As Portal 2 passes three weeks since its release, now is the time to look back on cooperative play and see how it has held up. As a GeekDad who does not yet have children of video game-playing age, I played through Portal 2 with a friend, but have enlisted the help of some fellow writers to provide much-needed perspective. What sort of experience do players have when tackling Portal 2 with a friend, spouse or child? More importantly, does it make them hungry for more co-op, or have they grown tired of the trend?
Helping out with this brief peek into the minds of co-op gamers are Dave Banks and Brian McLaughlin of this very site, as well as Jessica Sicard, who blogs about video games at It All Started With Chrono Trigger. What follows are their personal experiences with the game.
GeekDad: Who did you play with?
Dave: I played with fellow GeekDad Michael Harrison, my friend Sebastian who lives in Berlin and I'm playing split-screen with my nine year old son now.
Jessica: I played with my loving fiancée and Grand Cooperative Partner, Matthew.
Brian: I played with my wife.
GeekDad: Did your partner have experience with Portal on their own, or were you in the driver's seat? (For those of you playing with your children, be honest. Who solved more of the puzzles?)
Dave: With Michael and Sebastian, both were very familiar with Portal, so it was fun. Some rooms we walked into and we both kinda just knew what to do. Other rooms, I was completely lost and my partner in science figured it out. In others, I solved the puzzle.
With my son, he has no Portal experience and so the mechanics and concept are pretty alien to him, so I have pretty much told him everything he needs to do so far. But he's beginning to get it and I look forward to sitting back and letting him figure out some of the puzzles soon. I can't imagine playing with him without the new Ping tool. It's invaluable and was useful when playing with experienced players too.
Jessica: Matt played Portal when it was first released. Curiosity drove me to play it, but I was terrible at it so he coaxed me through many of the more frustrating parts and manually assisted in others. I would say that playing the first Portal was as much of a cooperative experience for me as the sequel in that regard. And even though neither of us are children (well, maybe me, spiritually) he was, and is, definitely the puzzle mastermind.
Portal allows you to brainstorm, have real life conversations and problem solve together. These kinds of cooperative achievements are great for couples because they are so positive and real life rewarding. I don't want to sound over dramatic, but finding solutions to issues as a team is a strength and trust building exercise in real life, and we find the same kind of positive 'we know can do this together' results come from figuring out the puzzles in the game.
Brian: Yes. She had played some levels of the first Portal and had worked with me through some of the levels of the first Portal.
GeekDad: Did both of you enjoy the dry humor of Portal 2? If playing with a younger partner, did jokes manage to bridge the age gap?
Dave: Some of it is definitely lost on my son, but more than that is the backstory from the first Portal game. Without that understanding, I think he's at a disadvantage as to why some of the comments are funny. He doesn't understand why the computer is insulting us.
Jessica: I probably snicker more at the mocking and intelligent things GLaDOS says, whereas Matt laughs at Wheatley's idiotic yet lovable charm.
Brian: The age gap is only 4 years but, you know, sometimes that seems like enough of a difference...
GeekDad: Do you typically play co-op games with your Portal partner, or did this bring you together as gamers?
Dave: Portal 2 is the first (online) game I've played with Michael. I play a lot of online games with Sebastian and I frequently sit down and play split-screen with my son.
Jessica: I always play with Matt. This wasn't our first co-op, and I believe having experience in the past helped us play Portal 2 together in a more peaceful and enjoyable way. It's difficult playing with someone else for the first time because the trust level isn't there yet – you don't know what kind of gamer they are. Accommodating? Patient? Controlling? Super-mega-throw-the-controller-angry? Now playing together, even if it has its moments of frustration (like accidentally killing P-body in a room full of toxic water), is more fluid for the same reason couples can finish each other's sentences. It's like a dance.
Brian: No. We have played a lot of games with me as pilot in command but this was kind of new with us playing together. We both enjoyed it immensely.
GeekDad: If "yes" to the above, what games have you enjoyed in the past, and are there any co-ops on the horizon that you plan to play?
Dave: I've played games I wasn't really that interested in, just because of the co-op campaign (Army of Two) and I've been pretty frustrated when games didn't have a co-op mode (Bulletstorm). I am looking forward to a number of games this year, but probably none more than Gears of War 3 and a lot of that is because some of my favorite game memories involve that series and the frustrations and rewards of playing cooperatively.
There's another Tom Clancy game scheduled for later this year. I'll likely play that if it has co-op. I'd love for upcoming games like LA Noire and Skyrim to have co-op components, but it won't make me enjoy them any less. After seeing the Dungeons and Dragons Daggerdale demo at PAX East, Michael and I have agreed we'll play that cooperatively on XBLA. A lot.
Jessica: Besides the obvious Rock Band/Guitar Hero titles that are fun to play together, our favorite cooperative title is Borderlands but it's actually pretty difficult to find same/split screen co-op games for adults. Since Matt and I played dozens of hours together in Pandora, we also became more in sync with each other's styles. As far as I know, there aren't any other cooperative titles on the horizon that we are looking forward to. Maybe Borderlands 2?
GeekDad: Spoiler blinders up! What was your most rewarding experience from the Portal 2 co-op missions?
Dave: I don't know that there was anything as rewarding as the end of the single player campaign in the co-op experience. But I think the thing I enjoyed the most was laughing together at the banter from GLaDOS and then the gestures Atlas and P-Body could do, especially as the game went on a little further.
Jessica: The gestures and the stories I made up in my head about GLaDOS actually being 'on our side' because we were robots. I think she liked me best. She kept saying so and I would taunt Matt a little with it. We would playfully nudge each other and fake argue about our robot-ness making us superior to humans.
Brian: Hitting all of the ah-ha moments together. We are great at working through things together on everything as mundane as house projects to testing the Wide Field Camera 3 for Hubble so seeing that teamwork transfer into the virtual world was just fantastic.
GeekDad: Did you know that if you want to upset a human, you can just tell them their weight variance is above or below the norm?
Dave: If the laws of physics don't apply in the future, then God help you.
Jessica: You mean Chell's 'generous...ness'? :D
Brian: Why, yes. Yes, I did.
From speaking with many people who played Portal 2 during the writing of the post, I was genuinely impressed with the number of people who went on to play the co-op missions after completing the single-player campaign. Although the co-op campaign does not contain the scale of plot advancement seen in the solo mode, I would still argue that co-operative play is the meat of Portal 2.
This conclusion came about after repeatedly hearing about, and experiencing myself, the relative ease at which players cruised through the single-player campaign. The game was very light on puzzles that required precision FPS skill to execute a solution, and very rarely did a red herring cause players to reach a false solution. Instead, the meat of Portal 2 lies in co-op because that is where the bulk of the challenge lies. Even the most veteran of players will have a few head-scratching moments during these chambers, and overcoming that confusion is the real "achievement" in gaming.
Valve has previously shaken up the co-op world with their Left 4 Dead series, but now they seem to have expanded the marketplace by swapping headshots for collaborative puzzle solving. With last week's announcement of free DLC that will include new test chambers, you can be sure that players will continue meeting up to perform science. I, for one, welcome our new co-op gaming overlords.
