A Week with Sportsfriends

Most often when you hear the word multiplayer, you immediately think of shooting someone right in the face. You and your anonymous rival, both wearing headsets, are alone in your consecutive living rooms, firing at one another.

Nowadays, it seems the Internet has left us playing video games alone, together. It wasn’t so long ago that multiplayer meant sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on your friend’s couch, staring at your designated fourth of the screen as you sniped your prick friend (you know, the kid who always picked Oddjob) or shredding plastic guitars to “Don’t Stop Believin”.

So when Motherboard asked if I could put together a multiplayer-focused arcade for their relaunch party, I knew who to call.

A rookle playing Johann Sebastian Joust at Motherboard's relaunch party (via Pitchfork)

In the subsequent week, I've been hanging out with some of those developers at the leading-edge of indie games today, folks like Ramiro Corbetta, Bennett Foddy, Noah Sasso, and Doug Wilson. As it turns out, these four have recently joined forces to create an incredibly warm, aesthetically minimal collection of local multiplayer games. They're calling it Sportsfriends.

When I told Wilson, who developed Johann Sebastian Joust (seen above), one game in the suite, that Sportsfriends is recapturing something that has gone missing from the contemporary gaming world--namely, that energy from playing together, that excitement in the room when, suddenly, you chuck down your controller, and scream at your friends--he said that it's all about rekindling that social, oftentimes physical rush that comes along with a playing-the-fool feeling.

“On one hand it’s intensely competitive," Wilson said. "I really like that. But on the other hand, there’s a kind of silliness to them. To me it’s this really nice mix between silly and competitive; a sweet spot.”

And they are sweet. Sportsfriends is an extremely satisfying collection of indie multiplayer games being offered on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter, but with a twist: If the game suite gets funded, it will be included in the Playstation Network’s Playstation Store.

So, how did this indie supergroup come together, anyway?

JOHANN SEBASTIAN JOUST

J.S. Joust takes to the streets of Copenhagen, June 2011

It all starts with Johann Sebastian Joust. A critical darling, J.S. Joust ousted both Valve’s Portal 2 and Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire in the Game Developer’s Choice Innovation Award category back in March.

Joust is very much a videogame, but it doesn’t have a screen. It’s can be tricky to describe. I like to call it a hybrid between the egg-in-spoon race from a Victorian jubilee and a grope-y junior high co-ed judo match. It uses the Playstation Move Controller, a more sophisticated and gyroscopic Wii remote normally used on the Playstation 3.

And yet with Joust, there is no TV. So where do you play?

“I’ve seen J.S. Joust played in tons of creative ways on both small and large scales," Nick Suttner, Sportsfriends’ friend in Developer Relations at Sony, tells me over email. "On the Kickstarter video you can even see them playing on the subway. It may require a little Johann Sebastian Joust feng shui of living rooms and some creativity, but I’m confident people would have a ton of fun with it even in close quarters.”

Fair enough, right? But is that something players are actually willing to do? Obviously, not everyone has enough room to play, let alone several Move Controllers hanging about--although J.S. Joust is certainly a reason to upgrade your square footage and pick up a few wands, while you’re at it. So Joust has been combined with some good old-fashioned multiplayer wunderkinds, thus forming Sportsfriends.

That formula caught Sony’s attention. “We’ve been working with Doug for a while to find the best way to bring J.S. Joust to our platform where it obviously makes a ton of sense," Suttner adds. "And when the collaborative Sportsfriends concept was floated it really just tied it together perfectly.”

HOKRA

Developed by Ramiro Corbetta, Hokra is a De Stijl style deathmatch made entirely of squares. It’s FIFA in Pong drag; two-on-two, shoot-'n-pass gameplay minimalism so tight my teeth still hurt.

Last week at the launch party, I saw Hokra catch the attention of some Rockstar Games devs and hip hop legend Yasiin Bey. Super approachable, and infinitely enjoyable.

POLE RIDERS

Pole Riders, by Bennett Foddy, is--in typical Foddy fashion--a goofily controlled pole vault kung fu match where two players aim to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a ball on a zip-line into opposite goal posts. It’s clumsy, unintuitive, and fucking genius. The unwieldiness of the poles often means you and your rival get locked into a suggestive, pole-slapping knot of strategic “you first” Chicken.

I lost my voice screaming at my pal Alex as we waddle-swatted the ball to my hairline victory shot last night at an event Tumblr hosted to Twitch stream all these games in action, seen in the gif above.

BARABARIBALL

Rounding out Sportsfriends is Noah Sasso’s BaraBariBall. Think of it as a pixelated Smash Bros., only with a volleyball mechanic that is so fun and satisfying that Masahiro Sakurai’s eyes must have popped out like the Tex Avery wolf when he first saw it.

The problem is, Sakurai’s eyes remain in tact. In fact, many eyes remain in their sockets. It seems Sportsfriends just hasn’t attracted enough attention to get enough funding for their campaign. Though they remain optimistic, with only three days left in their Kickstarter campaign, the boys are only at 56 percent of their goal. Sportsfriends' deal is through Pub Fund, Sony's indie-game incubator that, for better or worse, lets developers do their own thing.

“The Kickstarter campaign is entirely theirs. We’ve just helped to communicate it across our different channels and encourage people to support it if they find value in the idea," Suttner explained. "[The] Pub Fund program will provide them with financial and co-marketing support when the game is released, but they needed the up-front funding to develop the game.”

While J.S. Joust and Pole Riders border on the avant garde, Hokra and BaraBariBall are incredibly simple, almost fundamentalist revolts against modern game design trends. They focus, rather, on the core mechanics that made their respective genres so damn fun in the first place. It's an attribute that Suttner thinks could very well depolarize the mass gaming community.

“I think a lot of modern sports games, while incredibly deep, have become inaccessible to many gamers in service of their simulations," he explained. "Games like BaraBariBall and Hokra focus on some of the core tenets of sports that make them so great – passing, scoring, the competitive spirit – in a much more approachable way, simplifying the controls and even the aesthetic, while keeping them incredibly deep for those who want to play at the most competitive levels.”

Here's hoping it’s enough to bring these games to the masses. Either way, the Sportsfriends live in my neighborhood. We’ll be playing all weekend, screaming and laughing, while you’re alone and BluTooth-headsetted, shooting your opponent in the face while getting trolled by a 12-year-old.

Top: Motherboard relaunch partygoers playing BaraBariBall and Hokra (via Caroline McElhinny)

Follow Colin at @scallopdelion