The Uncooperative Gamer

When I play a video game with friends, I want to help. If I’m on a team, I want to contribute. If someone is injured, I want to save them. If someone is shooting, I want to lend them bullets in the same general direction.

However, sometimes this yearning to help doesn’t fully translate. I played Left 4 Dead 2 with two friends last month. After a jaunt into the campaign, we moved onto versus play, but obviously with uneven players one friend was lumbered with me, while the other had an occasionally competent AI team to work with. Every time I’m hit by a boomer, or a smoker, or anything at all, I scream. Similarly, every time my teammate is hit I scream on their behalf and fire bullets everywhere. I spent the majority of time on one level running away backwards from my opposing tank-friend shouting NO NO NO OH GOD NO as opposed to doing something practical or useful. It’s also worth pointing out on my first attempt at the “running in a straight line across a bridge” level, I failed to run in a straight line and coasted off a zombie into the water about ten seconds in.

Of late, video games have made me feel rather slow, perhaps even stupid. The primary skill I have learned is to anticipate special breeds of animals that live on corners of corridors in Tomb Raider.

Cornerillas (gorillas hiding round a corner), Corneraptors (raptors hiding round a corner), and Cornerdiles (crocodiles hiding round a corner). The trick is to approach every corner in Tomb Raider with your pistols out for any corner animals waiting for you. I now find myself stuck in the same place I was when I originally played Anniversary because I still have not mastered the art of jumping. Corner animals? Sorted. Jumping? No.

When I need to play a game cooperatively with a friend, this opens a whole new plethora of stupidity, I am unable to count to three, wait, do something when asked, or proceed with haste.

One of the early levels in Little Big Planet 2 has a puzzle that requires two players. I attempted this simple puzzle with my boyfriend.

While one player jumps from block to block, the other player needs to press a switch that alternates the blocks appearing. You can do this very easily by counting “1, 2, 3” and on “3” one player jumps and the other presses the button. Except for some reason when I count to “3” I forget to press the button and my boyfriend makes a leap of faith only to fall to his death.

He faced the same battles with me when we started the Portal 2 co-op missions. When it comes to Portal, I am a bit slow, and a bit dense. When I enter a room I spend a long time just looking at stuff without actually doing anything, and it does take a long time for the cogs to turn. I wince to think I spent a few minutes in single player jumping around and trying to interact with an almost broken window that was in front of a button.

“Sweetie, there’s a big arrow right in front of you”, he says. And so there is, directing me around the wall to the button.

Whenever we entered a co-op Portal room, I found my boyfriend is the opposite to me, and tends to throw himself straight into puzzles, and on many occasions has figured out what to do before I’ve even seen everything in the room. I found if I went for the “throw myself in” method I’d often bump Jim off course when he’s actually trying to do something, or end up killing my poor P-body in some way.

Then, of course, there were some rooms that require one player to operate a button for the other player’s safety. I don’t need to explain how that went.

Over the two days Jim soldiered through Portal 2’s co-op with me, I’ve impaled him on crushers countless times, regularly failed to follow instructions, I’m pretty sure I accidentally killed him with a laser, and in the whole scenario I honestly think I solved about two puzzles in total.

What matters though is he is happy saving the world with his slow, lumbering girlfriend somewhere behind him, accidentally walking off cliffs, and pressing the wrong buttons too late or sometimes not at all.