Split-Screen: Videogame History - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Split-Screen: Videogame History
Through Local Multiplayer Design
Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Pawel Grabarczyk

introduzione
This article provides a historical look at the evolution of main-
stream videogame production by examining how the roles of two
game design patterns, “collaboration” and “competition,” have
been altered in shared screen play (SSP) during the past five
decades.1 In the present context, SSP refers explicitly to the design
of multiple local “player positions,” which offers the designed
opportunity for multiple players to directly influence the mechan-
ics of the videogame using a single screen.2 Following Christopher
Alexander and his colleagues’ established view of design patterns
as solutions to (progetto) issues, our contribution builds on a two-
vector model of videogame design that looks at the practice
through screen-related solutions contra economic and technologi-
cal change.3

The economic and technological vectors of videogame pro-
duction represent two forces that influence the design process and
the final choice of design patterns. The economic force represents
the need for a videogame to be profitable. The technological force
represents the constraints a given machine (or hardware) puts on
the designer. Accordingly, we show how the balance between the
two vectors fluctuates across three historical eras of videogame
progetto, and our ultimate argument is this: SSP was previously a
particularly desirable factor in early commercial videogame
progetto, but it has gradually become problematic because of eco-
nomic and technological evolutions in the industry.

In the past decades, use of the word “evolution” in design
theory and research has seen a notable increase. With reference to
this tendency, John Langrish aptly points out the confusions and
misunderstandings that come with the word—namely, the con-
fusion of progress in the Spencerian sense (evolution toward
complexity via the “survival of the fittest”) with progress in the
Darwinian sense (adaptive change via “natural selection”).4 In
Questo articolo, our understanding of evolution relies on the latter
definition, with the view that adaptation lacks a final goal and
does not necessarily involve increased complexity. (Piuttosto, Esso
involves alterations of successful patterns that fluctuate along with
environmental changes.)

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00634

José Zagal et al., “A Model to Support
the Design of Multiplayer Games,"
Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual
Environments 9, NO. 5 (ottobre 2000):
448–62. See also Staffan Björk and Jussi
Holopainen, Patterns in Game Design
(Hingham, MA: Charles River, 2005).
Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Adventures of
Ludom: A Videogame Geneontology
(Turku, Finland: University of Turku, 2015).
For a summary of pattern theory’s
position in the present context, Vedere
Christopher Alexander, “The Origins of
Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory,
and the Generation of a Living World,"
IEEE Software 16, NO. 5 (ottobre 1999):
71–82. In particular, consider Alexander’s
principle on “the moral capacity to
produce a living structure” and its
influence in game design.
John Langrish, “Darwinian Design: IL
Memetic Evolution of Design Ideas,"
Design Issues 20, NO. 4 (Autumn 2004):
4–19.

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Langrish stresses that “Darwinian change does have trends,
pressures, and so on, but mainly within a limited time span.”5
Although this “limited time span” is evidently a relative concept,
ranging from years to millennia, it also applies to the trending pat-
terns of design evolution. Jennifer Whyte’s more practical interpre-
tation explicates as follows:

[B]y drawing attention to the way that the designer
operates within a selection environment, an evolutionary
[Darwinian] perspective draws attention to the way the
intentionality of the designer is, to some extent, contingent
on this environment.6

In questo articolo, we rely on this practical, instrumentalist use of bio-
logical vocabulary and present the case study of SSP as a particular
instance of design vestigiality: a momentary loss of contextual func-
tion for a design pattern as a result of techno-economic evolution.
Or, in less jargoned words, we show how certain (technological and
economic) changes in the environment affect the trending patterns
of design so that (the majority of) designers end up avoiding or
abandoning features that used to be popular.

