Complementarity is one of the most commonly used patterns in cooperative games. It implies that players play different character roles to complement each other's’ activities within the game.

Synergies between abilities allows one character type to assist or change the abilities of another. For example, in World of Warcraft, a Shadow Priest can cause an enemy to become vulnerable to shadow damage, which also results in an increase in the damage that Warlocks (another character type) can cause.

Abilities that can only be used on another player an example can be seen in Team Fortress 2, where Medics can heal other players.

Shared goals is a pattern used to force players to work together, such as in World of Warcraft, where a group of players are given a single quest with a shared goal.

Synergies between goals is a pattern that forces players to cooperate together through synchronized goals. For example, the achievement system developed for the Pyro and Medic character classes within Team Fortress 2 gives Pyros the goal of killing three enemies while ubercharged (being made invulnerable by a Medic). The Medic, on the other hand, has a different goal, which is to ubercharge a Pyro while he/she burns enemies.

Special rules denote rules that are used to enforce cooperation within teams. For example, designers can encode rules to denote specific effects to actions within the game when performed on a friendly player. The idea behind these differences is to promote and facilitate cooperation. A good example is the rule in FPS games that prevents damage when players accidently shoot other players on the same team, known as Friendly Fire modes.

Camera Setting there are three design choices for developing a successful camera in a shared screen co op games—split screen horizontally or vertically, one character in focus, all characters are in focus (the screen doesn’t move unless all characters are near each other).

Interacting with the same object providing interactive objects that can be manipulated by characters’ abilities. In Beautiful Katamari, players share a ball. Similarly, in Little Big Planet, both players can push or grab one object together.

Shared Puzzles this pattern is a general category for all cooperative design puzzles, also discussed in. This pattern was observed in games such as Lego Star Wars and Little Big Planet, where both players encounter a shared challenge or obstacle.

Shared Characters providing a shared NPC (Non-Player Character) equipped with special abilities that players can assume. This pattern can be seen in Lego Star Wars, where both players have the ability to assume a special character, but only one can. This enables discussions among players concerning how to share the character.

Special characters targeting lone wolf this pattern focuses on the design of NPC characters that target players who are working alone. In Left4Dead, the Hunter and Smoker are good examples of this pattern.

Vocalization are patterns that embed automatic vocal expressions on player characters that alert players of different challenging events. It, thus, encourages players to play close together and support each other.

Limited resources is concerned with providing a limited number of resources, and thus encourages players to share or exchange resources to research the same goal. Resident Evil 5 uses this technique; many examples of this pattern can be seen in board games.