Greetings everyone. My name is Jordan Hill. I’m the new kid here at GamesEyeView. Welcome to the first of what I hope will be many editorials I will post to the site. I spend way too much time thinking about video games and I have a lot to say about them. As much as I enjoy rambling, I also want to hear what you have to say. Agree? Disagree? Full of tl;dr rage? Let me know in the comments! Thanks for reading!
Scour the video game corner of the Internet enough (it’s right next to the cat videos corner) and you will find a handful of editorials about how single-player is dying thanks to Call of Duty, or World of Warcraft, or global warming. “The damn kids these days with their headsets and their DLC and their KDRs; they’re ruining the video games!” I think that this is a bit alarmist, yet I agree that adult gamers can sometimes get the cold shoulder. In this scholarly essay, I will argue on behalf of the value of the single-player aspect of video gaming from the perspective of a semi-responsible adult misanthrope.
Somewhere in the past 5 years, gaming changed for me. A game would be released with a much-hyped, awesome-sounding co-op mode and then, a month or so after release, I would find that mode untouched; a layer of virtual dust collecting upon that hemisphere of the menu screen. Whenever a new Halo came out, there would be a hot month or two of multi-player action, and then things would just kind of…fizzle out.
What happened? I used to partake in nightly hour-long games of CTF in Halo: CE. We would carry our TVs and Xboxes (Xboxi?) over to other dorms to find out who was the better (sadder) team!
40 hours a week, bills, kids, relationships, and “my damn catalytic converter broke so there goes $200!” happened…
We’re at the beginning of a new phenomena: a generation who grew up playing video games. Video games are quickly losing the stigma of a “kids-only” hobby. We adult gamers know this…it’s just that the rest of our lives don’t know this. Many people can’t get every new game that comes out and also have the time to complete whatever campaign mode there is AND meet up with their buddies online to play team deathmatch or kill wave after wave of zombies.
As I’ve gotten older, games have become just as much of an escape as they are entertainment. Chances are, you are not working in what you would describe as your “dream job.” I know I’m not. I want to come home and be able to get lost in a game for a few hours. I know there is laundry to be done and bills to pay, and I’ll get to that…right after this dungeon. I want to be able to accomplish something; I want to win. Most of your real life is the opposite of winning at something. Stuck in traffic? You lost at Traffic. Realized that you have been doing something the absolute wrong way at work the whole week? You just got team killed in a round of Call of Duty: Crushing Life Lesson 3.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy competitive multi-player, but there is a big difference between going online with a bunch of your buddies to yell and carry on, and joining a lobby full of strangers to silently kill enough people to make a number go up. I guess I need to have full disclosure here: I believe that most people online are horrible and your brain will melt if any of their word vomit gets in your ears. A large part of the fun of playing online is playing with your friends. What happens when one friend has a kid, another is out for “date night,” and your other buddy already traded the game in because he needs the credit to save every dollar he can because his video game budget isn’t as big as his “keep my family alive” budget?
We now arrive at the heart of the issue: there always needs to be games that offer a robust experience to those who can’t meet up with 8 – 10 friends online after they finish their homework on a nightly basis. Time is a luxury as you get older. And while it is true that you have way more income than you did as a child, you also have way more people that want money from you for such fleeting things as “electricity” and “medical care.” As a result, we are much more discriminating consumers with fuller calendars. You can try and set a “game night” with your friends, but something WILL come up. As soon as Bob (we all have a friend named Bob, right?) needs to skip this week because the kid has a fever, the wheels will fall off shortly thereafter.
