The only console hooked up at home is a slim PS2 that the kids got for Christmas last year.  They’ve enjoyed various games on it but the two in the current rotation are Guitar Hero 2 and SSX Tricky.  Coincidentally or not, I bought both of them. 

These two games illustrate two approaches to a pretty common game design ‘problem’… keeping track of a player’s advancement through the game.  GH2 is designed to track multiple players’ progress through the game with discrete ‘bands’ that are created.  Within this band is saved songs completed, scores, phat lewt purchased with gig money, etc.  On the other hand, Tricky has no individual player tracking besides entering your name when you get a high score or record time.  You don’t have to change your player profile in order to select a different ‘toon’ to run a race with and advance. 

Guitar Hero is not an RPG by any means… but the ‘band advancement’ aspect of it lends itself to a RPG-ish grinding mentality to the game.  My friends an I have, in the past, adopted the same gamestyle to Tricky by ‘calling dibs’ on particular toons and only playing them.  My room-mate would always board with Kaori and I’d always board with Eddie.  Handing the controller back and forth, we’d trade off on runs, putting our respective handles in when we would nail a high score.  It’s a lot like a classic arcade game, taking turns popping quarters into Pacman or Double Dragon.  Conversely, when taking turns in Guitar Hero, you have to back out of the menus up to the ‘select band’ level.  This can be annoying sometimes.  There may be a quicker way to back out to select a different band, but I don’t know what it is.

‘Back in the day’, we followed the same pattern with other video games.  You take your turn, play until your guys are all dead, then it’s the next person’s turn.  Super Mario Brothers was, arguably, a kind of RPG.  The game was action/adventure, exploring a world.  Legend of Zelda was more of an RPG, but you still had ‘lives’.   You had ‘save games’ in Zelda…  Metroid had ‘save codes’. 

Games like World of Warcraft are more glorified versions of Zelda.  You pick your ‘save game’ and then run around gathering loot, advancing your story, etc.  From this perspective, WoW is little different than Diablo with more people and ‘better’ graphics.  The more immersive, non-arcadey nature of these games, however, lend themselves to PC gaming more than console gaming.  How often do you see people ‘hot seat’ while PC gaming, taking turns playing?   Meanwhile, how often are there multiple versions of the same console in a household for gaming?  Halo multiplayer is nice with multiple Xboxes but is still a poor-man’s LAN party. 

Of course… most games these days have at least two play modes… single-player and multiplayer.  One could argue that games like WoW or Eve Online are always multiplayer but of course, one would be wrong.  You can play for years of your life in those games without ever chatting with another human or playing ‘with’ them. 

There are many examples and none of them work everywhere.  The two fundamental questions to be answered are ‘When does the game need to know who you are?’ and ‘Why does the game need to know who you are?’  Depending on the game, ‘who you are’ may vary from  defining your ‘high score handle’ to a fully-customized UI and game experience.  The ‘why’ drives the ‘when’ which helps define the ‘how’ of learning the ‘who’.