There have been a growing tide of these antisocial jerks over the years, and I'm one of 'em.
Multiplayer video games have been around approximately as long as video games themselves (Hello, Pong!), but over the last few years, they've seen a bit of an upswing. Many popular single-player franchises like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed have all seen multiplayer modes added in--sometimes organically, sometimes awkwardly and cynically jammed in. The president of EA, Frank Gibeau, recently boasted that he had refused to green light any game that was strictly a singleplayer experience.
The backlash startled him. And it seems to startle and confuse a lot of people in the industry, both developers and players alike. David Vonderhaar, the game design director for Black Ops 2, the upcoming entry in the popular FPS, recently gained a bit of notoriety for saying, "As popular as Call of Duty is, there are a lot of people who don’t play multiplayer, and quite frankly, this bugs the shit out of us. They should all play multiplayer."
Why wouldn't people play multiplayer? Gamers who love multiplayer modes express a level of bafflement and anger at people who refuse to join in. I've followed a number of threads on this topic, and their proposed reasons eventually boil down to either, "you hate multiplayer games because you suck at them," or, "you are lying. You love multiplayer games. Everyone does, because multiplayer modes are just more fun."
Early this year, IGN conducted an informal poll of its readers to try to determine why it was that some of us just didn't want to play ball with the rest of them. Among popular answers were that people just played games to relax, that they didn't enjoy the competitive tone of multiplayer, that multiplayer was repetitive and mindless, and that they were turned off by the abusive attitudes of the other players.
All these are good reasons to dislike multiplayer, but I don't feel that they get at the heart of what's wrong, at least for me and people I suspect are like me.
I have a friend who keeps trying to rope me into playing these games with him, and I have once or twice, and while the experience was not unpleasant, neither was it compelling. Just the mere fact of playing this game with another person was stressful on a mild but ever-present level. Like the mystified developers of these games and the industry that reports on them, I was confused by my reaction and struggled to find and articulate its source. Then I realized it had much less to do with the nature of the game and my experience of it. It wasn't that it wasn't fun, or that the people were abusive, or that it was repetitive and mindless. It wasn't that I disliked competition, or that I was closed-minded and unwilling to try new things, or even that I suck (although I certainly do suck at multiplayer, to a deep, abiding, and unredeemable level).
It wasn't about what I liked or disliked, what I could or couldn't do. It was about what I am: a goddamned introvert. For me, video games have always been, like books, a place I could go to recharge, to get away from people and disappear into the safety and comfort of my mindspace. I could be somebody else; I could explore a strange world; I could take part in a story; I could indulge my obsessive-compulsive desire to check off lists. In short, I could play. I could be a stealthy thief slinking along a rooftop, or a silent, stony warrior laying waste to an untamed wilderness. Without some chatty companion who at best is making continual, encouraging suggestions, and at worst is actively trying to destroy my playing experience. For us introverts, whenever there are other people around, we can't really play. People take energy and focus. There's always a level of discomfort, the same as when you're reading a book and someone is right behind you, reading over your shoulder. It's like that in multiplayer games. You're being observed, even engaged with, and that mere fact of other people means that the game changes from play to work.
Games were part of my private space, my secret garden where I could go to be alone and thrive. And I have always both loved and been fiercely protective of my gamespace. I don't want to let other people in there. It's mine.
And that's why I and other introverts react so strongly against the inexorable shift from single to multiplayer, from explorations of fantasy worlds to "social games" -- a horrible phrase, as oxymoronic as any introvert has ever heard. When we hear industry leaders stand up and say that the single player game is dying, or that Zynga owns the future of gaming, terrible things go on in our heads. That is our secret garden being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall.
"You need to have a social experience," Gibeau says, and he doesn't understand why it rankles. We hear these people speak with greedy enthusiasm about a future in which there is no world for the quiet introvert: all games will be multiplayer. And it's not rational, but instinctively, we fear this idea taking hold. We fear that one day, there will be no more reading books in your armchair; all books will be read in public in a chorus reading from a giant Kindle. There will be no more darkened living rooms and cinematic bliss; all movies will be watched in a crowded theater with live Twitter feeds scrolling down the sides. And there will be no more talking to yourself alone, because all words will be With Friends.
