For years we've been playing games that either pit us against each other or with each
other.
Games come in three forms, Competitive, co-op, and solo play.
But despite these all sounding like categories on pornhub, what we've seen from recent
games is that the best of the best include a mixture of these three.
Sure if you're forever alone there's plenty of games that have single player campaigns.
If, unlike me, you have real friends many of those same games have co-op campaigns.
And if your game has a gun you better believe there's going to be an online versus mode.
But if you look at a game like Destiny, there's one part of the franchise that stands out
above the rest.
The raids.
The feeling and adrenaline rush that comes from a fireteam of six working in perfect
harmony, exploding heads and shooting golden guns while yelling at each other that you're
out of heavy ammo, it's some of the best fun you can have in a game.
There's nothing quite like it.
But what is that feeling that draws us to co-op modes like this?
Why of all the modes Destiny has for us, is it the raids that stand out, that draw people
to buy the game?
Today, instead of analyzing the emotional chaos of Mario's mentality or the impending
doom Sonic sets on himself with his own worst fears, I'm going to analyze you.
But not just you, all of us, humans as a whole.
I want to understand why team based, heavily cooperative games like Destiny give us a satisfaction
other games just can't match.
I mean just look at this clip from the Achievement Hunter guys when they finished a Destiny raid.
I don't know about you, but I didn't scream like a goddamn maniac when I beat Shadow of
War.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that single player games aren't good.
I absolutely loved my playthrough of Shadow of War.
But at no point did I bust a lung with happiness.
Yet, I have done that over Discord with a team of six while playing Overwatch.
That type of pure adrenaline rush and reaction seems to only come from playing and succeeding
with other people.
So why is that?
What makes us so much more energized, excited, and happy to succeed when we do it with others?
I hope you're ready to dive into the entire history of gaming, from pong to Destiny 2,
as we unravel the story of humans as a species, the story of you!
Long ago, in an age when cell phones didn't exist, and your mom and dad were still decades
away from having a life changing accident called you, there existed the primitive video
games.
Look at pong in its natural habitat.
Breathtaking.
When it comes to early gaming your choices typically came as either solo gameplay or
a PvP exercise.
For a while cooperative gameplay just..didn't really exist.
If you think about the games you'll find in arcades now, you can always sit down and
play some Gauntlet with some buddies or slot some quarters in for a good Metal Slug experience,
but these games were released pretty late in the golden age of arcades, or missed that
segment of history entirely.
When you think about classic arcade games: Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Frogger, Donkey Kong,
you're always thinking about one player games.
The technology for cooperative gameplay just hadn't been actualized yet.
In addition to the lack of technology, the mentality to create cooperative games just
wasn't there.
Games in general were typically one player or competitive.
And I'm not just talking about video games right now.
Monopoly, pinball, all those board games your mom wants you to play during family time were
what game developers had as examples of "gaming".
So when it came to cooperative gameplay, it took much longer to come about.
Luckily, that didn't last forever.
As we got into console gaming the opportunities for cooperative gameplay began to expand.
When I think about my first cooperative experience I'm always brought back to Super Mario World
for the NES.
That game was hard.
As.
Fuck.
But it was also fun, fresh, other f words, and cooperative to a degree.
I mean you didn't actually play together.
It was basically the same as passing a controller between two people, but the excitement you
got from being able to go on an adventure together was so new, and felt so good, it
was like a mini braingasm.
I quickly realized that my favorite games aren't the ones with the best graphics or
the most immersive, they were the ones where I had someone else along for the ride.
Castle crashers is a perfect example of this.
Is that game amazing in any way?
Graphics, meh, gameplay, meh, but 4 player co-op?
Hell yeah!
And it's the success of games like Castle Crashers that have gotten us to the 6 player
co-op immersive experiences we have today with Overwatch and Destiny.
But I think the true driving force behind our amazing multiplayer cooperative experiences
actually came from our good buddies at Blizzard with a game you might have heard of.
It's called World Of Warcraft and took on the insanity of developing raids for anywhere
from 10 to 30 players at one time.
This isn't my bias as a WoW player by the way, I don't play WoW.
Well, I did.
For like a week.
A week where I...forgot what sunlight was.
So I decided this was a game I should avoid.
For health reasons.
But my friend Andy plays it and he gave me all the insight into what WoW's raid scene
looks like.
Blizzard took what cooperative games we had and decided to push the limits of what was
possible for cooperative play.
And If you're as old as I am, you can remember just how successful World of Warcraft was.
Again, when we're looking at this game, it wasn't the graphics that made it appealing.
In fact MMOs are notorious for having fairly bad graphics so they can reach the biggest
number of people.
It certainly wasn't the monthly payments added onto the price to buy the game that
drove people to WoW.
It was the sense of being part of something greater.
Of joining a clan, of having a community.
You didn't have to be a solo adventurer.
You had a group of dedicated people all working together simultaneously towards one goal with
the hopes that none of them were Leeroy Jenkins.
That's what made WoW special.
The advancement of cooperative gameplay through its raiding system was unprecedented at the
time.
