We don’t often stop to think about the entire layer of shared experiences represented by video games. The shared experience of multiplayer games is obvious, and often talked about, but there is also another shared experience: the eerie notion that you’re finishing a game as a solitary player along with millions of others. Pressing the same buttons, reading the same dialog, seeing the same sights, fighting the same battles. Personally I find that notion interesting.

The original Half Life sold 8 million copies, which means that at least 8 million people have been employed at Black Mesa Research Facility as a theoretical physicist. None of the millions of players ever saw each other, or talked to each other, but they were all asked to assist in a not so theoretical experiment and for all players that experiment was a disaster. Each one of us followed the same route out of the building. Each one of us was startled by a headcrab jumping at us out of nowhere. Each one of us took in the sights of the Planet Xen on our hostile little trip there. With some people it’s perhaps the only memories you share.

In real life I’ve visited Rome as a tourist and at some point took a picture of the Colosseum from the same angle as thousands of others have undoubtedly done, but I’ve also besieged virtual Rome like millions of others. I’ve taken its walls with massive siege towers hoping for them not to catch fire, unloading early legionary cohorts on defenders belonging to a different Roman family until they routed to the city centre where they made a final stand alongside their general.

Obviously the more linear a game is, the more similar the experience. Every player has to complete the same succession of steps in the right order to progress in most graphic adventure games. Some other games, however, have different endings based on the decisions you make.

The most unique experience, I think, would be accomplished by a game that is both massively multi-player and very sandbox. But at that point it stops being a game and starts being a Second Life. In any case, there is no reason why the shared experience should be an issue. Books are too, as well as films and tv series. Games are just more of an experience in the sense that you’re an active actor in the story. That is why the aspect of determination is relevant. Let me create some more shared memories by following in your footsteps in SW:KOTOR or perhaps S.T.A.L.K.E.R.