In Mario Kart, I do not identify with or as my character at all. As far as I am concerned, my kart could be an RC car, and I would have an identical experience. When I am playing against CPUs, I do not ascribe agency to them, and I see them as mobile obstacles for me to avoid. When I use items to attack them, it would be akin to destroying rocks and boulders that find themselves in my way. But when I play Mario Kart with friends in the same room as me, my perspective changes.
Local multiplayer Mario Kart leads me to identify the opposing karts as my friends. To delve into semantics, I do not envision the karts as containing friendly qualities, but I instead envision the karts as being representations of my friends. It is effectively an applied version of Shaw’s definition of identity in video games. Thus, when I throw a blue shell, I am not trying to hit the Yoshi in first place—I am trying to hit my friend who is sitting next to me. In other games where I am in the same room as my teammates/opponents, their onscreen characters become digital representations of themselves. In the Super Smash Bros series, fighting against a Bowser character is an incredibly different experience depending on when I play with my brother, or if it is against another one of my friends. Instead of embodying the Koopa King, a human-controlled Bowser becomes a vessel for me to insert the other player into. I don’t think, “Bowser is going to hit me with a neutral B.” Instead, I think, “My friend is going to hit me with a neutral B.” By attributing a character’s agency to a human being, I become more involved with how I should envision the game. My response is not, “My character should raise its shield” and is instead, “I should raise my shield.” I encounter a stronger form of identity through multiplayer play.
Perhaps this is why I find online multiplayer uninspiring. Most games end up being me playing against strangers who I will never play with again. I cannot begin to develop an expectation of how those players will act during only one match. In effect, these people become CPUs themselves, and their actions become little more than outputs of an algorithm that I will never see. Therefore, most of my online play is spent with friends that I have already extensively played with in a local setting. Then, any action has the potential to be truly surprising because I will have an expectation for how a player should act, and an unexpected twist creates a more compelling reason for me to become engrossed into the game.
Beyond competitive play, I still find multiplayer games best enjoyed with people in the same room as me. Games such as the Lego series are more fun because the other player and I can cooperatively decide how to approach a level, or how we should create our own game in the expansive hub world. One of my ongoing projects is to get my brother to play Stardew Valley, so that he and I can play together. By playing games with others, I gain a more expansive experience than what the sum of what I and the other players could have had on our own.