Evolution of Shared Screen Play
In this section, we describe the history of mainstream videogame
design across three chronological eras: that of the arcades (1970–
1980S), that of home computers and consoles (1980–1990s), and that
of internet-connected machines (1990–2000s). Note that these three
eras overlap, and the so-called “PC gaming” genre extends across
them all. Regardless of these caveats, we do consider them to be
fairly descriptive labels for the periods, representing the historical
transformations in the economic and technological vectors rea-
sonably well. Of further note, we stress that our analysis specif-
ically concerns the industry “mainstream”; we are aware that
various small and marginal(ized) design lineages (especially in
non-Western contexts) might diverge from the trends that we
discuss here. One specific example of such a domain is the inde-
pendent game scene, which often reinvents and returns to older
design paradigms.7 That said, these techno-economic counter-his-
tories must be studied with an explicit focus of their own, thus fall-
ing outside the scope of this work.

Before the analysis, we offer a few more words on the two-
vector model. Primo, to be clear, we do not suggest the two vectors
(economic and technological) as the sole determinants of video-
game development. Invece, we perceive them as a fruitful angle
from which to look at videogame development and, as such, useful
for scrutinizing the trends being discussed here. The premises
of the two-vector model are that including or excluding SSP is a

Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

5
6

Ibid., 10.
Jennifer Whyte, “Evolutionary Theories
and Design Practices,"Problemi di progettazione 23,
NO. 2 (Primavera 2007), 53.
See Maria Garda and Paweł Grabarczyk,
“Is Every Indie Game Independent?
Towards the Concept of Independent
Game,” Game Studies 16, NO. 1
(ottobre 2016). Vedere, for comparison,
Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical
Game Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009).

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decision that videogame developers make and that this decision is
encouraged or discouraged first and foremost by economic and
technological factors. As to the nature of the terms “economic” and
“technological,” we rely on these viewpoints:

1. “Economic incentives” refers to the videogame develop-
ers’ (and producers’) desire to increase both financial
profits and the perceived value of the videogame, IL
latter of which can be assumed to lead indirectly to
further financial profits.

2. “Technological incentives” refers to development and
production challenges related to both software and
hardware that accompany features like SSP; come

incentives also might support these development and

production processes in some ways.

Through this frame, we now analyze SSP as a distinct design pat-
tern that has been part of the videogame industry since its origin
in the 1970s.

Arcade (Era)
In the coin-operated economics of the arcade, an additional player
brings an extra penny—a premise that was successfully pioneered
by the pinball table. (Gottlieb’s 1955 Duett was the first two-player
pinball machine.) Not surprisingly, Poi, many arcade games in the
1970s and 1980s were designed with one or more multiplayer fea-
tures in mind, and the economic incentive for SSP was (and still is)
strongly present in the design philosophy of the arcade.

Tuttavia, attracting and satisfying multiple simultaneous
players is not always a trivial task. In her retrospective study on
the golden era of the arcade, Carly Kocurek observes:

[IO]f someone in a two-player game of PONG simply
refused to move his paddle, the game would end
almost immediately—an outcome unlikely to be
mutually desirable for the players at 25 cents a game.8

The engagement of multiple players has the potential to generate
more revenue than engaging solitary players, but keeping each of
the players concurrently both engaged and motivated is a design
challenge as well. Kocurek’s observation accentuates the fact that,
even when players compete against each other, a level of coopera-
tion is necessary for the game to function: The players want to win,
but they also wish to prolong the pleasure of play. The developers
of many player-versus-player arcade games (those of fighting
games in particular) found an interesting solution to this particular
design problem by introducing a timer that forced an end to the
duel, even in situations where standard victory did not indicate the
end of the match.

Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Carly Kocurek, “Coin-Drop Capitalism:
Economic Lessons from the Video Game
Arcade,” in Before the Crash: Early Video
Game History, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf
(Detroit, MI: Wayne State University
Press, 2012), 202.

