The Appeal of Playing Together, Alone

Playing together, alone. It sounds like a paradox, yet the idea has yielded some of the most memorable moments in the past 15 years of gaming. Think of the primordial landscape in Death Stranding, lit up like a Christmas tree by the holographic messages of other players. In Journey, you’re collaborating with strangers in a glittering, gold desert and maybe spending a magical 90 minutes with them ascending a mountain. Perhaps you recall walking up to a giant, slumbering tortoise in FromSoftware’s magisterial open-world role-playing game, Elden Ring, only to be stopped in your tracks by that message, or a version of it: “Behold, dog.”

For many, these games will manifest in their mind’s eye as single-player experiences: You step out into their adventure-promising worlds as a lone avatar, and you will, for the greater part of their durations, traipse about with little more than your own thoughts for company.

Yet humming beneath these single-player facades of exquisitely detailed worlds and rich narratives are multiplayer components that, just as much as finely honed world-building, breathe life into these virtual settings. In the case of Elden Ring, as well as the other Soulsborne games dating all the way back to 2009’s Demon’s Souls, multiplayer presents itself not through competitive, sports-like encounters but via more ethereal connections. With the Friday release of Shadow of the Erdtree, the highly anticipated expansion to the modern action RPG classic, more of these connections are set to be made. Players will yet again leave cryptic (and not-so-cryptic) messages for those following in their footsteps while also roaming about their game world as phantoms, the bloodstained ghosts of their former selves. Messages are etched into the terrain of Elden Ring’s game world; its very air is suffused with phantoms.

If there is a term that accurately describes Elden Ring’s multiplayer experience, and that captures the wider atmospheric allure of playing together, alone, it’s “ambient multiplayer.” Keza MacDonald used the term to describe Journey’s multiplayer in her 2012 review of the game for The Guardian, noting how being paired up with strangers heightened the game’s emotional impact. Writing for The Verge about Dragon’s Dogma 2, Capcom’s 2024 open-world RPG hit, Alexis Ong referred to its Pawn system (in which you create non-player character companions that can be downloaded by other players) as “ambient multiplayer.” In Journey, you fleetingly occupy the same virtual space as another player; in Dragon’s Dogma 2, you don’t—yet in both games, the presence of other players is woven into the texture of the game world like any other element.

There are further examples of ambient multiplayer: Drei, an underappreciated yet beautifully designed game from 2013 in which players collaborate to solve physics-based puzzles; 2018’s Ashen, an artful, indie take on FromSoftware’s Souls formula in which players can unexpectedly arrive in the game worlds of others. Grand space exploration game No Man’s Sky is a rare title whose multiplayer (added in a 2018 update) is explicitly referred to by its makers as “ambient.” There is scarcely a more thrilling social moment in a video game than when you bump into another spacefarer in the farthest reaches of No Man’s Sky’s vast, procedurally generated galaxy and exchange a few emotes, and perhaps a gift or two.

None of these games (not even the cultural juggernaut Elden Ring) feature heavily in the conversation about the current golden age of multiplayer, yet together they have unequivocally broadened the tonal possibilities of online play. They’re a far cry from the titles synonymous with this multiplayer boom: synchronous, mostly competitive shooters such as Fortnite, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and Counter-Strike, games that, between them, can boast more than 60 million active players in a single day. These are games of death matches and battle royales decided by headshots and killstreaks, and they are underpinned by robust matchmaking systems and high-speed internet.

“There is a lot of logistics and technical overhead to stand up a server and have people play live,” says Jamie Smith, a principal designer at People Can Fly, the studio behind the 2021 online co-op shooter Outriders. Smith doesn’t see a “solid” definition for ambient multiplayer but notes the way it often incorporates elements of asynchronous multiplayer, i.e., multiplayer that doesn’t rely on people’s ability to be online at the same time. He draws a useful comparison: If synchronous multiplayer is dependent on raw logistics to function, then ambient multiplayer, which can be asynchronous in nature, is either about “overcoming” such logistics or obscuring them entirely.

Patrick Klepek, an editor for Remap Radio, emphasizes the emotional tenor of these atypical multiplayer experiences: “There is something about being with an anonymous player which is just a little more serene, calming, and enjoyable than when it’s in the context of ranked players, usernames, and kill/death stats.”

In the summer of 2001, Capcom game director Hideaki Itsuno had just wrapped up work on the fighting game Capcom vs. SNK 2. He and his colleagues were sitting in the office of their employer in downtown Osaka brainstorming ways to build upon Capcom’s 1996 arcade game Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara. Itsuno wanted to create a more “realistic” take on that game, one in full 3D; he also intended to incorporate “online network” features, no mean feat in the early aughts, a time when most people’s internet arrived via a noisy phone line prone to intermittently cutting out. His workaround for these logistical challenges was captivatingly elegant: a game which, unlike synchronous experiences, “relied on the very short time of being connected.”

