Asynchronous Gaming Is Sexier Than it Sounds

The author, getting strangled by a schoolchild again

Chances are, the next time I fire up a multiplayer match in Call of Duty, I'll be swiftly shot to death by an eight-year-old. It’s a weird state of affairs, really. Developers spend a lot of money making online games pretty and entertaining; being teabagged by the cast of Annie doesn't really seem like the optimal outcome.

Still, if all you’re really after is basic PvP interaction, there’s a solution of sorts – even if it doesn’t yet work for shooters. It’s called asynchronous gaming, and it’s multiplayer, but you don’t have to show up at the same time as whomever you’re planning on playing against. You take a turn whenever you want, and then your rival takes a turn whenever they want. If they still want to teabag you, they’re going to have to come over to your house and do it in person.

Asynchronous gaming has been around ever since Oxford dons first took a break from running Asian spy rings and having affairs with Vladimir Nabokov, and decided to play postal chess with each other instead. It’s as old, probably, as the Penny Black. Modern asynchronous gaming really got its mainstream start with Facebook, however, and its first star was Scrabulous.

Scrabulous: it was fucking thrilling

Asynchronous gaming works because it flatters players, suggesting that they are busy and dynamic and can’t take 20 minutes out on a Thursday night to enjoy Everybody’s Golf with the neighbours. At the same time as these games are admiring what a captain of industry you are, however, they never think to ask why you’re on Facebook all the fucking time, and why the last three entries in your search history are “Who Friz Freleng”, “Tokyo Disneyland” and “Rachel Bilson sex tape?”

It’s a strange beast, in other words – as was Scrabulous. Nobody on Facebook really wanted to play Scrabble, most likely. They did it for the same reason people climb mountains: because they’re there, and because it’s a good excuse to tit around with Kendal Mint Cake and pitons. Scrabulous also happened to be fairly well made, and you could have hundreds of games on the go at once. Sadly, the developer forgot to take into account that the whole thing was a truly gigantic piece of licensing infringement.

Scrabulous disappeared overnight, like a wonky Soviet poet who had pissed in the glove box of Uncle Joe’s favourite Volga. Farewell, sweet prince. In its place, you could suddenly play Scrabble. It was pretty much identical, but it was also achingly legit, so a lot of the thrill was gone, in the same way that visiting an art gallery is more fun at night when you've sneaked in through a skylight, tranqued the guards with blow darts and jizzed on a Rembrandt.

Luckily, things have gotten a bit better since then. Smartphone owners now have Words With Friends (Zynga, iOS, Android), for example. It’s Scrabulous that you can play on the bus, or in the bath, or in both places at once if you own your own bus and have made some unusual modifications to it. Clean interface, free version on iTunes and Android, and if you’re terminally unpopular it will even match you with randoms, so you can vanquish people you’ve never met, using your vocabulary skills alone (while simultaneously getting an insight into why you’re so terminally unpopular in the first place).

Poor Alec Baldwin

Even better, though, is Panda Poet (Spry Fox, browser). Panda Poet takes the standard word battler template and throws in a territorial twist, allowing you to capture – or recapture – large chunks of the game board as you build new words, while giving you a hefty score multiplier to wield against your opponent. It’s a game that will test your spatial reasoning more than your linguistic skills, in fact. As a bonus, if you leave the chirpy, tweety background sound effects playing in a browser tab while you go off to do something else, you’ll start to understand what it’s like to house-share with Mary Poppins.

Elsewhere, Risk: Factions (EA, Facebook) explores what happens when you take one of the world’s favourite board games, throw it on a social network and cover it in toxically sub-Moon Pig cartoon art assets. What happens, incidentally, is you get a brilliant game that you should probably only ever play when squinting. Meanwhile Hero Academy (Robot Entertainment, iOS) takes the Words With Friends front end but rips out Scrabble, replacing it with a simple fantasy war game in which you take turns to drop a series of angry carnies onto a battlefield so they can smash up each other’s crystals. Just another day at the office for most of us, perhaps, but it’s slick, well balanced, and you can play it for free when the servers are actually working.

Asynchronous gaming has even made the slow, steady creep onto consoles. In 2010, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (EA, PS3, 360, PC) featured Autolog, a new navigation and ‘recommendation engine’ that poked you every time you started the game up, telling you how many of your friends were currently better than you at driving cars dead fast and pulling off the odd donut. In addition, it gave you the option to instantly replay any races you’d recently been beaten on, and thus, as Elton John once said, the circle of life continued.

Other console developers have tried to replicate the success of Hot Pursuit’s Autolog, but they tend to forget one crucial thing: to make asynchronous gaming work, it helps to have a game worth playing. Failing that, there’s always Scrabble.

Previously: The Top Ten Most Cowardly Video Games of Recent Times