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Statistically, the popularity of SSP in the arcades should be
measured by comparing the overall machine earnings (global
gross revenue). Tuttavia, this metric remains largely unobtainable
because the historical records are lacking. (Most of the arcade oper-
ators never recorded these data.) With the caveat that a successful
videogame title builds on various quality factors that need not
directly relate to our present design concerns, some indications can
be drawn from the more reliable numbers of arcade machine sales.
For instance, the list of all-time best-selling arcade games collected
by Wikipedia (Guarda la figura 1) includes 21 multiplayer titles among
the overall number of 26.

When we look at the multiplayer titles more closely, a subtle
pattern emerges. Of the 21 arcade games incorporating multiplayer
gameplay, no less than 20 used one specific multiplayer type that is
today largely forgotten: an impoverished version of “turn-taking”
between the players. Practically speaking, in turn-taking, IL
machine identifies multiple players respectively (Player 1, Player 2
…) and allows them to engage one by one without enabling play in
a shared environment. The players thus alternate between parallel
separate sessions, which can be called neither cooperative nor com-
petitive; instead, the players’ outcomes are simply comparable. For
instance, in the best-selling Pac-Man (Namco, 1980), whenever one
player “dies” and passes the turn to another player, there is no con-
tinuation or interaction between the two; Piuttosto, both sessions
operate individually. This solution differs visibly from the turn-
taking used in board games (per esempio., chess) or in videogames (per esempio.,
Heroes of Might and Magic, New World Computing, 1995), in which
players not only share the screen (or a board) but also operate in
the same environment where the decisions of one affect those of
the others. Because of the lack of such interactive elements, we call
the impoverished form of turn-taking in videogames pseudo-SSP.

Although users can easily engage in pseudo-SSP activity
without the machine identifying multiple players, the mode does
still encourage inserting more coins at once and succeeds in keep-
ing the player group physically close to the machine. Tuttavia, Esso
does not allow the players to spend the inserted coins simultane-
ously (cioè., to play at the same time), which is an evident economic
defect and one of the reasons that this multiplayer mode has
become rare in later designs (Guarda la figura 29). So why did the arcade
game designers of the 1980s so often implement pseudo-SSP
instead of its full-fledged counterpart? An explanation derives
from the technological challenges that existed specifically during
the first half of the 1980s. Pioneering arcade designer Mark Cerny
points out:

Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Figura 1
All-time best-selling arcade game machines.
Fonte: Wikipedia (novembre 2018).

Figura 2 is constructed from multiple
cited databases in Alex Ioana, "IL
Incomplete History of Videogame Sales,"
Medium (Dicembre 2016), https://
medium.com/the-peruser/a-brief-history-
of-video-game-sales-49edbf831dc. Note
that in Figure 2, two titles, Asteroids
(1980) and Mahjong (1983), provided
both pseudo-SSP and SSP; both versions
were included in the count of their
respective years.

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Figura 2
Local multi-player options in top five
videogames, 1980–1999 (based on the five
best-selling titles across all platforms).
Fonte: Multiple cited databases in Alex
Ioana (2016).

10 Brian Crecente, “How One Coin Saved

Arcades in Japan and Another Killed
Them in the U.S.,” Kotaku (Febbraio
2011).

11 Ed Logg, “Gauntlet Revisited by Creator
Ed Logg” (Game Developers Conference,
Marzo 2012), GameSpot, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=ItH-mV32KQY.

…To get the players to put enough money into the machines
they had to be two-player, they had to be four-player.
But a lot of games don’t work two-player or four-player.
“I want to go this way, you want to go that way. It just
doesn’t work.”10

One main issue related to the design of SSP for the arcades was
spazio. Early arcade games that allowed up to four concurrent
players, such as Atari’s Warlords (1980), solved this problem by
using the so-called “cocktail mode,” in which the position of the
machine’s screen resembles that of a regular table or a desk. Questo
configuration enables players to approach the arcade game from
both sides, instead of cramming the entire player group together
in front of a small screen. This solution naturally influenced the
rest of the game design significantly: The software had to be
crafted so that players could observe and play from both positions.
(Per esempio, in Warlords the playfield consists of four identical
inverted sections.)

