In Pokemon Sword and Shield you can not meet people, but you will feel them
The first person I talked to in Sword and Shields Wild Area gave me a three-day loaf – be careful, they said. The next person was German and greeted me with a “Good day!” Before she handed over a can of beans, a food that they said fell from the sky and hit her in the head.
Interactions like these are abundant in Sword and Shield. You probably heard similar stories too.
Sword and Shield, released on November 15 for Nintendo Switch, has launched an open multiplayer section called Wild Area where high-level Pokémon can roam freely. When you are online, there are many other players in the world who run around or do their own thing by bike. Some players stand in front of trees as if they are shaking berries from their branches. Others are stuck in a seemingly eternal search for others to help them with their Max Raid Battles.
There is a sense of social presence in Sword and Shield, though the multiplayer functionality is not transparent enough. It is not clear if these interactions happen in real time or if they are snapshots of player behavior in the world.
I suppose the latter is the case: I often find myself zigzagging other players through the Wild Area – an indication that they may be following others I can not see. Responses from these echoes of the players are pre-programmed, a series of messages randomly selected by the game itself. You can not necessarily tell if someone is interacting with you. There is never a pop-up window or a conversation selection about which answer to send. If I do not speak directly to other people, they are not.
Despite this understanding of the Wild Area and its players – especially the limitations of engagement – the characters flitting through the open space feel real to me. I was suffocated the first time I connected online and interacted with another player. I spent most of the game alone in an empty world before Nintendo turned on the game’s online servers. I was surprised when I suddenly saw a wild area full of life – or at least the idea of it. It felt like a huge improvement.
There is a certain presence in the Wild Area, something so perfectly constructed that it feels alive, even if it is not.
“Scientists studying games and other virtual worlds often talk about the concept of presence,” Dr. Katharine Ognyanova, Assistant Professor of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. “These include ideas like self-presence and the feeling that your avatar is really you. There is also spatial presence, the feeling as if you really were in this virtual world. “
But in Sword and Shield, social presence is the most appropriate, the feeling that there are real people in the game world who interact with you. Social presence is felt through two ideas: “a sense of agency,” as if there were another person controlling the avatars around you, and “realistic human behavior,” Ognyanova said.
In realistic human behavior sword and shield work and fail something. The unpredictable way in which characters move makes it clear that a real person is behind them. There is no way to program a non-player character like this. The actual commitment is limited. There are no dialogue options and no way to communicate orally with another player.
Game Freak, The Pokémon Company / Nintendo on polygon
Ognyanova said communication is critical to building relationships, which means we do not necessarily build connections with other players in Sword and Shield’s Wild Area. We connect to the options available in the game with them.
Players may use these options to adapt to the system and learn to create their own language, as in Hearthstone. Communication in Blizzard’s digital card game is limited to restricting certain types of trash-talk, but players have learned to deal with it. Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland found that players deliberately misused Hearthstone-Emotes to communicate with other players, and used “hello” as both a welcome and a sarcastic method to poke a slow player through a long break ,
Sword and Shield does not even offer these basic communication options, but there are a few moments when players need to click buttons to interact with others – the Pokémon camp and Max Raid Battles.
Cooking curry at the camp feels like the most intimate interaction with strangers in Sword and Shield. Once you set up a camp in the Wild Area, others can visit your tent. Your Pokémon play with yours. You can invite them to cook with you.
Together, you fan out the flames, stir a pot and throw your heart into your curry. “It feels strangely intimate,” Pokémon player Cel10e, who had asked Polygon to use her grip, told me. “You can at least see a simulation of the actual keystrokes.”
They added, “It’s really impressive to see how other people’s movements and what Pokémon’s movements are like and how they cook is that little snapshot of another person playing the game at the same time as you, even without any chat animations or show or emote similar. “
It’s not much, but you can imagine the presence of a person in those moments. What is your cooking style? How do they stir? Which Pokémon do you use? It’s a level of engagement that feels just right for a Pokémon game and allows people to connect to feel that presence, but not enough to soak up the venomous elements of online gaming ,
It’s enough to imagine your own little place in this big word as you have never seen it before in Pokémon games. I said it in my review: Sword and Shield open up the world enough to work wonders – the Pokémon that hunt me in the wild are part of it. The other part is in a dynamic, changing multiplayer area with friends and strangers.
Players use these systems to telegraph things to other players and to curate these experiences, much like camps of NPCs are built on the Galar routes. Clips from Pokémon camps, some chance encounters, other curated experiences – like a flock of Ditto or Pichu and a Toxel Day Care Center.
You can stumble randomly into the camps of others, but much of the social media game is published in clips on Twitter or Facebook. Communication and connection are pushed out of the game, but in a way that still influences the gaming experience. There is the idea that you could meet these players – you can publish your own meme experience – in the Sword and Shield multiplayer area.
The Sword and Shield game area is limited and players adapt to work around it. These restrictions go beyond the interaction of the players. In Sword and Shield, there are very real server problems. Digital Foundry found that connecting to the Internet in Sword and Shields Wild Area resulted in dramatic performance degradation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEcZaBAWegI [/ embed]
The online interaction in Sword and Shield feels magical, but is just the beginning. This is not a massive multiplayer online game, not even nearby. And yet I finally feel like the Pokémon Champion I’ve always held myself for.
And I’m still humble enough to travel the world and distribute sausages and beans to other players.