It would take a full 11 years for Itsuno’s idea to eventually become Dragon’s Dogma (he was busy helming three entries in the blockbuster action series Devil May Cry). By 2008, when the game was in development, broadband was slowly creeping into the mainstream, while online multiplayer was well-established on consoles, thanks to games like Halo 2 and SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs. The technical barriers of years prior were removed, yet Itsuno remained committed to his original asynchronous vision for the Pawn system: He wanted users to download NPC companions rather than play with other gamers via wholesale, real-time co-op. Itsuno would draw inspiration from old-school bulletin board systems and other unlikely sources: an odd PlayStation game from 1999 called Doko Demo Issyo, and, yet more bizarrely, PostPet, a 1997 email client system featuring mail-delivering animals.

In Doko Demo Issyo, it’s possible to teach the meanings of words to computer-controlled characters you train and then have them play word games with other users using rudimentary network features. In PostPet, when another person’s pet arrives bearing an email, you’re able to communicate with it by praising, petting, poking, and teasing it, after which the pet reports back to its owner about those interactions. The key point, explains Itsuno via email, is that customization is always an “expression of the player,” and, to some extent, a “substitute for real-time communication.”

A version of this plays out in the ambient multiplayer of both Dragon’s Dogma and its 2024 sequel. As with PostPet’s asynchronous communication (the pet returns to the user bearing evidence of its travels), a Pawn that has been downloaded by other players returns to its own player’s game world bearing gifts and information about where it’s been. Logging back into the game after a few weeks is never less than a delight as your Pawn unfurls practically an entire treasure chest’s worth of goodies: expensive jewelry (if you’re lucky); a ferrystone, perhaps (crucial for fast travel); aged scrag (a curative meat); and, in all likelihood, more than a few rotten apples.

“Since players are playing the same game, they have a common understanding of the value of each item, how hard it is to get, how expensive, how useful, etc.,” writes Itsuno. “So when players receive a gift, they can feel in a very real way how much the journey with their Pawn was enjoyed.” The system even allows for high-level items (relative to the receiver), and those that might disrupt the story line, to be exchanged. Itsuno believes “this allows the player’s emotions, such as surprise and gratitude to play a much larger role.”

In 2012, like today, online usage fees applied to real-time competitive and cooperative play, but, says Itsuno, a “small amount of [data] storage could be used for free.” Dragon’s Dogma took advantage of this storage reserved on free servers, the result, the director stresses, “of many meetings with the engineers of the hardware manufacturers of the time.” It was all in service of a more “casual” form of online play, one implemented within the “scope of a free service.”

One can wax lyrical about the thematic significance of the Pawns within the larger franchise story: the way they must be sacrificed to reach the true ending of Dragon’s Dogma 2 and the existential questions they pose—are they mindlessly servile or some doomed fragment of our former selves? Yet the system also arose from a more straightforwardly humble desire; Itsuno had just reached his 30s when conceiving Dragon’s Dogma in 2001. Prior to that moment, the director had dedicated himself to the visceral, real-time combat of fighting games (credits include seminal titles of the Y2K era such as Power Stone and Rival Schools: United by Fate). Now he was searching for a different type of experience.

“After work, when you are tired, when you want to take a break, when you feel like playing a long session, I wanted to be able to play without having to adjust to other people,” he says. Dragon’s Dogma would come to embody the oxymoronic appeal of such ambient multiplayer experiences—a desire for connection but, crucially, not too much. “I wanted to be able to play freely without worrying about others,” continues Itsuno. “But I also wanted to be able to connect with other people and have adventures together.”

According to the creative director of Journey, Jenova Chen, the advancing age of designers was a big factor behind the takeoff of this flavor of unorthodox multiplayer in the late aughts and early 2010s. “People were getting old,” he says. “Developers were getting to the age where they didn’t just want to be a space marine or a soldier.” Chen points to the online co-op of 2008’s Left 4 Dead and Elden Ring’s ultimate antecedent, 2009’s Demon’s Souls, as originating genuinely new online interactions. “We were bored. We had played enough competitive games,” he continues. “We were wondering, is there anything more than killing each other?”