In this technological respect, Gauntlet (Atari, 1985)—one of
the first arcade games to support local collaboration for up to four
people—offered an alternative. Gauntlet’s designer, Ed Logg,
explicitly stated that his main incentive for the inclusion of local
collaboration was “the multiplication of income without the multi-
plication of the number of machines.”11 To achieve this goal, typical
Gauntlet cabinets used the standard upright machine position,
which freed the developers from the constraint of a multi-perspec-
tive design yet resulted in a new challenge: The screen had to be
bigger so that all four players could see it.

What makes Gauntlet of extra interest to us is that, although
originally released for the arcade, it was heavily inspired by
Dandy—a title created by a single independent developer (Palevich,
1983) and released for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. Dandy’s
mechanics are very similar to Gauntlet, and it likewise features a
mode for up to four players. Così, in contrast to the common trend
of converting popular arcade games to home computer versions,

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

the process went the other way around: A popular videogame in
the home computer market got converted to the arcade. The con-
version of Dandy to Gauntlet provides an illustrative case for under-
standing the economic and technological vectors.

In the more common arcade-to-home conversions, the prod-
ucts usually retained most of their original mechanics, even if
these mechanics made little or no sense in the new environment.
Per esempio, many of the fighting games that were converted to
home computers and consoles retained a session-limiting timer,
even though it no longer had an economic function. A logical rea-
son for retaining such mechanics derives from the fact that, In
addition to the conversion teams’ need to save resources, a success-
ful conversion would be expected to comply with the original:
Players want to have the arcade experience at home. The case of
Dandy is different, Tuttavia. As a fairly unknown, independent
home computer game, the arcade game developers faced no pres-
sure to retain its mechanics; instead, the key mechanics that
changed in the transition were directly connected to economics:
Cooperation between players significantly helped to prolong play
without requiring that additional coins be inserted. Hence, Gauntlet
introduced a special “energy depletion” mechanic that effectively
functioned like a session-limiting timer that could be extended
with money. This capability is absent from the independent home
predecessor: Dandy does measure player health by means of
replenishable energy, but energy does not decrease automatically.
Inoltre, both Dandy and Gauntlet struggled with a tech-
nical limitation posed by the introduction of SSP. As Cerny
implied, designers were often forced to make painful compro-
mises. The particular problem that the developers of Dandy and
Gauntlet faced was continuous screen movement because the
games allowed players to move in different directions.12 Many later
developers overcame this issue by means of split-screen—display-
ing two active windows on a single physical screen using a clear
separation line (vertical or horizontal); Tuttavia, rendering two
parts of the environment simultaneously was too heavy a task for
the computers of the time. Consequently, Gauntlet ended up mov-
ing the screen only when the players moved in the same direction,
whereas Dandy allowed the players to go off-screen, centering the
visible area only on one of them. Both solutions were greatly miti-
gated by the videogame’s labyrinthine topological structures,
which rarely permitted players to move completely freely anyway.
In sum, the interplay of economic and technological vectors
in the arcade, regardless of their limitations, strongly favored SSP
progetto. Enabling players to experience arcade games simultane-
ously benefitted the designers both economically (multiple players
led to multiple coin-input) and technologically (arcades could only

12 See Clara Fernández-Vara et al.,

“Evolution of Spatial Configurations
in Videogames,” in DiGRA Proceedings
‘05 (Tampere: DiGRA, 2005). See also
Alison Gazzard, Mazes in Videogames:
Meaning, Metaphor and Design
(London: McFarland, 2013).

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

accommodate a limited number and size of machines). In prac-
tice, SSP in the arcade took form mainly as pseudo-SSP and
favored linear gameplay design, which solved screen issues in the
case of conflicting player movements. The interrelation between
the technological limitations and SSP is even more prominent for
home consoles, which we analyze next.

