Collaborate versus cooperate?
Taken from Merriam-Websters online dictionary;
collaborate
: to work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something
: to give help to an enemy who has invaded your country during a warcooperate
: to work together : to work with another person or group to do something
: to be helpful by doing what someone asks or tells you to do
: to act in a way that makes something possible or likely : to produce the right conditions for something to happen
In terms of gaming ‘cooperate’ has become the common term for playing together with others. At the same time my thesis focuses on a gamified solution and is not a ‘game’ as such. Which is why I early on chose to use ‘collaborate’ when referring to the objective of my thesis prototype. The use of ‘achieve’ as part of the definition for ‘collaborate’ also weighs in for choosing this term. But even so I am worried about the loss of attention my work will have from a gaming perspective as ‘coop gaming’ has become something of a standard when referring to this kind of social interaction.
I found an article online discussing the similarities and differences between these words and from this perspective the outcome of an innovation process is ‘owned’ by the ‘collective’ that worked together to make it happen. A cooperative effort does not automatically hold this kind of ‘collective ownership’.
Another comparison also implies a difference in the ownership of the final outcome where ‘collaboration’ implies that it is collective, and ‘cooperation’ does not hold the same strength of common ownership as you can participate or help with generating the outcome without holding any rights on the outcome.
When doing my initial analyzing of games I found that the individuals ownership of both their character/avatar as well as the items in their inventory are very important. At the same time they feel a mutual ownership of game achievements that require a team effort. This leads me to think that for an innovation process the idea and its content when it is ‘completed’ in the gamified solution needs to be ‘owned’ by the collective that worked with it, but that as an individual you can take credit for certain parts of it. Working with the game analogy this makes the completed idea an achievement, but the parts that it is made up of are virtual items ‘owned’ by individuals.
As I am interpreting collaboration and cooperation at this point there is a path here representing an players involvement with an idea. A player will go from being unaware of an idea to be aware of it, then interested in it and then seeking involvement. When becoming involved you move from contributing to cooperating to collaborating. For a gamified solution to work all of these levels of involvement must be represented and have different interactions connected to them to help clarify their differences. And the players level of ownership to an idea is central to making this part of the gamified solution work.
My first collaborative game experiences
It is hard to state what my first collaborative game experience was as it depends on how you define it. Personally I subscribe to looking at it from two perspectives; one involving collaboration outside the game itself and one that involves the in-game multiplayer experience we have grown accustomed to today. Even today I feel both are equally relevant, but naturally the in-game collaborative game experience dominates my gaming schedule today.
My first memory of collaborative gaming was with the 1982 Atari classic Choplifter. A friend taught me the basic concepts of the game, and then after this we had a part competitive and part collaborative relationship when playing. Competitive regarding score and progress, but at the same time watching each other and discussion problematic elements of the game and trying to solve them as a team. This collaboration introduced a social aspect to the game even if at any given time only one of us was actually playing.
A few years went by and I got my first computer, a Commodore 64, and with it all of the early games of the 80s. This included the game Bruce Lee (1983, Datasoft Inc.) which became my next collaborative memory. Conceptually the same type of game experience as with Choplifter, but this time the collaboration ended with a complete success and the game was completed. Alas completing the game just meant you would start again from the beginning, but it still felt ‘special’ to have made it to ‘the end’.
Shortly after the success of Bruce Lee we discovered M.U.L.E and everything changed. While competitive at its core – naturally you want to win – it also included options for collaboration. Both keeping the ‘colony’ alive as well as making sure that the computer did not win created a window for a collaborative gaming experience, and many hours were invested in this game at the time. Even if it would take some years until we could sit at home and enjoy a multiplayer experience this game will always be my first.
I truly believe that a good game should include a social element. And even if you play the game alone the experience can be enhanced by having someone to share it with. That said, even outside my gaming I prefer collaboration to competition. When comparing the element of winning versus participation I believe that participation will always end up as the most important of the two. Given this, combined with the fact that it feels better to have everybody ‘win’ and at the same time avoid forcing anybody to ‘loose’, games the focus on collaborative game play are just more interesting. And of course it never hurts to be able to grab a beer with your collaborators to get some time away from the computer screen…
Finding collaborative game mechanics
Having spent several hours working with an assortment of MMOs it has always been my assumption that it is possible to identify specific game mechanics that enable collaborative gaming. Gamification uses the term game mechanics very loosely about both simple and complex parts of a game, and for now I will adopt this practice until I can establish a better set of terms and definitions. At this point there are three game mechanics that I feel are critical for collaborative gaming to occur.
- 1. User profile
The user profile is the players base of operations in any kind of game experience today, and for most MMORPGs it includes one or more avatars and their virtual belongings. The players ownership of these avatars and virtual commodities gives them a reason to invest time in the game with the promise of increased value to the user profile. Value being individually different. - 2. Events
Collaborative play occurs when there are game mechanics that enable players to ‘play together’. An event here being a game experience where players participate together. - 3. Rating
For some winning is important, to others achievements is more important. No matter what motivates a player the game experience needs to be able to give the player some way to measure their successes or failures.
Moving these game mechanics into an open innovation process helps define critical requirements that a gamified application will need include. The player must be able to feel ownership to their participation, preferably through a user profile. There must be events that will let the player participate in a collaborative way, and there must be a way of letting the player see how their participation affects the game as well as how they are rewarded for their participation.
Gunnar Øyvin Fredrikson 