I really like the idea of players helping each other in a gameworld in order to progress through the level , things like 1 player has to push the box over a trigger while the other has to gaurd him from enemys attacking him , this kind of gameplay excites me as it give it a sense of urgency and togetherness, if games used this techniche more than i am sure pc gaming in general will be a big success again. what do you think?

I agree with you, for the most part. I'm a big fan of teamwork in multiplayer games, but it's often tough to make it work right.

World of Warcraft has a pretty polished system, where clearly defined roles are called for in different situations, and players each take a role and work together to complete the challenge. I don't much like WoW, and I find that the repeatable scenarios start to reek of scripted situations, trading innovation and cooperation for by-the-book play, leading inevitably to people being shouted at by their mates for dropping the ball in a situation that they could have researched thoroughly beforehand with FAQs and YouTube. "Kick that moron and find a druid who knows how to heal this instance."

That's what I'd fear for a box-pushing game like in your example. There were a lot of really fun custom maps for Unreal Tournament 2004 that required everyone to work together to do extremely difficult things. They were usually metagaming or brute-force challenges, like using a grenade launcher to throw a team mate's car onto a small, distant platform so he could throw a switch and open the next area, or a maze with a hundred dead ends, 99 of which are teleports back to the start, where systematically searching them will get your team through. Voicechat didn't really happen back then, so there was a lot of typing going on, as veterans taught newbies the "right way" to get through a task, with a lot of chastising accompanying each failure.

A squishier system can be seen in shooter games like Call of Duty, where you're working as a group, but it's generally a group of individuals each looking to farm their own achievements or maximize their kill/death ratio or otherwise pursuing a goal that often leads to the team's best interests taking a back seat.

A third system expands on that, having cooperation be optional and only having players team up when it'll be mutually beneficial. EvE Online is famous for offering a wide array of group activities, many of which are less profitable than the solo variant. If you mine alone, you might make 3 million isk/hour, and if you mine in a 20-man fleet you might make 3.2 million, but mining in a three-man crew nets you 2.7 million, so you're actively sabotaging one another in order to cooperate.

I've been enjoying some Red Dead Redemption online lately, and it's got a nice free-roam system where you can form groups with other players and work toward common goals, but it suffers a bit when it comes to distributing rewards. A perfect run, all by myself, might be worth more to me than a three-man run where my teammates are sometimes stealing my kills and interrupting my combos, but I'm less likely to die, and so my multiplier goes up. Weighing the potential gains from cooperative play is a big part of that game.

For my part, I think that the foundation of co-op gaming is roleplay. I'll trade my profits, my experience points and my leaderboard stats for a really enjoyable team experience. I'll take dumb risks, like driving an APC through enemy territory to extract a guy who would just respawn in the APC when he died anyway. I'll dutifully cover an empty street while my buddies rack up m-m-m-monster kill...kill...kill...s on two other fronts, because sticking to a plan and having it work is a richer satisfaction than the simple *ding* of most in-game rewards.

I still crave a good modern version of Rogue Spear, with the planning phase at the beginning where everyone gets their orders and directions for the mission. Reaching waypoints, waiting for go-codes, falling back onto contingencies, it's all great sport. Oddly, the mysterious EvE Online FPS Xbox game, Dust 514, has got me intrigued for that very reason. I'm 85% sure it'll be a dud, but it might be awesome.