Home Computer (Era)
In the mainstream home computer market of the 1980s and 1990s—
both consoles and PCs—the economic incentive for SSP turned out
to be much weaker than it had been in the era of the arcade. Multi-
plying the number of concurrent players on a home videogame
does not directly multiply its profits; as a result, direct economic
incentives no longer functioned as key motivations in local mul-
tiplayer design. Therefore, the role of SSP moved more toward
exploiting the “social glue” and adding perceived value for the
product.13 Because people across cultures enjoy social play, provid-
ing it in one way or another becomes profitable, even if it does not
immediately accumulate financial profits.14

The home computer era can be perceived through three
sub-eras. In the first sub-era, most of the best-selling titles were
simply conversions from the arcades. When pseudo-SSP was used
in the original arcade game, its computer conversion usually
retained it, even though its economic function was lost in the
home setting (per esempio., timers in fighting games). The popularity of
pseudo-SSP solutions waned across the years, and they are now
practically non-existent (Ancora, Guarda la figura 2). Even current retro-
inspired throwbacks to the 8-bit and 16-bit designs do not repro-
duce the feature.15

From a technological viewpoint, the design of SSP for the
home machines of the 1980s and the 1990s depended greatly on the
genre. Apart from early systems, such as the Atari 2600 or ZX Spec-
trum, 8-bit and 16-bit machines were very capable of fast and fluid
screen movement and used this effect extensively. As long as the
videogames followed the conventions of platformers, or shooters
with linear level structures, implementing genuine SSP was rarely
a major challenge. Likewise, fighting and sports games—with the
prevalent design paradigm forcing players to focus on the same
part of the screen—followed (and still follow) the same logic.

The second sub-era of the home computer era is associated
with the rise of non-linear–level design. Genres such as adventure
games, role-playing games, and simulation games were not
strongly present in the arcade market because of multiple practical
problems: They took longer to play, were larger, and were more
laborious to learn. Yet they eventually experienced a boom for the
home computer market because of a technological fit with person-
alized machines. For these genres, implementing SSP was initially

13 See Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan,
Glued to Games: How Video Games
Draw Us in and Hold Us Spellbound
(Oxford: Praeger, 2011).

14 Vedere, per esempio., Florence Chee, “Online Games
as a Medium of Cultural Communication:
An Ethnographic Study of Socio-Technical
Transformation” (PhD diss., Simon Fraser
Università, 2012). See also Graeme
Kirkpatrick, Computer Games and the
Social Imaginary (Cambridge: Polity,
2013). For comparison, see Jukka
Vahlo et al., “Tasavallan core-gamer:
Videopelaamisen piirteet Suomessa,
Kanadassa ja Japanissa” [Core Gamers:
A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Gaming
in Canada, Finland, and Japan], in Finnish
Yearbook of Game Studies 10, NO. 1
(Dicembre 2018): 35–59.

15 The reappearance of pseudo-SSP in

1993 E 1995 in Figure 2 is explained
by the re-release of older titles from
the early 1980s in compilations: Super
Mario All-Stars and Namco Museum
Vol.1, rispettivamente.

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Figura 3
Bloodwych single-player (left) and multiplayer
(right). Fonte: Author screenshots.

a multilayered problem that few even dared to try to resolve. Ulti-
mately, the reduced economic incentive for SSP in the home com-
puting market spurred the evolution of single-player genres in the
home computing era, which started to appear in the top spots of
the best-selling lists in the 1990s. We elaborate on these initial chal-
lenges to SSP by taking a closer look at one historically notable
instance on the Commodore Amiga, Bloodwych (Taglione et al.).

