A Dividing Issue
We all have fond memories of our early ventures into gaming. I’m sure we all remember the first time we ever laid hands on a joystick, or the first time we ever saved the princess, or the first time we ever beat our best friend black and blue before tearing out his spinal cord(on Mortal Kombat of course). So many precious moments, and what made these moments even sweeter was that our bestest buddies where right there with us sharing the laughter, sharing the tears and clubbing us around the back of the head as soon as our backs were turned.

Now games have come a long way from side-scrolling adventures like Streets of Rage and the Secret of Monkey Island but the sentiment hasn’t changed, you play too have fun. Split screen gaming, something that was a staple of games in the 90′s and into the early 2000′s, is slowly disappearing in favour of more modern forms of gaming such as online multiplayer. I get it, progress right, and don’t get me wrong i love going online and “pwning the noobs” just as much as the next guy but surely there must be some of you who feel saddened by the industries switch in focus? While online gaming is fast, fun and furiously addictive, its also incredibly impersonal. Now instead of sitting on a sofa with a few of your friends and happily blasting away waves of enemies(or each other), people recline in there single seat armchairs and spout virtual bullets and gross obscenities at people from all over the globe. Some developers have been known to argue that split screen is “hardware intensive” meaning that splitting a screen into multiple view ports will lower texture quality, affecting things like graphics and scaling. This is undoubtedly true, however it all depends whether you want a game that looks good or supports split screen gaming and this choice should NOT rest with the developers. Of course playing online is not the only option game developers are leaving us, consoles such as the Xbox 360 allow for local area gaming through “system link”. This is where you link two Xbox 360s together using an ethernet cable and play in the same room, with no Internet connection necessary. However to do this you still need two Xboxs, two TVs and two copies of the game so this is in no means a cheap option. For some though this is now the only option. I have seen and spoke with various families, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives who play games and on previous consoles had taken advantage of the inclusion of split screen, but are now forced to either play separately or too use options such as the aforementioned system link. As i mentioned before i am not averse to online gaming and its rise in popularity, I’m merely saddened by the fact that split screen must suffer as a result, especially when the two make such a sweet couple. I’ll apologise in advance for name dropping like a drooling fanboy but Halo got it right. From Halo 2 onwards the series has included online capability alongside good old fashioned split screen co-op. Halo 3 for example allows four players in the same room, on the same console, with a single copy of the game to go online and bring the “pwnage”. Something very rare for a new generation game.

Unfortunately it seems the Halo franchise is the last of a dying breed as fewer and fewer games each year include support for this kind of play, and it seems that split screen gaming is going the way of old yeller, with online support the proverbial shotgun. There is one shiny glimmer of hope however. A while ago it surfaced on the Internet that Microsoft filed a patent in 2002 for “Dynamic join/exit of players during console-based video game” and that this patent was granted them on the 14th of July last year. The document details a process where players located in front of a game console can dynamically play the game together, and reference is made to the “splitting” and “unsplitting” of the screen as players enter and exit the game. While this patent seems to have been filed with a certain game in mind(the patent application was adorned with sketches that appear to be of the 2003 Xbox game Brute Force), it seems unlikely that Microsoft would file a patent for the sake of a single game. Especially as the patent took 6 years to be awarded. Does this mean that Xbox users can expect to see a lot more split screen games in the future? Maybe, but do you want that? Is the current gaming populace happy with the slow decay of split screen? Or like me do you stand by its bedside clutching its hand and praying for a speedy recovery, and more games like Halo.