I have been chatting with a friend about how fun the good old days were when we played games, sitting in front of a (home) computer. Where have these days gone, when you played a game with your friends, and you’d pass the keyboard and mouse along after your turn, waiting for everybody to finish their moves?
Games like these are called “hotseat” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotseat_%28multiplayer_mode%29) games, as Copilot explained. We had a few favorite games we’d play in that mode, a few friends of mine – but usually we’d be 2 or maximum 3 of us playing at the same time. For more people, the wait times in between your own moves just tend to be a little too long – even for slightly faster paced games.
Where did these games go? One obvious theory is that they were replaced by games that focused on networking that became more present even with home computers. Be it nullmodem or IPX – the networking capability, married with two new genres dominating more-people-playing-together, made the change:
- First-person shooters, Doom started this era.
- Real-Time Strategy that started with Dune II, but really took off with Command & Conquer.
These clearly benefit from people playing at the same time, against one another, moving a away from the classical hotseat situation. Hotseat playing benefitted from players looking over one another’s shoulder, trash-talking one another for their bad decisions, clearly leading to a missed turn. FPS and RTS games absolutely won’t have that: they benefit from surprise strategies that give you a benefit over your enemies, often requiring to build up ammunition, getting to a strategically beneficial position or just more forces.
Both of these games, to be fair, also work far better in larger groups of people, such as 4 or 6 players, that brings a hotseat setup to its knees. No one wants to wait their turn with 4 or more friends multiple times.
I am missing some of these games. I remember vividly playing Bundesliga Manager Hattrick during my own football career in youth teams. A friend and I would meet for afternoons, playing season after season with our selected and ever-developing teams. The highlights were clearly the direct matches during the seasons. We’d trash-talk one another and criticize each other’s decisions, downplay transfer market purchases, laugh about the random injuries our players would have – and crack jokes when we lost about teams further down the leaderboard. It’s mostly the emotions and following my friend’s decisions, thinking, and then seeing him succeed or fail – and the “together” part of the gameplay, that made the difference.
Another well-known highlight: Worms. What fun it was to have death matches with your worms, get tears of laughter when your opponent had the perfect plan of destroying your worm, but blew himself up because they overlooked a few last pixels of the environment that weren’t eradicated from a previous explosion. The absurdity of having worms fight one another, in pixel graphics, with fictitious weapons – it was a hard, fast paced competition, because you had to make moves within the time limited rounds, before control was given back to your opponent. Here too: watching your opponent and trying to figure out their tactics as early as possible to get counter-measures in place to have that last worm standing was just fantastic. We’d still play for hours, but multiple games, as the rounds were shorter and faster-paced, which added pressure, that also increased the error rate leading to blowing yourself up more often.
I miss the days. We need to bring more hotseat games back!
FRICKELSOFT 