![]() "With boxed products, I think it is because assets are so damn expensive," says industry analyst Nicholas Lovell, author of The Curve, a book on the future of the video game business. They also encourage players to buy in early – because everyone wants to get good at the game as quickly as possible – which means a nice flood of upfront sales. Multiplayer games are easier to monetise after release, allowing developers to sell extra downloadable content like maps to fight in, and new weapons and scenarios. But we shouldn't rule out the commercial imperatives. So if there are plenty of gamers who still want to play lone campaigns, why is game design orthodoxy moving toward shared narrative experiences? Is it just that a majority of people welcome our seamlessly connected future? Perhaps. that's not fun, that's an unpaid part-time job." The money behind multiplayer Having to play any multiplayer game for 25 hours a week to remain competitive. Being stuck at level 40 in World of Warcraft when all my friends are level 60 and don’t have time to help me catch up is no fun. "Having a stoned college kid tell me I suck and can’t fucking shoot when I’m just learning an FPS is no fun. ![]() "Playing with jerks is no fun," says internet cartoonist and keen gamer Jeffrey Jaques. The experiences some people have had while trying games like Call of Duty and Halo online have put them off forever. Multiplayer shooters particularly are dominated by young men trash talking each other, often with sexist, racist and homophobic slurs. "Sticking with the single-player, finishing it, and then moving on to the next game also allows me to play a wide range of titles, rather than spending all year playing the same game, just waiting for the next map-pack to freshen things up."Īnother big factor is alienation from the online gaming community. "Having a job and an adult life means I can't start playing a game on the day of release, and be up to level 45 by the end of that weekend," says Richard Hancock, a local radio producer. This need to condense gaming sessions into narrow periods of valuable free time is another reason why plenty of people – especially those with kids and careers – want to play alone, in their own way, at their own pace. I'm a single parent, too, but when it's bed time for my son, it's game time for me." "I don't have the time to get good at Call of Duty" "I'm very people-focused at work and it's nice to switch off for a few hours, weld my jaw shut and get into a great story. "I prefer to play alone," says April Pereira-Finn. There are gamers, then, who play games as a form of pure escapism – not just in terms of escaping to new worlds, but also escaping other people. "It really felt like I had an impact on the story and the game I remember feeling upset and angry when Iceman died, but I had the sense that it was my fault for failing missions. "The earliest I remember was Wing Commander on the Amiga," says Simon Matthews, a PR manager based in Egham, Surrey. Many players still want those epic all-consuming narrative experiences, and that sense of personal responsibility. A great single-player game is the perfect solipsistic fantasy, it's you by yourself, saving the world – and everything revolves around you, not a guild of friends, or an army of strangers. Talk to gamers over 30 and they'll often be nostalgic for classic adventures like Secret of Monkey Island, Deus Ex and Final Fantasy, games that wrapped you in a world for many hours – days even – and allowed you to wallow in them alone, like good books or epic TV series. I really liked Grand Theft Auto V, and I'm big-time into racing games such as F1 2013 and Forza Motorsport, but I play all of them exclusively single-player." "Maybe that's a subconscious influence on me even today. "I grew up in the 1980s when single player games were – with few exceptions – all there really was," says veteran gamer Dave Kirk. ![]() The chances are, if you played games before 2000, you mostly played alone by default – or you occasionally allowed one friend into splitscreen sessions. Partly, of course, it's a preference that's steeped in the history and tradition of gaming. The industry may be mystified by these digital era luddites, but there are good reasons for their intransigence: they represent a whole way of thinking about what games are and the experience they provide. Plenty of gamers, even in this age of cloud computing and continuously connected games consoles, just want to play alone. There's just one problem: plenty of gamers don't want it.
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