Game designer
It is this one magical experience that drives players to play games for days, months or even years. It is the most proved and addicting aspects of games. What is this ‘team play’ and how is it used in games? What makes team play such a powerful game element?
Imagine yourself setting a goal that is far beyond your capabilities. You can either try to accomplish that goal and fail or… you could ask for others to help you. Every person that is going to help you reach your goal will extend the capabilities of you and your group of people we call a team. So to work as a team basically means to use the extended capabilities of every individual. Every individual must act on the behalf of the team or else the capabilities won’t add up to the people who do. If the full capability of the team is required to reach a goal, you need real team work, something that is not as easy as it may seem and something that needs a lot of preparation and organization. This part of team play is what we call team strategy or tactics.
In many recent video games, this last thing is where most games are based on. Think of an MMO like World of Warcraft where 25 individuals team up to defeat dungeons, or Left4Dead where 4 players all take a role in defending themselves and their teammates. Or think of almost any team sport – soccer, baseball… even tennis with 4 people is mostly based on strategical positioning and shooting.
Is there a difference between teamwork and team play? Is there a difference between working together and playing together? Which term you could use would depend on the context, on the goal of the team and whether that goal is brought to the team with a cooperative mind or setting. Both terms suggest interactivity between the team members. Team play would suggest that the team members have fun doing their part of the work that has been done, but why can’t team work be fun?
Anyway, we can conclude that the goal is what makes team play so powerful, impossible as an individual but possible as a team. The accomplishment of difficult tactics or strategies only add to the reward of achieving the impossible. Even if there are no explicit tactics, is can be a huge reward for the team members to accomplish implicit tactics. But are there also other factors that strengthen that sense of being part of a team?
If you have ever been part of a (successful) team, you would know that there is always this one team member that is better at what he does than everyone else in the team. I would like to call these people team heroes. These people inspire others to do their own task better, whether that task is the same or completely different. Beside respecting each person’s individual capabilities, strong team members also trust in each other in acting with their full capability.
So to wrap this up, a team is easily created by gathering some people together and giving them the same goal, but for a stronger sense of team play, a lot more is needed. Tactics make sure the process of achieving the goal is done organized, team heroes inspire team mates to do their work (better) and team members being dependent on one another will create trust in all the team members.
Achieving the impossible is possible. You just can’t do it by yourself.