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Are single-player games doomed?February 10th, 2006 |
The entire video game industry’s history thus far has been an aberration. It has been a mutant monster only made possible by unconnected computers. People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other. When you were kids, you played tag, tea parties, cops and robbers, what have you. The single-player game is a strange mutant monster which has only existed for 21 years and is about to go away because it is unnatural and abnormal.
– me, at the Churchill Club
Well, that one set the cat among the pigeons…
After 24 hours, we see story after story after story after story after story on this, and of course, I also got a bunch of emails from co-workers, including the memorably titled “Are you serious?”
Yes, I am serious, but it’s worth digging into the topic a bit more thoroughly.
Historically speaking, single-player games are indeed an aberration.
Games are either symmetric or asymmetric. The vast majority of games are symmetric games: that is, games where the opposition to a player’s activity has the same choices to make as the player does. In tennis, both players get a racket, and a side of the court; in chess, both players get a side of the board and the same array of pieces, and so on. In the pre-electronic days, there were very few asymmetric games.
Some, like fox and geese, literally provided different pieces and choices to each side (the best-known modern multiplayer asymmetric game is probably Starcraft). Others, like solitaire, relied on randomization to provide the cognitive challenge to the player. Upon occasion, you would get asymmetric puzzles, as in crossword puzzles or the current rage of sudoku, but these aren’t really games in the strict sense.
It isn’t until the advent of the computer that we suddenly get widespread asymmetric design. The earliest computer games were symmetric ones — Pong, Spacewar. But quickly, the power of the computer meant that the opponent’s role was taken by primitive AI, and very quickly, developers realized that the very nature of computers meant that the opponent would likely have to have different choices than the player did. The result was games like Space Invaders, where the set of moves available to the player’s opponent is extremely different from what the player can choose from.
The videogame industry became set in an asymmetric pattern pretty early on, and has remained largely in that pattern for a variety of reasons.
- Human interface factors. It is difficult to get multiple people around a computer monitor.
- The invention of co-operative play, which permitted players to mimic symmetric sports games (both Gauntlet and the 100m hurdles share this structure; players play in parallel against the same opposition, which in the case of hurdles happens to be physics).
- As computers developed, it becamse easier to deliver stories using them. It’s notable than many of the objections to my sweeping statement centered around affection for story — not around affection for gameplay.
Taken as a whole, it’s clear that the computer enabled a vibrant new branch of game types to come into full flower — the asymmetric game flourished on the computer, and by and large is clumsy in person-to-person gaming.
However, it’s also worth noting that from very early on, electronic games were also employed in a multiplayer fashion. After all, computers, from very early on, were envisioned to be networked. Right when mainframes were first proliferating across campuses, Spacewar appeared in multiplayer form. Right when PLATO terminals appeared, they were promptly used for multiplayer gaming. Right when personal computers started to be deployed in homes, MUDs were invented to take advantage of early forms of the Internet. When those personal computers were at their peak with the Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore machines, they came with multiple joystick ports so you oculd play with your friends. Right when online services first began to provide walled gardens for subscribers, there were multiplayer games there to rake in millions of dollars.
The multiplayer game never went away. It especially never went away if you consider how much of even single-player gaming was played with an audience. The default mode of playing a console game today is with multiple people on a couch. In a very real sense, we regularly play single-player games as multiplayer ones, passing the controller around, spectating, and so on. Modern market research data shows that the myth of the solitary gamer bathing in the glow of their cathode ray tube is just that, a myth.
It can be argued that the major reason why so many games were designed for single-player play instead was because of who was doing the designing. If you survey personality types, you’ll find that the personality type of the gamer is strongly introverted. In 21st Century Game Design Bateman and Boon identify what is generally considered to be the core gamer market as mostly INTJ, ISTJ, INTP and ISTP in the Myers-Briggs typology. As they say of their “hardcore conqueror” segment,
The Myers-Briggs types that dominate this cluster (INTJ, ISTJ) are two of four types that research has shown to be common to programmers, and indeed, Type 1 gameplay dominates current game design assumptions in most developers and publishers. In some cases, it seems that this has been identified as the only style of “legitimate” gameplay…
The types of games these players prefer? Action games and computer role-playing games (which it should be noted have very little to do with face to face roleplaying, when regarded from a mechanical perspective, being mostly about acquisition and power fantasies).
These four Myers-Briggs types represent only 33% of the American population. More significatly, they represent only 19% of women.
