I nominate this game as a potential Canon Game:

Left 4 Dead, a first-person shooter video game made by Valve and released in 2008, with a
sequel released in 2009. The premise of the game is that of a modern Zombie Apocalypse world, with a
team of 4 players stuck right in the middle of it; the players must work together in traveling through the
ruined city, using guns, grenades, and other weapons to fight back a seemingly endless swarm of
murderous zombies.

At first glance, it seems like any other generic first-person shooter, a derivative of the many
other first-person shooter games that Valve is famous for, such as Counter-strike and Half-life. A little
digging, however, reveals this game to be a grand experiment in video game design and programming.
The methods and mechanics tested with this game have either been untested theories, or concepts that
have designers have so far been trying to implement in videogames without much success. The resulting
popularity of Left 4 Dead (Left 4 Dead 1 sold 2.5 million copies as of 2009, while Left 4Dead 2 sold almost
3 million copies as of 2010) is a testimony to the importance of these concepts, a gleaming solid
example of these concepts properly implemented and working very well, for which the game itself
should be retained for future study. This paper aims to highlight some of these features.
I) Why it should be canon: as a multiplayer game

1) A true cooperative multiplayer game

In the book, "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses", Jesse Schell outlines a list of design
concepts related to making a good multiplayer game. Most are standard fare, fulfilled by many other
multiplayer games before Left 4 Dead. One particular concept stands out, however, as a concept that is
central to Left 4 Dead's success as a multiplayer game. As the book puts it: "Force Players to Depend on
Each Other". (Schell, 2008). A multiplayer game, especially a cooperative game, relies on players helping
one another and needing help from one another; this makes the difference between a cooperative
multiplayer and a mere "many individuals vs a single opponent" format.

One mechanic in the game drives this point home: The game's Special Zombies, more advanced
and varied in their abilities than normal zombies and, more importantly, more dangerous in their ability
to pin down a player and render them completely helpless. The Hunter and Charger tackle players and
slam them to the floor, the Jockey latches onto a player and steers them into other zombies, the Smoker
constricts a player and pulls them away from the rest of the group. In each case, the player who is
caught can literally do nothing to free himself other than wait for death; it's the other players'
responsibility to free him from the special zombie in question. Similar to this is the mechanic of
incapacitation. Should a player's life get reduced to zero, they're not entirely dead yet; they get knocked
down to the floor, unable to move, with a second hp bar ticking downward (on top of the damage
coming from the things still trying to kill them) to a second zero and complete death. A player can still
recover from this; another player must get to him and pick him up off the floor. These mechanics, along
with the population of things to be killed by balanced for exactly 4 players, ensures that a player sees his
teammates not as "I should get a higher kill count than him", but as "I need him to stay alive, and he
needs me to stay alive, so we can all beat this challenge".

As an added measure to encourage players to play with players and not just computer allies, the
game gives us competent computer AI teammates to fill in for empty player slots. Not "good AI
teammates", just competent; they can aim and shoot better than human players, but they can't use
grenade items, have a tendency to use the very rare life-replenishing first aid kits too early, can still fall
behind or wander off away from the rest of the group, and of course can't coordinate with the rest of
the group as they can't told what to do.
 just sit back and enjoy the show.

2) A very successful formula for increasing replayability

One particular issue that video games of a player-vs-environment format have is the
predictability of the environment. The paths don't change, and the enemies and powerups always
appear in the same places. In other words, it's the same game every time; the player will soon be
reduced to memorizing, any other emotional effects on the player will soon stop working in favor of
"repeat precisely this and only this procedure to win", and thus the player will get bored and stop
playing the game. (Booth, 2009)

As a player-vs-environment game, Left 4 Dead was able to bypass this problem using a complex
set of algorithms known as the AI Director. As the Valve document, "The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead 2"
outlines, it is a system for dynamically determining where and when the hazards and helpful items will
appear within a given level (Booth, 2009). A sudden zombie swarm or any of the game's Special Zombies
can appear literally anywhere within a level at any time, the only rule being that they spawn into the
game world at places the players don't have a direct line of sight to. In the same vein, the helpful items
that the players may find also change, this one influenced by the performance of the players; supplies
like ammunition and especially first aid kits, resources the players must conserve in order to reach the
end of the level, may not show up at a given item spawn point unless the players are almost dead, and
even then an item might still not appear.

This tactic, coined with the term, "procedural pacing", ensures that simple memorization of a
level does not happen. The threat level stays high due to the fact that sooner or later something WILL
show up to kill the players, even if they remain in the same spot or backtrack. Also, as the where and
when of the next incoming threat is largely unpredictable, there will be a greater emphasis on a player's
skill in dealing with all possible threats. (Booth, 2009)

something that big can still sneak up on you.

Of course there have been other cooperative multiplayer games before this one; notable
examples include the side-scrolling beat-em-ups from way back in the late 1980's, and MMORPGs like
World of Warcraft. These games, however, lose their charm as COOPERATIVE games much more quickly
due to the inability to implement the previous two ideas. Double Dragon and the Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles beat-em-up games end up becoming a scoring race, and World of Warcraft's "same monster
placements every time" group dungeons devolve into just the dice gambling at the end to see who gets
the monster drops. What was supposed to be a cooperative game just turned into a competition all over
again.

one-man army? not in this game!

