Ben Fromstein-Practicum Post 4

Recently I have been playing a lost of multiplayer games on Kongregate. I started off with a simple game called Fly or Die. Basically, each player gets a turn to decide if they want to fly in a direction, shoot in a direction, or do their special move like drop a bomb. In this game, players have the ability to play in games of up to 8 players at a time. A game is started in the lobby by one of the players, and they get to choose the details of it, such as how many players are allowed to play, if the players are on teams or all going at each other in a free for all. As I mentioned during my presentation, I have noticed that people in the multiplayer games SUCK. on multiple occasions, I have been harassed and called names while playing other people in this game. Maybe it's because the idea of the game is that you are trying to shoot the other person's plane, maybe it's because a lot of the people on this site are just huge D-bags. I'm not really sure why it happens, but for whatever reason, these people feel the need to degrade their opponent through the little chat in the bottom of the screen. If anyone has any ideas as to the rationale behind this virtual oppression, please feel free to enlighten me.

I think this was a good game to start my multiplayer gaming with because it allows you to play as little as one person at a time. You aren't automatically launched into a massive game with hundreds of players on at one time. The game itself is very simple and the rounds don't last more than a few minutes. Once you're done with a round, you can go back to the lobby and play again, maybe with the same person or maybe with new opponents. This type of game is really a good gateway into larger online games because its very similar to normal multiplayer video games that you might play with your friends on a console.