Journey debuted in 2012 to rapturous acclaim partly because of the way it hewed traditional synchronous multiplayer down to its core: spatial presence. There is no violent gameplay in Journey, no aggravating voice and text chat, and certainly no option to crouch (thus removing the potential for teabagging). Nor is there traditional matchmaking: Instead, the game connects players based on their locations within the game world, a design choice, Chen explains, made in an effort to sync people up according to their gameplay interests. Prefer to venture off the beaten path in search of secrets? Journey will pair you with a player who is exploring the same pocket of outlying desert, driven, presumably, by a similarly deeply held desire for undiscovered treasures. “In that situation, the connection is genuine,” says Chen. “It’s not forced.”

What did Sony, the game’s publisher, make of this minimalist take on multiplayer? “They didn’t like it,” says Chen. “They said, ‘Right now, multiplayer games are popular. You’ve got to allow people to invite their friends to play with [them]. That will increase your sales.’” Chen pushed back because, he argued, friend invitations would create an expectation of being able to speak with others over voice chat. If you can talk to friends that way, why not strangers? It would cause the game’s “serendipitous human encounters” to become meetings between “specific” people with “specific accents.” The game’s fiction, its retelling of the hero’s journey in broad, deliberately universal strokes, and thus its emotional resonance, would be undermined by such specificity. Chen wanted to avoid this at all costs.

Sony might not have been enthusiastic that Journey was forgoing friend invitations, but at least forgoing that functionality was a straightforward technical process. That wasn’t the case for obscuring player names, whose silliness (and sometimes distastefulness) would also disrupt the carefully crafted emotional register Chen was aiming for. “As soon as you connect to someone online, PlayStation broadcasts the player’s name across the media box,” he explains. “You pause the game, and you can see who you’re playing with.” This wouldn’t do, so Chen and his colleagues devised an ingenious and subversive solution. “We made a hack so that the player name wasn’t even sent to the operating system,” he says. This time, Sony’s response was marginally warmer: “They respected us for sticking to our guns.”

The resulting in-game encounters are arguably as close to pure magic as video games have yet come: Dressed in billowing red robes, players seem to almost miraculously appear out of the ether, like some kind of deified companion. In a celebratory 10-year anniversary piece on the game for The Verge, Jay Peters wrote about the wordless “rapport” he built up with a stranger and the way their death made him feel like he had “actually lost a friend.” In a broader sense, Klepek remains enraptured by the “brief, shared, communal experiences” for which Journey has set the standard. “You have none of the tactile information that we normally associate with social experiences: conversation, text, things like that. So you have to imbue it with meaning yourself,” he says. “You have to interpret their actions. You have to apply how you felt about the experience, how they interacted or didn’t interact with you.”

Drei could be considered a cousin of Journey, released just a year later in 2013 yet conceived of in the mid-aughts as an exercise in fostering connectivity between strangers. Its makers, Christian Etter and Mario von Rickenbach, didn’t market the physics-based puzzle game as a multiplayer experience. Rather, its online encounters occurred seamlessly if a number of factors were satisfied: Players had to be in the same level; they had to be geographically close to one another; and, crucially, their internet connections had to be of comparable quality. As in Journey, communication was deliberately curtailed, which fostered a unique culture of communication. Bobbing up and down in the game’s weightless environments quickly became an expression of joy that then propagated throughout the network as players copied one another. “In this weird, abstract world, emergent behavior developed,” says Etter, “a behavioral language.”

Journey’s and Drei’s communicatively sparse multiplayer experiences also double as an ingenious moderation solution, suggests Klepek. Many developers, particularly at indie studios (for whom monitoring and policing what players say and do is a gigantic logistical and financial issue), have told Klepek the same thing: “It’s a lot easier just to not let players say the racial slurs at all.”

“Try finger, but hole.” The players of FromSoftware games have devised innumerable ingenious ways of expressing themselves precisely because they cannot write whatever messages they want; they are limited by the vocabulary FromSoftware offers them. In a game world of opaque lore, arcane dialogue, and tangled, mazelike environments, these messages function like a player-driven guide system: a helping hand from the community when the designers themselves appear to deliberately withhold information and even attempt outright deception.

Yet for every helpful pointer left by a conscientious fellow traveler, there is a corresponding shitpost scrawled by a troll. Both can elicit a smile: one grateful, the other wry. Klepek sees the comedic nature of the messaging system as a “direct extension” of the trickery and comedy of Souls games themselves. He doesn’t go as far as saying the messaging system has been designed outright to facilitate such jokes, but he isn’t “surprised that’s where it ended up.” For a maker of high-fantasy series that are dark, oppressive, and isolating, says Klepek, FromSoftware goes out of its way to “create a sense of community” amid this aesthetic.

