A couple of years ago, during Thanksgiving with family, my cousins, siblings, and I began playing a card game. We call it King Peasant, but it has many names worldwide.
The Table of Contents
What Video Games Taught Me
The premise is that the game models a political structure (it’s sometimes called the President) where the people on top stay on top and the people on the bottom stay on bottom. At the beginning of each round,
the lowest people have to give their top 1-3 cards (depending on how low in the hierarchy they are) to the top people, ensuring that the top people have better hands.
The King Peasant Revolution
At this Thanksgiving, I’d been on the bottom for nearly the whole game, so I decided to see if I could model another aspect of politics and start a revolution. I got everyone at the bottom and the neutral person in the middle to join my revolution. We’re going on strike until the top agrees to negotiate.
Our goal is to make the card-stealing mechanic less harsh on those at the bottom. For me, it was hilarious to expand the political model in this way. For my two sisters who were at the top, though one of whom had just reached the top after slowly clawing her way up from the bottom, this was not funny.
They were both legitimately pissed at me, not just during the game but afterward. Talking about King Peasant with them remains a bad idea to this day.
The Lesson: Games Have Social Consequences
I learned that day to be more careful when weighing amusement within a game against long-term social relationships outside the game (I get along well with my sisters, but still). I also learned that changing the rules of a game is something that the people who suffer from those rule changes unsurprisingly and legitimately consider a BS move.
Multiplayer games are social events. Breaking the rules to amuse or benefit yourself has consequences and victims, even if it’s to explore or goof around rather than to cheat.
How NES Multiplayer Taught Me to Socialize
I should have known better, because on balance, video games have made me a better-socialized person. Some of my best life lessons about sharing as a kid came while playing multiplayer video games on the NES.
Split-screen co-op was rare in those 8-bit days (aside from Spy Vs Spy and Xenophobe), so most multiplayer games were alternating play, same-screen co-op, or same-screen competitive. Each of those multiplayer styles provides a venue for different socialization skills that were good for me as a kid (though I also knew kids who just got more practice at being jerks while playing each type of game).
Competitive Games: Winning and Losing Gracefully
Competitive video games like Rampage, Tecmo Bowl, and WWF Wrestlemania were a good opportunity to learn how to win and lose without being a jerk. If you were a jerk, people wanted to play with you less. I didn’t get an NES until midway through 1988, so if I wanted to play before that, I had a great incentive to be someone who wasn’t annoying to play with.
Co-op Games: Learning Cooperation
Co-op games like Contra, Metal Slug, Streets of Rage 3, TMNT III: The Manhattan Project, and the Ikari Warriors series need cooperation. In the 8-bit era, one player's progress could accidentally harm the other.
This funny twist reappears in the New Super Mario Bros series. You had to be aware of how what you did affected your partner and the overall strategy, and not always put yourself first.
Alternating Multiplayer: Patience and Sharing
Alternating multiplayer games like Super Mario Bros, Double Dragon (NES), Paperboy, and the odd Q*Bert taught patience and sharing. You had to wait and watch the other player(s), which made the experience unique. I forgot how hard Paperboy was until I replayed it a few years ago! Actively rooting for their failure also tended to have negative social consequences (usually).
Unsupervised Learning
Now, all of these peer socialization lessons are things that kids get outside of multiplayer video games, of course, in activities like team sports, schoolyard playground activities, or playing things other than video games with friends. But unlike team sports or schoolyards, video game sessions tended (for me, anyway) to be relatively unsupervised by adults.
Unless peer interactions got really out of hand, there was no adult stepping in to make us play nice. Instead of learning what the supervising adult’s consequences for misbehavior were, I learned what the peer consequences for being a jerk were. That is a different and important thing for a kid to understand.
The Verdict: Online vs Local Multiplayer
Looking back now, with two kids of my own, I can answer that question I posed in 2014: online multiplayer is worse for socialization. The current generation hasn't learned the same social lessons I did from local multiplayer. Online gaming harms kids in ways local co-op never did.
When you're sitting next to someone on a couch, there are immediate social consequences for being a jerk. You see their reaction. You risk them not wanting to play with you tomorrow. Online? Kids curse and insult strangers with no real consequences. They haven't learned proper social skills through face-to-face interaction first.
I last played local multiplayer in 2010, got about 8 people together for Call of Duty. That kind of gaming session is rare now. Kids today grew up online from the start. They're lazy with their words, actions, and feelings because the screen creates distance from consequences.
The social lessons I learned from NES multiplayer patience, cooperation, and losing gracefully don't translate to online gaming, where you can just mute someone or switch lobbies.
My kids are growing up in this online gaming world, and it's different. Not better.
Got NES multiplayer games collecting dust? We buy Contra, Metal Slug, TMNT III: The Manhattan Project Ikari Warriors, Tecmo Bowl, and all the classic co-op and competitive NES games at The Old School Game Vault - loose or complete, any condition - and always for cash and not store credit promises.
💰 Sell Retro Video Games Online