Bloodwych is a role-playing videogame created in 1989 Quello
stylistically is similar to better known titles, including Dungeon
Master (FTL Games, 1987) and Eye of the Beholder (Westwood, 1991).
In contrast to both, Bloodwych allows two players to roam a dun-
geon simultaneously via split-screen. What makes this example
enlightening is that the split-screen effect is present even in the
single player mode, in which the view to the videogame’s graphi-
cal world is still only through half of the screen (Guarda la figura 3). As
indicated earlier, one reason for this design choice was the lack of
contemporary computer power and running performance. More-
Sopra, while the designers also could have scaled up the graphical
presentation in the single player mode by stretching the interface
to cover the entire screen, this step would have resulted in a rather
unattractive outcome because of inherent problems with scaling
raster graphics.

In some cases, these same split-screen limitations also
applied to videogames from genres that should have been more
fitting for the feature. For instance, Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
(Magnetic Fields, 1990) —a fairly typical racing videogame with a
visual presentation similar to Sega’s Out Run (1986)—also allowed
two players to play simultaneously on a horizontal split-screen, Ma
it did not allow players to use the full screen when playing alone
(Guarda la figura 4). In this particular case, Tuttavia, the developers hid
the limitation by using the second half of the screen for another
purpose: showing the second (inactive) car.

To summarize, making use of the split-screen was truly tax-
ing for computer systems of the time, and with the common use of
raster graphics in 8-bit and 16-bit videogames, interfaces rarely
could be rescaled efficiently; instead, they had to be redrawn from

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

scratch when developers wanted to adjust the visual presentation
based on the number of players. Generally speaking, the inclusion
of SSP meant that the designers had to create the videogame
around this feature in particular, which typically led to serious
compromises to the single-player mode.

A paradigm shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s led to a
third sub-era of the home computers era. Many non-linear video-
games, such as Goldeneye (Rare, 1997) and Halo (Bungie, 2001),
started introducing shared split-screen play without notable com-
promises to the single player mode. Three major technological
changes converged at this time to allow for this feature:

1. Polygon-based graphics were established as the de facto
visual standard for almost all existing videogame genres.
Di conseguenza, scaling the screen back and forth, depending
on the number of players, became much easier.
2. The computing power of home computers had increased,
thus making smooth split-screen play possible even with
four players (although titles like Nintendo’s Mario Kart
64, from 1997, had a decreased animation frame-rate in

the split-screen mode).

3. The size of an average TV screen increased significantly,
which made split-screen play viable even when displayed
on one quarter of the screen.

The differences between home consoles and personal home com-
puters (PCs) is noteworthy here. Contrary to consoles, the PCs of
the time did not use television display, and the average size of the
PC monitor was (and still is) significantly smaller than that of the
TV screen. Inoltre, because the PC primarily was (and is) con-
trolled using a keyboard–mouse interface, videogames designed
exclusively for the PC typically lacked SSP entirely; meanwhile,
multi-platform titles providing split-screen for consoles—for exam-
ple, Call of Duty Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007), Borderlands
(Gearbox Software, 2009), and Don’t Starve (Klei Entertainment,
2013)—still often were shipped for the PC without the SSP feature.

Figura 4
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge single-player
(left) and multiplayer (right). Fonte: Author
screenshots.

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Figura 5
SSP to non-SSP ratio in the top 10 best-selling
videogames, by console generation (non
including PC sales). Fonte: Video Game Sales
Wiki (2018), various locations.

In light of these observations, both the economic and tech-
nological vectors of the home computer appear clearly less favor-
able for the design of SSP compared to the arcade. Technological
progress (including by-products such as increased computing
power and potential screen size) did contribute to videogame
design by facilitating certain aspects of the production process;
Tuttavia, it also continued to redefine aesthetic and mechanical
standards so that features like SSP remained problematic.

Internet (Era)
To recap our chronology so far, in the arcade (including the still-
vivid arcade domain), designing SSP was moderately favorable in
terms of both the economic vector and the technological vector
because it contributed somewhat positively to profits and to the
production process. In the home console era of the late 1980s and
1990S, despite the improvement offered by bigger screens and
increased computing power, the SSP feature became less favorable
to design because of its generally altered economic effects and
increased technological difficulties in genres using non-linear
progetto. In the era of internet-connected machines in the 2000s
and the proliferation of online games, designing SSP became even
less favorable.