And on top of that, WoW made raids of different difficulties depending on the type of player
that wanted to raid.
WoW's easiest Looking-For-Raid (LFR) raids needed 25 players to join.
It utilized an automated matching system to group you with other strangers and automatically
teleports you to the raid once there's 25 people in the group.
Normal and Heroic Raids were 10-30 player quests but there was no automated matching
system, people needed to have family or friends or clans to be able to play these harder raids
and they were wildly successful.
The raids would adjust based on the number of people in your party to give you a fighting
chance if you only have 10, or to try and overwhelm you if you brought in 30.
And there's the Mythic raids that need exactly 20 people.
They are the hardest of all the raids and require high levels of team coordination and
practice to complete.
They're the types of raids where you have 20 people all in one Discord voice chat, but
everyone is deathly quiet as the leader explains everyone's roles.
The mythic raids are the ones that people truly love.
The hardest of the hard to require true cooperation to succeed.
The success of these massive raids with dozens of people was food for thought for game developers.
As gaming has evolved we've seen more and more games allow for larger numbers of cooperative
gameplay with great success.
Destiny 2 is just the most recent example.
And the advancement of technology has brought us applications like Discord that not only
give us the ability to easily connect with friends and clan members across the world
for gaming, but also allows us to make communities around gaming and the games we love.
Just as an example, I'm part of the Treesicle Community Discord, and you can be too, a private
discord for the three main Tree dudes and our editors, a Discord for my highschool and
college friends who I game with, and my Dungeons and Dragons Discord where our DM is actually
a fan turned friend from the Treesicle Community Discord.
All these communities were brought about by the need and desire to play cooperatively
with other people.
And I know I'm not alone when I say I'm a part of that many online communities.
But the question is: why?
Why do we flock to gaming communities, why are we attracted to cooperative play?
What makes beating a raid as a team feel so good?
The answer is our primal instincts.
Humans as a species are not solo creatures, we like to live in close knit groups among
a larger community.
These small groups are our families and our friends.The places we live and the small part
of society we find ourselves living in is our community.
If you think about humans we're just super evolved brainy as fuck animals.
We're basically the snobs of the animal kingdom.
But in the end, we still have the same basic psychology as many animals, staying alive
is our primary objective.
And the best way for us to stay alive is in a community.
It's written into our DNA to seek out communities that we can thrive in.
And I know that I and probably many of you who watch our videos thrive in the gaming
communities.
This is what makes us feel so good when we're playing a game with our friends.
We're quite literally going through a simulation wherein our main objective is to stay alive
and work with our community to kill whatever is trying to kill us.
So when you're on a fireteam of six and taking on a Destiny raid where this big ass
dude is trying to kill you and your five friends, you're actively probing that animalistic
instinct inside of you.
Despite Destiny 2 being one of the newest releases, what the game is doing to you when
you play through a raid is it's essentially transporting your mind to a more primitive
time.
Your brain becomes completely focused on fighting, surviving, and communicating with your team
to make sure everyone is doing their part and staying alive.
It's engaging a more subconscious part of your mind and bringing that feeling to the
forefront of your brain.
So when you beat that boss after what seems like a lifetime of working in perfect harmony
with your companions you get this reaction, it's because you're literally doing the
most instinctual thing you can do while using an advanced piece of technology to make it
happen.
Next time you're playing a game with your friends, whether it's Destiny or Overwatch,
or anything else that requires more than one player and constant communication, remember
that there's something much deeper happening to you than just having some fun with a friend.
You're participating in a subconscious need and desire that dates back to the founding
of our species.
To work with the people you like, to succeed at something together, that's not just fun
in a video game, that's fun in real life.
That's what this channel is and has always been about.
Because every video that goes up on Treesicle, it's not just me, it's not just Grant,
it's me and Tyler and Grant, constantly working and fighting together participating
in our small group of three while working to make a larger Treesicle community as a
whole.
We do it because we want to make a community that we love, a community that you love, that
you feel you're a part of, that you can call home.
Because at the end of the day, that's what cooperative gameplay is all about, creating
that community for you and your friends to call home.
So to make that happen, our friends over at Discord have been nice enough to sponsor this
video.
So if you want to help us in continuing to create the best community we can, check out
the discord link in the description.
It'll take you to our Treesicle Community where you'll be able to ask us questions,
meet other people who watch our stuff, play games together, actually find out what Tyler
does on the channel, all while hopefully make some really good friends like I have.
I've met people from the Treesicle Discord that I talk to on a weekly basis, and not
just our Dungeons and Dragons DM.
On top of that, I'm always logged in to Discord when I'm on my computer to talk
to our editors and the other Tree guys.
It's my main form of communication for everything that happens on the channel and we want you
all to be a bigger part of that.
So click the link in the description, make an account if you don't have one and feel
free to say hi, hang out, and talk to us some if you want to.
One of us is almost always online.
Like literally 16 hours a day there's probably a Treesicle member online.
Anyway, that's it for me today and I hope to see you all in the next video, or talk
to you all on Discord!
Toodles!
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