Erry Day I'm Scramblein'

Lame Party Rock Anthem reference aside I wrote this for my personal blog that, understandably, nobody reads. So I figured I would share it here :)

I really liked Words with Friends for quite a while. It even graced my life a second time when my group of friends back home got into it after my friends at school started to loose interest. I still like it actually, but after having up to 5 games going at the same time for weeks on end I kind of burned myself out. However, another word game from the same publisher, Scramble with Friends, has found its way onto Android, after a stint of iOS exclusivity, and has quickly situated itself comfortably in the “Frequent” tab on my HTC Thunderbolt.



So has Draw Something. I also got the new SSX last week. So I have been playing a lot of multiplayer, but have never actually been online at the same time as my opponent, with the exception for a couple rounds of Mass Effect 3’s Galaxy at War mode. I have come to discover that there is actually a term for this! It’s called “asynchronous multiplayer”. I love the term! I love it because it makes me feel like a scientist, instead of a white 20 something in the American Midwest that has an unhealthy attraction to electronic media. That and I think words are fun. Now the best way to describe this would be to say that the games are “turn based”, but this isn’t turn based in the way that a turn based RPG might be, it takes its systems from far before the traditional video game. I have been so enthralled by how awesome this concept is I did a little research and I want to start with square one. You see people have been playing games with each other for a while.

Not like how people played Mass Effect for “a while” until the ending ruined everything for them (topical humor!). I mean the oldest game I can think of is chess and it came into being around the 6th century supposedly. And one way to play chess is “correspondence chess”, which, is thought to have first been played in the 9th century by “Emperor Nicephorus and the Caliph of Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid”. Correspondence chess is simply a game of chess played by communicating remotely via postal service or even homing pigeon if you’re that much of a hipster or lived in the 9th century perhaps. You would make a move and then tell your opponent what you did so he/she could replicate it on their board.



There have been plenty more of these play-by-mail games but let's jump ahead a bit. Now a days we use our beloved internet to communicate and the games do a lot of the work. “Draw Something” on iOS and Android based smart phones and tablets give you a word to draw (go figure), records your process, and then sends it off to player 2. Player 2 then gets to watch your drawing appear as you drew it in almost real time (if you stop drawing for a bit the playback wont also pause when player 2 watches it), complete with erasing and resets to a blank page. Then after they guess you are both awarded coins to spend on various in game items. A bit more elegant than dirty birds bringing you a scroll of parchment with “Queen to E7” written on it with ink from a quill.

Another great modern day use is SSX 2012. It doesn’t technically do much of anything new, but it presents it so well I had to make note of it here. Anyone on your friends list with the game is considered a rival and the game will record their ghost data and then sends it to all of their rivals. The game then does a wonderful job of telling you when your record has been beet and by whom. It’s actually part of the whole experience instead of just being a leader board tucked away in a separate menu. I could go on and on about asynchronous multiplayer games that I have played, can’t play because they’re on iOS devices (I’m sorry Thunderbolt, but I regret choosing you over the iPhone 4), or have yet to grant access to the general public like MechWarrior Tactics. I won’t make any bold claims like “asynchronous multiplayer is the future of multiplayer gaming” because I’m not trying to make a point and couch co-op and online play are just too much fun, but it’s awesome to see old ideas being implemented to create such great new experiences.