II) Why it should be canon: other experiments

3) A departure from the usual game format and premise for FPS's

Thanks to the likes of Doom and Halo, First-Person-Shooters are famous for being free-for-all
player-vs-player shooting competitions where there players are some form of military soldier or other
Hollywood-level fictional character. Left 4 Dead takes the time to mix this up by switching from the
player-vs-player format to a players-vs-environment cooperative format. Character design for the player
characters also gets changed up a bit, by way of using normal people in everyday outfits, as opposed to
the nigh-perfect physiques and fantastical costumes that most video game characters are always found
wearing. Of particular note in this regard is the character Coach; rarely are action game fans asked to
step into the shoes of an ordinary fat 40-year-old black guy. (Anhut, 2010)

guns make ANYONE look cool, it seems.

4) An interesting experiment in games as a storytelling medium

Left 4 Dead actually does have a deeper story beyond just "survivors in a Zombie Apocalypse".
The 8 player characters (4 for the first, and another 4 for the second game) are not the only remaining
people alive, there are others as well who are also fighting their way across the United States territories
through the zombie swarms to designated military outposts in order to be evacuated out of the zombie-
infested areas to safety. The nature of the zombies is largely unknown save for the fact that they are
called "infected" in this world, and along with this name the idea that the zombies are actually incurably
sick people, a sickness the player characters are somehow immune to. And towards the end, the player
characters come across the idea that their immunity to this sickness comes at a price: that they are
carriers that can unknowingly spread the sickness to the very people that they are hoping to be rescued
by.

Most videogames would display their story details in "cutscenes", short movie-like snippets
interspersed between sections of gameplay. While effective, this method does bring the side effect of
pausing the player's control of onscreen action, a side effect that may not work well with an action-
heavy game genre like the first-person shooter.
 Left 4 Dead, however, uses no cutscenes other than the opening cinematics to feed the story to
the players. It instead employs a method called Emergent Narrative, defined as a story " that is not so
much 'told by an author' but that emerge from the interaction between the player and the environment
the author created" (Kluitenbrouwer, 2005). What this means is that the story is not directly told by the
game. The story is present within the environment, background, and characters of the game, and the
player learns the story for himself by playing through the game as normal. For Left 4 Dead, the best
visual example is the graffiti found on the walls of the safe rooms where the players begin each level.
That there is graffiti at all suggests the presence of other people besides the player characters. Reading
the graffiti reveals plenty of other details; messages between friends and loved ones, directions on
where to go to be evacuated, heated arguments on what the zombies are and whether the military are
actually of any help or not, and even some occasional random statements like "No Zombie is Safe from
Chicago Ted". As for audio, the dialogue spoken between the characters, of which there are several that
are randomly chosen from at certain intervals, reveal details about the characters themselves; Francis is
a gruff biker guy who pokes fun at his teammates and hates everything except his vest, Nick is a
sarcastic deadpan guy in a 3000$ suit who won't say why he's forbidden by law to use a gun and has an
ex-wife, and Ellis is a happy-go-lucky mechanic who is a rabid fan of a famous race car driver and is
always telling stories of a guy named Keith, and so on and so forth for each of the 8 player characters.

With bits and pieces at their disposal, players, if they so choose to, are thus free to figure out
the story by theorizing and discussing it with others, whether as dinner conversation or on internet
forums. Some are confirmed by Valve, some are proven false, and some are still under discussion, with
new arguments appearing every day. Part of the entertainment also comes from particularly incredible
off-the-wall stories that some people come up with based on an otherwise insignificant detail; the
previously mentioned "Chicago Ted" graffiti has given birth to an entire urban legend of an epically
unstoppable zombie hunter. (It should be noted as well that this free discussion also adds to the game's
value as a multiplayer game (Schell, 2008)).

empty walls are the new internet.

III) Therefore.

It has merits as a dynamically changing environment as a computer opponent. It has merits as a

cooperative game where players actually have to cooperate. It takes a favorite genre and tries a new
premise in it. And it tells a story without actually telling a story.

With all the new stuff mentioned, the game sells, and sells well. It therefore proves that all this
new stuff works, and can be done. For that, I call Left 4 Dead a potential Canon game.

teammates. strangely alien in the videogame world, up till now.

references:

Schell, Jesse. Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. 2008: Boston Elsevier Science and Technology
Books, Amsterdam.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach To Creating Innovative Games. 2008:
Boston Elsevier Science and Technology Books, Amsterdam.

Booth, Michael. The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead.

<http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2009/ai_systems_of_l4d_mike_booth.pdf>
accessed February 15, 2011

Kluitenbrouwer, Klaas. Emergent Narrative: What is the specific quality of interactive stories? 2005:
Mediamatic.net <http://www.mediamatic.net/page/9529/en>
accessed February 15, 2011

Game of Design: Procedural Storytelling. May 27, 2008:

<http://dankline.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/procedural-storytelling/> accessed February 15, 2011

Anhut, Anjin. Character Design: Left 4 Dead 2. August 30, 2010: How Not to Suck at Game Design.com
<http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/?p=982>,
accessed February 15, 2011

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/45823/Left-4-Dead-Sold-2-5-Million-Copies-at-Retail

http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/02/09/left-4-dead-2-sells-over-2-9-million-copies-in-retail-stores/