Rethinking Online Gaming

By Garrett Martin

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 11:00 am

Forget ever-improving graphics and blazing processors and goofball motion controls. The greatest advancement in console gaming over the last decade has been online play. From old friends halfway across the country to that dude right down the street whose apartment smells like a summer camp bathroom, online gaming lets us play with people we can't or don't want to hang out with in person, something that was impractical to impossible just ten years ago. Recent events have shown the downside of online dependency, though. Can the internet be trusted as a vital foundation for a video game, or should online be treated as a special bonus instead of a core feature?

In the last few weeks two things have me wondering if online is worth it. Obviously one of them is the PlayStation Network outage. PSN has been down for weeks, with no online play, new games, or new DLC, and the private information of all its users stolen by hackers. This outage has been bad for those who play and make games beyond the very serious potential identity theft issues. We can't play Call of Duty or Motorstorm: Apocalypse online, but downloadable games like Outland have seen their PS3 release dates replaced with a big TBD, and any company that counts on PSN for business is losing money over this. One Capcom suit estimated the PSN outage has cost the company hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, in revenue.

And then there's Brink, Splash Damage's online-intensive shooter that promised to combine single-player, co-op, and multiplayer into a single "seamless" experience. Of course you can't play it online on the PS3, but even on the 360 or PC you'll see more jump cuts in five minutes of multiplayer than in every French New Wave film combined. It's a twitchy, laggy, spastic mess. And since the campaign is basically just a multiplayer map, almost every part of the game is plagued by these issues. Until the server or connectivity problems are straightened out, your only recourse is to play the campaign with bots, which removes most of the challenge and most of what is supposed to make Brink special. It's basically unplayable, and a day-one patch doesn't seem to have fixed the issue at all.

Not to sound like a crotchety greybeard (mine is still 80% black), but this wasn't something players had to worry about until the internet got involved. If a game didn't work the problem was with either the game or the system, and most of the time the solution was to go get your money back or exchange it for another copy. You can't return Brink to K-Mart because your soldier has a seizure every thirty seconds. PlayStation 3 owners waiting for Outland would have beaten it days ago if they could've picked it up at a store. Of course then it would've cost more than $15.

I'm not saying we need to burn the internet down and shop solely at Zayre's for all our interactive entertainment needs, but both situations illustrate the dangers of relying on networks that can be hacked, overtaxed, or otherwise busted through villainy or incompetence. We trust things to work the way they're supposed to, and when incidents like these pop up it's understandable to lose a bit of faith in the system. Brink will probably be fixed soon, and when PSN is back up I'm sure I'll give them my new debit card number late at night in a moment of drunken weakness (I should've gotten Def Jam Rapstar for the 360.) But I'm sure anybody working on a game that absolutely requires an internet connection to enjoy has gotten pretty nervous these last few weeks.

Run Button is a regular column where Joystick Division associate editor Garrett Martin rambles leisurely through whatever video game issue bugs him that week.