Although the presence of SSP remains strong from the late
1990s fifth generation consoles to those of the current eighth
generation (Guarda la figura 516), this picture is only a small part of the
modern gaming culture that changed somewhat radically in the
2000s with the growth of the Internet. In particular, esports and
free-to-play online phenomena have come to dominate the PC mar-
ket and clearly are changing the design economy of consoles as
BENE (Guarda la figura 6).17 In other words, although console videogames
with SSP are still doing well in terms of unit sales, their promi-
nence in the overall market has dropped significantly. SSP is a
much less viable design choice in the current videogame market
than in preceding ones.

16 The sales data figures, collected from

various locations in the Video Game
Sales Wiki (2018), are merely indicative
and not intended to be precise.
17 Note that the typical monetization

strategy of free-to-play allows players
to install and play without making
purchases. Invece, purchase of
in-game equipment or implements is
encouraged to enhance the experience.
See Veli-Matti Karhulahti and Kai
Kimppa, “Two Queens and a Pwn,
Please: An Ethics for Purchase, Loot,
and Advantage Design in Esports,” in
Proceedings of the 2nd International
GamiFIN Conference, Primavera 2018
(Tampere, Finland: Tampere University,
2018): 115–22, http://ceur-ws.org/
Vol-2186/paper14.pdf. In Figure 6,
two of the console game titles provide
SSP; none of the titles in the PC list
provide SSP.

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Figura 6
Top grossing videogame titles by category in
2018. Fonte: Superdata Research (2018).

The decline in SSP prominence coincides with the increase
of broadband Internet connections, which eventually led both the
console and the PC videogame markets to incorporate online
co-play. Because local co-play using split-screen or other means
usually runs on a single sold copy, disregarding SSP features
enables further monetization: Each player collaborating online has
to purchase a separate copy of the product. Di conseguenza, the eco-
nomic vector starts to provide a strong incentive against SSP. Questo
economic perspective obviously applies to the majority of subscrip-
tion-based design frameworks too (per esempio., massive multiplayer online
games) but the specific gains in the console market are worth
emphasizing. By forcing collaborating players to purchase indi-
vidual copies, the dominant platform owners (Microsoft, Ninten-
do, Sony) also further their machine sales and the membership
subscriptions that are currently required, with few exceptions, for
online play.

Inoltre, online play eliminates the technical difficul-
ties related to shared screen design—and to split-screen design in
particular. As we pointed out previously, the split-screen feature
entails either increased computing power or a sacrifice of visual
quality. In contrasto, online co-play does not demand similar com-
promises from developers: They do not have to scale the graphics
or animation fluidity or to worry about input interfaces. Infatti,
being connected to an online server opens the possibility of
offloading some of the computing requirements to the server it-
self, thus making online co-play even more advantageous to
progetto. A look at the current market reveals a drastic decrease of
SSP, especially among bigger productions: Best-selling shooters
like Destiny (Bungie, 2014) and Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment,
2016) have never provided the feature, and some that previously
relied strongly on it (Halo) have decided to remove it from their
future iterations.

In sum, both economic and technological vectors seem to
have diminished the use of SSP. The feature is still present in vari-
ous smaller productions and indie game development, ma il

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

Figura 7
Economic and technological vectors across
development eras.

macro-level evolution of videogame culture appears to trend
toward designs of social videogame play that includes multi-screen
solutions and away from designs involving shared screens. IL
current trends toward battle arena and open-world designs push
the technological vector still further from SSP because creating
split-screen solutions in such contexts is extremely demanding
technically, including in terms of memory use.18 Genres that previ-
ously contained SSP, such as racing, are tending to replace this
option with online play.

