Support Sportsfriends!

Kickstarter campaigns are something that I often dislike. There's one running at the moment though, that I think matters and really want to see funded. I've put my pledge up to try and nudge it a bit closer. Forgive me, because this is going to get a bit nostalgic. You've probably been fed enough of that by Kickstarter itself recently, yes? Well, sorry; I promise there's a point to it. All of my nostalgia relates to an important yet neglected bit of videogame design, and the campaign I'm talking about is trying to revive it.

Sportsfriends ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gutefabrik/sportsfriends-featuring-johann-sebastian-joust ) is a collection of local multiplayer games. At the time of writing, it has 29 hours and $29,000 to go to meet its target. Local multiplayer games are very important to me. I'm not alone, and that value isn't something that's only held by an indie echo-chamber or super-elitist club of developers.

I currently live with a guy who plays a lot of games, often renting them for a few days at a time. Beyond that, he's not particularly informed and certainly wouldn't be able to name any indie developers. He's not a part of any games cliques or cult followings. He doesn't hang out at TIGSource or Super Friendship Club, nor does he go to events like Wild Rumpus. He's never touched Steam, and probably doesn't know what Kongregate is. He doesn't use PSN or XBLA unless he really has to.

He buys and rents games on discs, and there's one thing that has really, intensely annoyed him about this most recent console generation: Outside of some sports games, multiplayer now takes place almost exclusively online. He can't be arsed with all the things I can generally get through to play games with my friends: The setup, the faffing with routers, the lag, the shitty teenagers. He really misses being sat on the sofa with friends, playing something with them there. Castle Crashers was a brief highlight of this generation for him.

We grew up with unconnected consoles and computers. There was Bruce Lee, Final Fight, Golden Axe, Micro Machines, Gauntlet, Super Skidmarks, Goldeneye. There was exotic hardware that hardly any of your friends had, for connecting handhelds to each other with wires, or extra controllers to your console. There was winding each other up by pressing start before everyone had hit ready. There was being able to physically put each other off. There was leaning forwards, screaming and shouting and laughter and jumping off the sofa and taking the piss out of each other. There was taking a break to put the kettle on or eat lunch together.

Then there was absurdly good two player shareware on cover discs. Fucking /Spacewar/:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/space-war/screenshots/gameShotId,107581/

Extreme Violence:
http://realityglitch.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/face-laser-death.jpg

Biplanes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOfG04NFt0E

Occasionally baffling wizard battles in Trick or Treat:
http://hol.abime.net/pic_full/dbs/5401-5500/5410_dbs1.png

And another two player, asteroids ship combat game with a timer. I can't remember its name or find a screenshot, but one match was so close and we were so tense that I accidentally broke the chair I was sat on. Both the legs on one side came clean off and my friend cackled his way maniacally to victory, while in sudden defeat, I actually had to pick myself up off the floor. Playing games with a group of your mates on the internet can be hilarious, but it just doesn't enable anything like that. It's good, but there's really important human stuff missing, and no intermediary technology can replace or transmit it.

At present, the big commercial side of the games industry doesn't care about local multiplayer. As far as I know, it's not on the agenda for any publisher-driven game, and it's not in the marketing bullet points typically going on the back of boxes. To developers and publishers pushing that forward edge of console tech, it's old hat. For the most part, it's what they used to do in the distant past. To them, connected consoles have superseded it, and that's wrong in all kinds of ways.

Local multiplayer matters far more than how such games perform on a balance sheet; it matters to the culture of games. It matters as a significant strand of the profession of game design. It matters as an important part of our past, and it's as relevant now as it was in the 90s. It matters because of the human experiences it gives you that the internet cannot.

I don't want it to be lost, and I don't want it to carry on being neglected. So in the curation work I've done for GameCity, The Eurogamer Expo, and Rezzed, I've been trying to stress local multiplayer. A lot of developers ask me what criteria we judge on, and they're very variable because you never know what amazing new things you'll be sent, but honestly? Being able to play side by side with friends sends games rocketing *straight* to the top of my lists. I've shown BaraBariBall at all three of the events I mentioned above, and a few more besides, because it's really fucking good.

