Cooperating in Video Games? Impossible! Undecidability of Team Multiplayer Games

Abstract

Abstract We show the undecidability of whether a team has a forced win in a number of well known video games including: Team Fortress 2, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, and Mario Kart. To do so, we give a simplification of the Team Computation Game from Hearn and Demaine's “Games, Puzzles, and Computation” [7] , and use that to give an undecidable abstract game on graphs. This graph game framework better captures the geometry and common constraints in many games and is thus a powerful tool for showing their computational complexity.