I think this is why games like Dead Island, which I genuinely enjoyed, are somewhat troubling for me. They feel like I’m paying for way more than what I’m actually using. I spent maybe 5% of my total play time playing with another person: if one of the 3 people I know who bought it are on and weren’t playing another game and also see above about my desire to not play with a stranger who just wants to take the best loot and skip any dialogue or cut-scene that dares rear its head. The rest of the time was a lonely trip through Zombietown. The trend of games that are “well, technically it’s single-player but dude, totally play it co-op” is something I hope does not catch on. Dead Island, Borderlands, Fear 3; all examples of an offline-like experience that was designed with co-op in mind. A game like Gears of War 3 can feel like you’re buying a 24 oz. sirloin, eating a third of it and then just sort of letting the rest reach room temperature before throwing it away. There was a single-player campaign that was quite entertaining (but dude, you tooootally have to play it with 3 other people!) and then there was the Horde mode and adversarial multi-player. I know there are bots offered in both of these modes but come on, playing with bots is like seeing a guy riding riding a bicycle built for two by himself.
At the other end of the spectrum you have a game like Battlefield 3. Its multi-player is a riot, its co-op is OK but frustrating (also, no local co-op = boo), and its single-player, I think we can all agree, lies somewhere between “mediocre” and “hot garbage.” Now that I think about it, Battlefield 3 supports my argument perfectly. Even in its strongest mode: multi-player, it requires a solid group of friends to squad-up with or a steeled resolve in dealing with strangers running off on their own and not playing their role. The first week that Battlefield was out was like sweet, sweet poetry. At times, we couldn’t fit into one squad. My buddies and I had each others backs; resupplies, revives, and repairs flowed like wine. Now, engineers fly by my tank in a buggy to go die alone somewhere, no one throws down ammo packs, and snipers just care about finding the part of the level where they can shoot from that the other team can’t reach. I’ll just go play Skyrim, thanks.
The reason I find this to be worth writing about is that there is a lot of money to be made in online multi-player. DLC and subscription-based games can certainly pad the wallets of developers and publishers alike. Sometimes, turning a profit can outweigh artistic integrity and storytelling. Single-player serves a purpose above being a training ground for the multi-player portion of a game. There is a very large portion of us out there that wants to play a game with missions and objectives given context through a story (no matter how generic or contrived) that we play on our own terms. Our schedules don’t necessarily allow us to develop “map knowledge,” “team spawns,” and keep our twitch reflexes honed. Many of us just want to come home from a long day and explore a world much more interesting than our own, not rage quit a few matches of paintball where you don’t have to go outside and get welts. There are only two things I want out of life: 1. the kids to get off my lawn and 2. video games that work on my schedule, not the other way around.
Exactly. I really miss Legacy of Kain.
Great point about the MMOs. I have been dabbling in The Old Republic and it has been shocking (in a good way) how much Bioware has paid attention to the story. More often than not, strangers that I have grouped up with have been friendly and polite. However, and this is just my personal taste, I can’t bring myself to truly enjoy the “hotkey stacking”-style play mechanics of MMOs. I’ve tried and tried (Asheron’s Call 2, WoW beta and then, years later, actual WoW, and now SW:ToR) but it just doesn’t seem in my gamer DNA. However, for others who don’t mind the clicking and macro’ing of MMOs, you are correct.
Those 3 games that you’ve listed are, indeed, great examples of fantastic single-player experiences. Haha I may argue that MGS may give one a little TOO much single-player in the form of feature-length movies…but I digress. I think Skyrim is great for getting lost in a game for hours on end. I think Bethesda games cannot be beat in that regard. But I will concede that their storytelling is flawed in that I believe giving a game a “sandbox” structure flaws storytelling from inception. Gone are the intended, purposeful pacing mechanics of game designers…in is the player-as-director “well, I’ll get back to the main quest 15 hours from now…wait, what was happening? Who’s this guy, again?”
Basically, I enjoy tight, story-driven gameplay like an Uncharted, or a Portal 2, but I can equally enjoy a game that is a fun time-sink like a Skyrim, GTA, or Saint’s Row.
I’d recommend playing an MMO then. People there if ya need it, but always a solo option in most major western MMOs.
Honestly if I’m playing a singleplayer game the narrative has to be strong and engaging. Mass Effect 2 or MGS for example…maybe even Portal 2. Skyrim not so much.