Local multiplayer doesn't belong in the dusty, converted attics families relegated computers to in the late 1980s, nor does it belong in a cupboard with your N64. It doesn't belong solely in a genre of games meticulously simulating real world sports for their existing fans. It doesn't belong in our past any less than it belongs in our future. It belongs in our living rooms, our bars, our parks and public spaces. It belongs at our events, our festivals and expos. It belongs in our lives, right now.

There's a second reason Sportsfriends is important to me. I always hated sports games, and for nigh on fifteen years, they've been the main place to go to for local multiplayer. Since my early childhood, I've just not given a shit about simulating sports that take place on a pitch. I was never particularly good at them, but I still felt I'd rather play football or tennis in real life, or actually learn to skate and hit a puck.

One of the reasons I've never really liked sports games is a deep seated, unconscious and irrational one I only figured out recently: The sound of a football crowd is the sound of a boring, childhood Saturday afternoon at home. The sound of my engaged and fun dad, finally in the house for a couple of days straight, becoming completely absorbed and stationary. I love him, he was and is a good dad, but when I was very young and football was on the telly, he wasn't the same person anymore. Nothing sinister or angry about him in this state, but when I was five, it meant I'd lost an excellent friend for the afternoon.

Sports games are older than my dad. Ever since Tennis for Two was made to run on an oscilloscope in the 1950s, they've been tethered to fidelity within the limits of their technology, and that's never really interested me. Even at the park, even though I didn't understand it as such, and despite being called an idiot by my friends, I was usually more interested in modding football than playing it ("Why don't we try a triangular pitch, two balls and three teams?", "What about this ball that's shaped like a baked bean?").

I played all of the games in Sportsfriends before this Kickstarter was put together. J.S. Joust gave me something entirely new: The contact and sparks of playing a physical game with other people, while all of the boring admin and judging are done by a computer (exactly the reason I switched from modding pen and paper RPGs to modding videogames in my teens). BaraBariBall soothes me with water drums instead of assaulting me with crowd noise. Hokra strips down the aesthetics of a sport to something pure, ludic, and simple to grasp. Pole Riders gives me an athletic approximation a million times more interesting and challenging than the shit keyboard mashing of 80s athletics simulators.

Whether it was staring across a room, circling someone else clutching a PS Move controller, or feeling a small crowd of spectators get drawn into the close contention of a four player game of Hokra, these games all awoke a part of my brain that had been starved for many years. I realised I'd finally found something in sports that I could count myself a supporter of.

I don't actually know Ramiro, Doug, Noah and Bennett very well, but through their work they've shown me that I don't actually hate sports games; that such games can do new and interesting things. They took a genre I normally wouldn't spare any time for, and populated it with some of the best things I've played in recent years. They're not simply recreating the better bits of games from our past, and they're not just simulating existing sports. They're doing new things, things that only videogames can do. In that, they're also reviving a tremendously important aspect of game design.

Sportsfriends never, ever trades on nostalgia. They're not hawking plug-into-your-TV ZipStick replicas with Amiga games burned onto a ROM, and they're not just updating old games for new devices. They're making new stuff for you to play with your friends, and it is truly excellent. It's not just cool stuff for indie kids, it's easily playable fun for everyone. Beyond that, it's preservation and expansion of game design heritage.

With Sportsfriends, there's no risk of these amazing games *not* being created. The prototypes already exist, and with this extra funding to finish them, they will shine. Furthermore, not only will you get them for your computer, but it will enable them to exist on one of the very console platforms that has neglected local multiplayer this past generation. There's just over a day left, and Sportsfriends is here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gutefabrik/sportsfriends-featuring-johann-sebastian-joust

- David Hayward, 09/12/2012.

--
Hello. My name is David. Depending on what time of year it is, I'm a production manager for the GameCity Festival, or an indie games curator for the Eurogamer Expo and Rezzed. You can contact me for games stuff at all times by any of these email addresses: david.hayward
[at]ympt.co.uk
[at]gamecity.org
[at]eurogamer.net