According to Bateman and Boon, it’s actually the “participant” player type who represents the larger cluster in the general population. They go on to state, “In truth, we lknow very little about these players…”
It is therefore unsurprising to see commentary on my statement that reads like this:
Such optimism towards human interaction is just wonderful, but lets face it. Playing video games in any context will always be much more rewarding than actual human interaction.
-A poster on the Joystiq thread
What we see there, people, is the introvert in action.
It is hardly a major prediction to state that as games that reach these segments become available, that they will be connected in some fashion. And indeed, the major casual games sites, which have enormous female populations, are heavily community-oriented.
Today, even single-player games are played in “connected” fashion. The poster child for this is, of course, Xbox Live. Every single-player game on that platform has online profiles, special badges called “achievements,” awareness of other players playing in parallel — basically, all the qualities of playing games in a living room in parallel, all the qualities of playing in parallel in an arcade, all the qualities of a playground. Competing for a high score in Geometry Wars 2 is exactly the same as engaging in a footrace against the clock; you are playing a lengthy extended parallel symmetric game against other players, whilst you are also playing an asymmetric one against the direct opponent (the computer, in the case of Geometry Wars; physics, in the case of the footrace).
But this is hardly the only way in which this happens. These days, the forums attached to a game are part of the gameplay experience. The collaborative building of walkthroughs is part of the game. The sharing of screenshots is part of the game. The trading of user-created game assets is part of the game. These are all forms of multiplayer play. They have a direct impact on the gameplay experience. They often serve as badges, as profiles, and as awareness of other players playing in parallel.
Some have accused World of Warcraft of being a “massively single-player game” in that it enables solo play to such an extent that you can play much of the game by yourself. Unsurprisingly, many of the current hardcore gamer community cite the attraction of playing by themselves “near other people.” There’s that introvert again… and once again, what the game provides is badges of achievement in the form of levels, profiles in the form of avatars, and awareness other players playing in parallel, via chat channels. And the difference is…?
Half the PC game market revenue comes from games on networks. Casual games, found on websites with forums and chat channels and online scoreboards; and massively multiplayer games, which brings those things within the game. The dwindling segment is the single-player eloaborately architected authorial experience. Even there, vast swaths of the market demand multiplayer content now; try making an action game without it, even a heavily story-driven one. Even the elaborately story-driven experiences made by developers like Bioware and Bethesda come with tools designed to enable players to trade game content.
In addition, the console market will be 99% connected gameplay by the end of 2008 or so as current consoles are abandoned. The entire next-gen is going to a connected experience. Even the most heavily single-player driven experience, the RPGs and story games, will be intrinsically connected. You will never be playing alone; there will always be other players there right on the other side of a network adapter. You will be playing a single-player game only in the sense that a kid on a playground who is swinging on a swing is “playing alone” in the crowd of other kids playing near them, waiting turns, pushing them, and competing with them to see who can loop-de-loop the swing and be the first in the school to crack open their skull.
In the end, there are some fundamental trends driving all this.
- It’s now physically possible. It wasn’t before. But very soon, all gaming platforms will be on the Net.
- We’re actually getting everyone to play, instead of only the introverted geeks.
- This larger audience is partly driven by the fact that the geeks want games that are too damn expensive to break even given how few geeks there are.
- Lastly, even the introverted geeks want social approval, so they engage in wrapping their games with social content that demands connection, such as walkthroughs and forums.
None of this takes away anything from the immersive story-driven experience that many gamers love. The dense rich RPGs, the elaborate RTS campaigns, the lengthy searches for secrets of the platformer, these things will all still be there as long as we can afford to make them. But they won’t be the single-player game as we know it today. Some compare these sorts of experiences to books. But books are also enjoyed as social activities today — they are traded in book clubs, they are read in classrooms, they are recommended on television and argued about in newspapers. Few books are truly enjoyed as solitary experiences except on a truly momentary level.
Single-player gaming is doomed, because already today, the large crowd playing Solitaire is doing it online, whilst chatting in a chat room, because they can; because the RPG player is doing it whilst chatting with friends about the plot in a chat room, because they can; because fundamentally, the vast majority of humans want human contact even if only fleeting. We want to know where we stand compared to everyone else, whether what we like matches what the world likes, and whether or not others care that we are there.
That’s the connected future. You need to get used to it, because it’s halfway here already.
Edit: Since the Internet seems to be erupting with commentary on this, a short form of my argument: Very soon, all single-player gaming will happen within a multiplayer context of connectivity, persistent and publicly visible profiles, and awareness of other users.
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