The dynamic of group video games has changed. In elementary school, I loved playing Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog with a big group. We would trade off after a person beat a level or lost a life. Kids not playing would cheer (or jeer) the player along, giving simple suggestions, most often “Go that way” or “Get that power-up.”

I find the current evolution of games fights this style of social gaming.

Today’s video games take longer to play, involve more complex environments, characters, abilities, and stories. Finding the 1UP or collecting 100 rings has given way to unlocking extra features and more powerful combos. The quintessential social game, the fighting game, has forgone the down-forward-punch moves for lengthy combo moves involving dozens up to one hundred different characters.

When teenage friends who never played a video game tried to play to Street Fighter, the learning curve took a few minutes. Mario took even less. Side-scrolling games like Final Fight or Double Dragon were even more fun with two people.

The complexity of today’s games can scare away non-gamers. I bought Lego Star Wars to have an easy, collaborative game, but the variety of characters, each with different moves, proves too challenging, even more so when you throw in puzzles to solve. This isn’t just run to the right.

Even playing with talent gamers, collaborative play is not much fun, mostly due to camera issues (the television screen only gets so big). Online play is the real future, but this feels like a step backward, keeping people in their own homes. Playing games with people in the flesh has the rare appeal of allowing you to heckle them to their face.

Unfortunately, the next-generation of systems appears to continue this push. Even the novelty of the Wii’s nunchuck, which should provide ample party fodder, might not lend itself to large groups (how many people can be swinging their tennis arms next to each other).

Still, as the younger generation grows up more and more playing video games, kids will have an easier time jump from game to game. Additionally, new technology, most simply in larger television screens, could allow for improved cooperative gameplay. For now, online seems the future to allay criticisms of video games being anti-social behavior. Unfortunately for me and my aging friends, that is what seems to be happening.