Freelance journalist Evan Narcisse

It goes without saying that when we play single-player games, we usually do so by ourselves. But while staying at a friend's in Los Angeles over the Thanksgiving break, we were introduced to the singular pleasures of passing the controller back and forth so that two players can, um, jointly progress through a game's solo mode. Upon discovering that freelance journalist Evan Narcisse likes to indulge in the same recreational activity, we knew we had to persuade him to write about this phenomenon--and its implications--for Level Up. Narcisse, whose work on videogames appears in the Washington Post and Entertainment Weekly, also writes the Thought/Process cultural criticism column for Crispy Gamer and moderates the site's podcast, Blazing Prattles. Here's what he had to say.

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Being a journalist who writes about video games tends to be a pretty cool job. Insight into a medium that you love, early access to potentially mind-blowing games and a sense of bonhomie with other writers all help to ease the panic brought on by the debt load of my student loans. Still, the core misconception about this vocation never goes away: "All you do is play games all the time."

There's a great sequence from a mid-90s DC Comics mini-crossover that I think about when people say that. In the sequence--written by the great Denny O'Neil--Batman, Green Arrow and the Question cross paths during an adventure. After the Dark Knight shares some rarefied knowledge vital to completing the heroes' mission, the cantankerous Emerald Archer wonders just how Batman knew that stuff, saying "I thought all you did was swing down from rooftops and clean bad guys' clocks." O'Neil liked to write an especially brittle, arch version of Batman and true to that, Batman coolly informs Green Arrow that "that's only 4 percent of my activity. The remaining 96 percent is spent gathering information."

My point here is that, in my experience, in order to write reviews and articles about videogames, it takes a lot more than just playing them to churn out work I'm consistently happy with. Sitting in front of a console playing a game to meet a deadline or to just take stock of the buzz surrounding a certain release can be drudgery. It's solitary work that requires focus and oftentimes requires you to be anti-social, too. I often ask myself, "Do I succumb to the need to sleep/pee/eat or keep grinding my way through this level?"

Over the holidays, I got a chance to relieve some of that solitude when a friend of mine--let's call him B--moved two-and-a-half blocks away from me. B came over with another friend as I started playing The Orange Box. My other bud was a big Half-Life 2 fan, so we took a look at the way the 360 version played. Later, B hung around as I started playing Portal. He knew nothing about the game and, after I quickly explained what I'd gleaned from previous press events, he just watched me play. Quickly, the brilliance of the game dawned on us.

More importantly, it dawned on us together, and B soon decided that he wanted in. We started going through the game hot potato-style: I'd finish a test chamber or would get a mental block that prevented me from seeing how the pieces of a particular puzzle fit together,  so I'd pass the 360 controller to him. Back and forth it went. "Put the ingress here…" I'd say and he'd finish "...and the egress goes here? Are those tiles actionable?" (Yes, we did actually say "ingress," "egress" and "actionable." I take full responsibility.)

I started noticing that my experience of Portal differed from other titles I'd played recently. By my lonesome, I might've chalked up my occasional frustrations to poor design, frazzled reflexes or my own cognitive bottlenecks. Playing co-operatively with B allowed me to take some of the pressure off of myself and let the game seep in. The way I heard GLaDOS's snippy commentary changed completely. Were I playing Portal solo, I would've asked myself if I'd heard her snark correctly, shrugged and gone back to solving the puzzle of whatever room I was in. With B by my side, whoever was playing would pause, we'd look at each other and break out into guffaws when GLaDOS's dry condescension or blatant panic made itself known. By the time the camera careens through the underbelly of Aperture Science and the first gentle strains of "Still Alive" start up, we both were dizzy from flinging Chell through Room 17 and aching from laughing through GlaDOS's final rant. (For my part, I started to well up a little bit, too.)

A short time after finishing Portal, B and I started playing Assassins Creed in the same way. But here the experiential arc here differed a bit; the hype surrounding Assassins (instilled partly by me) had gotten to B and visions of cutting-edge kills were dancing through his head. As the game unfolded, including a framing story I'd successfully guessed at after seeing the game at E3 2005--and yes, I'm gloating--I started to carp about some of the glaring flaws that I felt stopped Assassins from being great. I worried about this, because I didn't want to sour B's experience.

Still, every time we looped through any one of the game's cut-and-pasted elements, B nevertheless expressed amazement at the game's structural ambition and technical dazzle. Early on, I was better at the free-running and combat portions of the game, but my twitchy reflexes had it so that B handled all the pickpocketing missions. Eventually, we both became sufficiently adept at maneuvering Altair and the controller-passing frequency increased. I kept waiting for Assassins Creed to show me more: more gameplay mechanics, more story, more character beats. By the time the last third of the game came around, B, not me, was the one pointing out flaws in the enemy AI and lamenting the change to swordplay-intensive levels. He appreciated the way the cities felt populated and the thrill of climbing the heights of historic Jerusalem, but the game's cliffhanger ending evoked in us a similar feeling of emptiness.

Having played two ostensibly single-player games in this co-operative fashion--let's call it SCOOP for single co-op--I wonder how many other people must be running through their games this way. As titles get more expensive, more expansive and more complex, I wouldn't be surprised if more gamers chose to take two and pass. Hand-to-hand co-op differs from, say, tackling a few songs on Rock Band because one partner goes from active to passive. Alternately, Player X becomes the performer--with his skills and progression open to interpretation--while Player Y can assume the role of critic, coach or partner. My buddy-up sessions with B were filled with suggestions/orders from both of us to "try going over there," "point the camera on that thing" or "go follow that guy".

When the last round of the Roger Ebert vs. Video Games grudge match was flaring up, I wondered aloud (in a IM to N'Gai, I think) if what bothered Ebert was the way that games attempted to place players in something akin to an authorial space. In many of the best and/or most ambitious games, the pacing and narrative flow is often left to the player to decide. Don't feel like getting back to the plot of an open-world romp? Let's do some side missions, then, or muck with the AI and see if we can poke at the seams of this world.

Videogames are an interactive medium, after all, and moreso than in other entertainment forms, what you wind up getting isn't just what the content creators intended but what you put into it as well. The end result emerges as a gestalt experience that changes with each different user. For somebody like Ebert, facing such a shift in media sensibilities must be like looking out the window and finding out that the geocentric model of the universe is dead wrong. That idea--the end user as auteur--multiplies when a game gets played pass-around style because the "audience" isn't a passive entity. The feedback loop that every game creates becomes more powerful with every participant--whether or not that participant is actually controlling the gameplay. Theoretically, every "Dude, you suck!, " or "What the hell just happened?!" or "That was amazing" changes the overall act of playing a game.

B and I haven't gamed on the couch together since running through both Ubisoft and Valve's efforts. There's been some talk of trying Army of Two or eventually seeing what Tom Clancy Vegas adventure has to offer. But, what I really want is something we can play SCOOP-style--and to see if the next AAA title coming down the pike can give our Team Supreme a run for its money.