Playing With Others: The act of betrayal

[Editor's note: archimedes17 talks about the time he betrayed his brother in Streets of Rage for his Monthly Musing piece. -- CTZ]

We had done it. My brother and I had worked our way through the ranks, up from the streets, taking down the sprawling criminal syndicate that threatened to snuff out the last shred of decency the town had left. The road had been long and hard, and we had lost countless lives, but thankfully they were all ours, and we had plenty to spare. A carnival of bizarre, deformed goons assaulted us; their twisted visages and cheap throw moves demonstrated the extent of the evil we had to overcome. And overcome them we did, flying kick after flying kick. We kept our heads the entire way: we split the loot evenly, shared the weapons, and used the special moves to our advantage.

Our teamwork and dedication led us to the top of the tower, the penthouse suite where the big boss, Mr. X, held court. Together, we broke down the door and charged in, ready to fight our final foe. We were not prepared for what Mr. X had in store for us.

Ah, Streets of Rage: the game that changed the meaning of multiplayer gaming for me.

Everything started so innocently. It began in 1990, when my father introduced my younger brother and me to the NES. We willingly gorged ourselves on the vivid pixels that covered the television screen. All of the games we played together fell into one of two camps: co-op or competitive. We were either battling against the forces of evil, side by side, ala Battletoads, or we were trying to take each other out ala Blades of Steel.

As I grew older, the technophilia started to infect my mind -- I wanted to move beyond the limitations of 8-bit systems into a bigger league with twice the definition. My father wasn't interested in getting a new console, so I set my mind on saving enough money to buy one myself. At the age of 12, with $100 in my pocket, I bought my first game machine: the Sega Genesis. Because I wanted to play games with my brother, I dropped by a used game store and picked up a copy of Streets of Rage, thinking that it would be a good beat 'em up game where the valiant brothers triumph over the worst scum the streets had to offer.

Everything in the game, up until the final level, was par for the course. We each picked a stereotypical fighter with correspondingly stereotypical stats (i.e. the blond-haired white guy is the standard against which the beefy black man and slinky white woman are measured) and side-scrolled our way through levels filled with carbon copy enemies. It was all good -- we fought alongside each other, protecting one another's back. In some ways, it was the tidy division of labor that compelled me to play co-op. My brother and I had different tactics that complemented each other: he liked the slow, heavy-hitting tanks who took the brunt of the damage, while I preferred the finesse fighters who cherry-picked and back-stabbed. As the older brother, I found this arrangement satisfying. But in spite of all my elder sibling urges to keep the upper hand when playing with my brother, I knew that the goal was to defeat the bad guys, and sabotaging that mission by hogging resources, stealing kills, and other unsporting acts was bad form.

Then Level 8 happened. If you're not familiar with the game, the last fight pits the player(s) against Mr. X, aforementioned criminal mastermind. Before you can take a swing at him, he makes an offer: join him as his "right hand man." In a single-player game, if you accept, he laughs at your foolishness and drops you down a trap door, which takes you back two levels. Dick move, but understandable. Why would he trust somehow who just decimated 99.5% of his organization? In a two-player game, he makes the offer to both players. They can both refuse and finish their righteous crusade; the game rewards them with the "good" ending where peace and love are restored to the town, and the characters can have a very Breakfast Club-style conclusion. If they both accept, Mr. X laughs and sends them down the hole. But the third option, where one player accepts and the other doesn't, that option inevitably crept into my brain. Without listening to my brother's protests, I turned my back on all we had worked so hard to achieve and struck him down.

I couldn't look my brother in the eye as I used the cheapest moves to whittle away at the impressive number of lives he had racked up. He fought back, but it was in vain. Anger made him sloppy, and each time his character fell to the floor, he got more frustrated. As his last man dropped, he threw the controller down, punched me in the shoulder, and left. I knew he would be mad. But the game gave me the choice. How could I not pick it?

That fight was the first game I encountered that presented players with an option other than "save the world" or "doom the world," and it hinged on the fact that two people were playing. Mr. X's offer resembles the oft-quoted prisoner's dilemma, where two people must decide whether or not the other can be trusted not to shank them in the back when given the choice. Christopher Nolan uses the concept well in The Dark Knight when the Joker rigs the two boats with explosives and tells each boat that the people on the other vessel can kill them at any time. The premise here hinges on the fact that one boat has "average citizens" and the other one has convicts. Ultimately, the movie suggests that people can do the right thing; but all of that was far beyond my thinking at the time when I betrayed my brother. He trusted me to stick with him through the end of the game -- based on our relation and our previous gaming experiences -- and I took advantage of that trust.

The whole experience illustrated a lot about me as a young boy. Looking back, I realize how much of a dick I was at times. I would like to blame the game for what happened, something akin to the "devil made me do it" defense. And perhaps some part of me picked that choice because of its novelty. I think, however, I just needed a game that condoned all those ugly sibling rivalry instincts that clotted beneath the surface. Sure, I could steal special attack drops and conveniently let that thug grab my brother while I'm "busy", but the game isn't encouraging that behavior. I'm reading that into the game. When I'm explicitly offered the chance to betray my ally, all bets are off. I could always say, "But the game let me!"

Ever since Streets of Rage, my brother has never fully trusted me when it comes to co-op. We have to work out very detailed plans for working together, and if I make one misstep, he releases the hounds. I remind him that, given the prevalence of online multiplayer, he has it easy. These days, its hard to play a round of Left 4 Dead where you don't see someone hotdogging it at the expense of the rest of the team. The choice of whether one honors the tenets of co-op gaming or not introduces a lot of frustration and facepalming, but it also makes those players who do respect the co-op that much more noble.

When I was 12, I got a taste of that freedom and got drunk on it. By now, I've learned my lesson, and I try to maintain a code of conduct that would make even my brother proud. That's the way I like it, especially if we ever get around to playing Streets of Rage again.

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