Cooperative design has been an integral part of many digital and table top games since their inception. With the recent success of games like Resident Evil 5 and Left4dead , many video game designers and producers are currently exploring the addition of cooperative patterns within their games. In this thesis, I present two contributions. First, I present a set of cooperative design patterns. This framework can be used by game designers to add co-op content in their games. Second, I present a set of validated performance metrics that can be used to gauge the users\u27 experience in a cooperative game. In this study, we developed the performance metrics. I then applied them to evaluate four commercial cooperative games. I further validated these metrics through a qualitative content analysis method where I investigated the relationship between the metrics derived by our study and the metrics derived by game reviewers
