange Box (which I got for 20 quid) and I think I must have got 20x that amount of game out of it, likewise, L4D gave me tonnes of game and enjoyment online for its price, and L4D2 has done even more.

Is the online gaming experience the best way to play multi-player? It allows access to anyone in the world, but what sort of people are they? I asked Alex Mladek, another industry pro, what he thought the best multiplayer gaming experience was:

‘I do have a 360 and a Gold Live membership, I do have a PC that’s capable of playing the latest titles online, but I still massively prefer spending my time playing multiplayer games offline, with a load of friends sat around on a couch. Why? Well, my chief reason is that I’d much rather play with friends than strangers, and even when playing with people I know in ‘real life’, offline games leads to infinitely more intimate encounters (no, not that kind of intimate). Sure, I could humiliate my mates via the wonders of the internet, but why do that when it’s far more satisfying to do it face-to-face?’

‘Of course there are other reasons that I could mention (why does Xbox Live seem to consist solely of racist 12-year-old Americans?) but the truth is I prefer the experience of getting a load of mates over, plonking yourselves down on a couch with a few beers, and trash-talking the crap out of each other. Until Microsoft invent a hologram projection camera, and start projecting virtual versions of friends into your living room, online will always come in second.’

So maybe that’s the answer – however you play, play for fun. Play with your friends, or people who may become your friends. The thing that made online better for me, was adding friends I knew, playing online in a party and learning that it isn’t so bad if I’m not so brilliant at a game and that the whole point of gaming is to have fun. Sure, I’m not completely, 100% comfortable with it all of the time, and there are people out there who are not nice, but for once I can say: ‘so what’?