Dropped Connection: The Loss of Local Handheld Multiplayer

We live in a fallen world. Like the barbarians of old, we trample thoughtlessly across the remnants of a once-mighty empire. Perhaps we deserve our benighted existence — perhaps it has been rendered unto us by the spiteful gods. Regardless, we are deprived of the splendor known by those who came before us. We roll around in the dirt with our Steam Decks and our live games, believing ourselves to be kings. Yet the commoner of yesteryear led an existence beyond what our feeble minds could imagine. Ten years ago we had Streetpass, Download Play, and Pictochat. Now we have no streets, no play, and no chat.

We used to throw LAN parties in this country. We used to pile our computers into someone’s living room and promise their mom that we’d be careful around the china cabinet during an all-night Unreal marathon. We didn’t connect to a game’s servers or wait to download updates. We installed spawn copies of Starcraft on everyone’s machines and had direct, wired connections. We did this and it was good, though not without its flaws.

Photo by J Scotty Emerle-Sifuentes, from LAN Party

We were not content to stagnate. We sought to throw off the tyranny of cables: CAT5 cables, Game Boy link cables, coaxial cables. They strangled us, kept us grounded when we knew we were capable of soaring through the skies. Freed of these tethers, we would communicate through the air itself.

Enter the Nintendo DS in 2004, a mutant of a handheld device whose bizarre design led some at the time to call into question Nintendo’s sanity. It seemingly included every gimmick possible at the time, from dual touch screens to a microphone. But more important than those showy features was the handheld’s communication capabilities. The DS was able to communicate with others of its kind wirelessly, an innovation that single handedly allowed the game convention bean bag handheld lounge to come into existence.

It would have been enough to have been able to conduct Pokemon battles without having to be sitting inches away from your opponent. But the DS took things a step further. The Download Play feature allowed players to actually share their games. Your pal wants to play Mario Kart DS but you don’t have a copy? No problem, just connect to their DS — sure, you can only be Shy Guy, but you’re still playing. Download Play, then, was something of an evolution of the traditional concept of console multiplayer in which only one player had to own the title, while also functioning as a kind of trial experience of the game. Dozens of games used this feature, including high profile titles like Tetris DS, Mario Party DS, Advance Wars: Dual Strike, New Super Mario Bros., and Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!

Some games used the wireless features of the DS in more subtle ways. The World Ends With You, for instance, allowed for communication while the handheld was closed (in “sleep mode”). Passing by another player with the game in their DS would grant a bonus of experience points. In 2011, the 3DS iterated on the concept of encouraging passing connections between players with the introduction of Streetpass.

Oh, blessed Streetpass! Oh ye pinnacle of social game design! The 3DS could transmit its user’s Mii and basic information to other systems it passed by on the street in the course of day-to-day life. Upon checking the system, the user would be greeted with a bright green LED to indicate that they’d made such a contact, then could personally greet each Mii they’d encountered on their journeys. These Miis could also assist the player in purpose-built minigames, such as completing jigsaw puzzles of 3DS titles, growing a garden, or exploring a haunted house. 3DS games were also able to use Streetpass for their own distinct mechanics. Players could meet and recruit one another’s avatars in Fire Emblem Awakening, or try to beat each other’s records on courses in New Super Mario Bros. 2.

Designed for the dense urban environment of Japan, Streetpass was less useful in the sprawling wilds of the United States. But each connection, each passing contact, was a beautiful thing, a reminder that those around us have names, faces, and dreams. Conventions, meanwhile, became Streetpass bonanzas, flooding 3DS owners with a deluge of visitors from around the world. This was cutting-edge technology in service of whimsy and delight, and as an experience it was so compelling that many still carry their 3DS handhelds with them to gaming events over a decade later.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite

But it wasn’t just Nintendo that was playing around with the new experiences that local wireless devices were making possible. We hunted the (fire-breathing, half-lizard) mammoth in Monster Hunter titles on the PSP and Vita, playing these games the way they were meant to be played, with other people. And smartphones began to become commonplace, games like Spaceteam took advantage of their features, allowing for chaotic local multiplayer dynamics to emerge.

When Nintendo announced the Switch, a hybrid console/handheld, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that the features pioneered by the DS family would again be improved upon and incorporated into the new hardware. And yet… and yet. Streetpass is dead. Download Play is a thing of the past. The Switch Lite, one of the most perfect handheld devices ever forged by man, pales in comparison to its dual screened predecessors when it comes to local multiplayer. Sure, we can play Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate online, but at what cost?

Why have we turned away from the light of local multiplayer and the beauty of fleeting social gaming connections in an era when more people than ever own devices capable of wifi and Bluetooth communication? Perhaps we are afraid of the world we have created, a world where our perpetual connection to our devices no longer represents myriad opportunities for play but rather an avenue for harassment and criminality. When the DS launched with the Pictochat feature that allowed nearby users to chat by writing or drawing with the stylus and tabloid news outlets warned that it could be used by child predators to lure in children, perhaps even while driving alongside them on the highway, we all laughed. Well, in our present-day reality of revenge porn, location-based stalking, and countless other excesses and misuses of communications technologies, perhaps we aren’t laughing quite so much anymore.

A pedophile could communicate with your child while driving alongside your vehicle on the highway using the Nintendo DS’s “Pictochat” feature. This is what we were worried about in 2007.

Maybe we don’t want to be connected to those around us. The pandemic didn’t help, to be certain, but the trend away from the developments of the early 2010s started long before it hit. The Streetpass LED on the 3DS, an early form of notification, was a joyful signal. Today, we’re bombarded with notifications and alerts, and many of us have grown weary of them. In theory, modern smartphones could support apps with Streetpass-like features, and location-based dating apps are somewhat similar. But that experience of delight at connecting with another player likely wouldn’t be there because of how ubiquitous the hardware has become.

Dedicated handhelds from major games companies are now more or less dead anyway. The failure of the Vita took Sony out of contention in the field. The Steam Deck is a little too bulky to be considered a proper handheld, and as essentially a portable computer, it doesn’t support ad hoc wireless play. Meanwhile, the Switch continues to occupy a strange position straddling console and traditional handheld.

Maybe Streetpass, Download Play, and the other local multiplayer features of the DS family were always doomed to disappear into obscurity like the dual-screened design of the consoles themselves. Or maybe the dream was always, like past President of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi once suggested, of people who play RPGs, to sit depressed and alone in our dark rooms. We have Discord and voice chat now, and perhaps that’s enough.

Or maybe it isn’t. When my book LAN Party was published earlier this year, I was struck not just by how many people had fond memories of participating in them, but by how many younger people expressed a desire that they could have been around for the era of their heyday. I don’t think this is an uncommon phenomenon — many people are fascinated by the period just before or after they were born, which is one reason for the continued influence of the 1980s in American pop culture — but it seems to speak to a longing for connection among younger people. In this sense, the handheld technologies of the early 2010s were a kind of successor to LAN parties. Software like Pictochat encouraged just hanging out and messing around, while Download Play continued the tradition of PC multiplayer games allowing for installations on multiple machines.

As both millennials who grew up with the internet and watched it transform and zoomers who have only ever known it in its current, centralized and corporatized mode are beginning to reevaluate their relationships to personal technologies, perhaps now is the time to rediscover what has been lost. A renewed interest in retro games has led to the boom of handheld devices running Android and Linux, typically used as emulation machines. And as hobbyist development takes over where corporate interest has declined, these devices can now even be used to play old 8- and 16-bit games over ad-hoc connections without wifi. We are rediscovering the old ways. Are we going to go back to sitting around drawing dicks in our local wireless chat rooms anytime soon? Probably not. But it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we did.