Conclusions
Our historical analysis of SSP suggests that the feature was ini-
tially a desirable and profitable pattern in mainstream videogame
progetto, but following cultural evolution, it no longer is. We con-
sider this loss of contextual function to be an exemplary instance
of design vestigiality —momentary loss of contextual function for a
design pattern as a result of techno-economic evolution. Through
this case study, we hope to open new ways of looking at design his-
tory through component-specific vectorial analysis.

The interplay of the forces determining the choice of design
patterns, represented in our case by two vectors (cioè., economic and
technological), can be presented using a six-point history of design
development (Guarda la figura 7). Point 1 represents the arcade era, In
which both economic and technological incentives favored SSP,
mostly for the ease of implementing pseudo-SSP. Point 2 repre-
sents the beginning of the home era, in which the significance of
the economic factor shifted but the technological aspect remained
intact because of the choice of linear genres and pseudo-SSP. Point
3 represents the rise of non-linear level design, which decreased
the technological vector. Point 4 represents a short period during
which technology developed to a state where implementation of
SSP in non-linear design became possible. As shown by Point 5,
this period quickly changed during the Internet era: The economic

18 See Samer Al Dafai, “Conventions

Within eSports: Exploring Similarities
in Design,” in Proceedings of the First
International Joint Conference of
DiGRA and FDG (Tampere, Finland:
DiGRA, 2016), http://www.digra.org/
wp-content/uploads/digital-library/
paper_249.pdf. See also Carl Therrien,
“From Video Games to Virtual Reality
(and Back): Introducing HACS (Historical-
Analytical Comparative System) for the
Documentation of Experiential Configura-
tions in Gaming History,” in Proceedings
of DiGRA ’17 (Tampere, Finland: DiGRA,
2017), http://www.digra.org/wp-content/
uploads/digital-library/57_DIGRA2017_
FP_Therrien_HACS.pdf.

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Problemi di progettazione: Volume 37, Numero 2 Primavera 2021

vector turned, and SSP became less profitable compared to its
online counterparts (even while remaining technically viable).
Point 6 represents the move toward new and challenging design
genres, which moves both vectors to a state where the incentive to
keep SSP disappears almost entirely.

We note four areas to which our approach can be further
applied in the future. Primo, we chose not to discuss the ongoing
mobile gaming culture because of space constraints. Tuttavia, IL
changes in this area appear to fit the argument: Despite the prolif-
eration of larger mobile screens, no major trends toward SSP seem
to have emerged so far. Secondo, in another deliberate omission, we
ignored the modern independent game phenomenon, within
which SSP seems to be relatively popular. We hypothesize that the
reasons for this popularity lie in socio-cultural factors. For exam-
ple, we suspect that small indie developers often lack the infra-
structure needed for securing online play. The issue calls for
further study. Third, we note the slowly progressing “interactive
film” movement. Companies like Quantic Dream might have the
potential to reinvent SSP forms. Fourth, Nintendo’s recent design
philosophy (especially with the Wii and Switch consoles) ha
begun to rebuild co-play features by compensating for their eco-
nomic and technological disadvantages with innovative efforts on
hybrid analog equipment. We look forward to following how these
ongoing developments interact with the economic and technologi-
cal vectors of the field.

The evolution of organisms, in Darwin’s sense, has no ulti-
mate goal beyond adaptation, and this applies to the evolution of
design as well. In the same way that vestigiality in biological
organisms is relative to its time, so it is with videogame design.
Perhaps we will see the reinvention of SSP in mainstream gaming
one day; and if so, it can likely be examined using the same envi-
ronmental vectors of economy and technology that we have estab-
lished in this article.

Ringraziamenti
This study received funding from Academy of Finland project
312397 (part of the work also during 309382) and the European
Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s H2020 ERC-
ADG program (grant agreement No 695528). The first draft of the
study was presented at Tampere Spring Conference in 2018 Dove
we received valuable feedback. In particular, thanks go to com-
mentators Annakaisa Kultima and Casey O’Donnell.