The culture expressed in the multiplayer of FromSoftware’s games—the banter, memes, and, throughout it all, sense of camaraderie—offers a clue as to why ambient multiplayer experiences haven’t proliferated to a greater degree. “They tend to be tailored to the core experience,” says Smith, who references one memorable synchronous element in Demon’s Souls multiplayer: the Old Monk boss. That particular enemy, located beyond a fog door at the top of a winding staircase, may either be controlled by AI or by another player—an act of devious trickery on the part of FromSoftware. “You couldn’t take that example and put it in Call of Duty because it’s so specific to a melee encounter in a third-person game that’s very hostile in which you’re constrained by the environment,” says Smith. “It’s unique to that experience.”

The elusive, hard-to-define ambient multiplayer is perhaps resistant to the type of convergence that has occurred in synchronous, competitive multiplayer over the past 10 years. Many of the biggest competitive titles riff on similar (and oftentimes identical) game modes, monetization models, and means of forging connections. The specificity of ambient and asynchronous multiplayer doesn’t “limit its potential,” says Smith. It simply helps “elevate such experiences”—causing them to linger in the mind long after you’ve set down the controller.

Ambient multiplayer was forged in the crucible of the late aughts and early 2010s: advancing hardware; the rise of broadband; aging developers who, as per Chen’s contention, were searching for an emotional gratification that lay beyond the reticle of a gun. The period was one of increasing experimentation for indie developers, who had access to better tools, and larger studios, whose budgets had not yet swollen to today’s eye-watering sizes (Horizon Forbidden West reportedly cost $212 million to develop over a five-year period). Put simply, technology, studio, and market conditions enabled greater creative risk-taking.

Etter doesn’t shy away from the reactionary nature of Drei or any of these other titles, the way they were created in opposition to the popular multiplayer games of the era like Call of Duty and FIFA. “It was certainly a response to that,” he says of Drei. “It was certainly trying to break the mold a little bit for others. It was about realizing you can make a game about anything. It doesn’t need to be in these preset narratives.”

This anything-can-be-a-game (or, at least, anything-can-inspire-a-game) philosophy permeates Elden Ring’s progenitor and a trailblazer of ambient multiplayer: Demon’s Souls. FromSoftware’s inaugural entry in its Souls series evokes some of the most well-worn, archetypal design principles in all of gaming: an uncompromising level of challenge that gradually gives way to a hard-earned sense of mastery; labyrinthine spaces of Gothic grandeur that simultaneously invoke dread and wonder. The game also traffics in quintessential medieval fantasy tropes: knights swinging swords taller than themselves; fire-breathing dragons with scaly weak spots. Yet the phantoms, the flickering mainstays of the Soulsborne games for 15 years, the elements that arguably contribute the most to their ambient multiplayer, emerged from less insular influences.

As the story goes, game director Hidetaka Miyazaki had the idea for phantoms after his car, and those behind it, became trapped in snow on a hill. The cavalcade of vehicles, starting with one at the very back, began to push one another up the hill before disappearing into the dead of night without even exchanging a word. “I couldn’t stop the car to say thanks to the people who gave me a shove. I’d have just got stuck again if I’d stopped,” Miyazaki told Eurogamer in 2010. “On the way back home I wondered whether the last person in the line had made it home, and thought that I would probably never meet the people who had helped me. I thought that maybe if we’d met in another place we’d become friends, or maybe we’d just fight.”

Miyazaki called this wintry chance meeting “a connection of mutual assistance between transient people,” which sums up the collaborative core of ambient multiplayer. This is precisely what it means to build physical infrastructure (bridges, ladders, zip lines) in Death Stranding, helping other players traverse the vertiginous terrain, all while the “keep on keeping on” hologram chimes in your (and their) ears. In Journey, the kind of ephemeral encounter that Miyazaki describes elevates the game from a stylistically ravishing third-person adventure to a genuinely profound meditation on human nature in the age of the internet. Now we have Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, a vast and sprawling living text created not just by the developers at FromSoftware but also by the legion of players whose ghostly actions and often charmingly idiotic messages are an indelible yet evanescent part of the in-game mythology. In an era when our real lives have begun to resemble a kind of ambient multiplayer game (replete with the “self-destructing” messages of Snapchat and Instagram Stories), these games make communication feel vital, surprising, and playful rather than like an exhausting chore.

With his reflections on that incident in the car, it’s as if Miyazaki inadvertently articulated the fundamentals of ambient multiplayer design. Nearly 15 years later, it still feels as if game makers are only scratching at the surface of its potential. These shared, mostly anonymous moments do not last forever, which is precisely the point, and the well from which they draw much of their emotional potency. “Simply because it’s fleeting, I think it stays with you a lot longer,” said Miyazaki. “Like the cherry blossoms we Japanese love so much.”

Lewis Gordon is a writer and journalist living in Glasgow who contributes to outlets including The Verge, Wired, and Vulture.