Massively Multiplayer Online Solitude

Remember when a massive multiplayer gaming experience consisted of your system, a couple controllers or a mouse, and a few buddies sleeping over for the weekend?

I do, pretty fondly in fact. But today’s idea of multiplayer has become much different.

These days you have MMORPGs like World of Warcraft with a subscriber count in the millions, demographics all over the place, and concurrent online user counts that put your multi-tap parties to shame.

So what’s the point of the name of this entry? Well, oddly enough, I found my multiplayer experience and needs changed a lot with both my age and evolution of the games.

I’ve played a ton of mainstream titles like World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and EVE Online just to name a few. And what I’ve discovered in each of these, is that I mainly enjoy a solo experience. A lot of these games, Warcraft as a great example, even boast the ability to be able to solo a lot of the content by yourself if that’s how you prefer to play. There’s something to be said for marketing strategy here, but that’s for a different entry someday perhaps.

What does this mean? Well, for me, it means that I enjoy the idea of being connected into a world where there are a lot of live players simultaneously. But at the same time, I also find that I tend to be more of a rogue or lone wolf in most of these virtual worlds.

I know I’m not alone (drumroll, plz) in this.

So why not just play single player games? Well, I still do. And it’s still not like it used to be.

I recall camping the nook in front of the computer station on a weekend with a friend and my bitchin’ Tandy, firing up games like Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry, and playing until the sun came up. A single player multiplayer experience of sorts.

It’s weird how things have have crossed over.

Now, I log into massive universes where there are a billion other little live, human avatars running around, and I’m doing everything I can to avoid having to interact with them. And on the other hand, I’m sitting here playing single player games like Silent Hill and wondering what the eff I have to do to solve a puzzle, and miss having a pal nearby to toss the controls over to because they were the ying to my yang when it came to genre titles.

I’m not complaining, either. I love the way things have evolved, and look forward to seeing how things further change in the future. I just find it kind of ironic the way my experience has flipped, so to speak. And I get nostalgic when I think about how gaming used to be for me.

All in all, maybe it has more to do with age than evolution of the game, really. As the line sort of went at the end of Stand by Me, “I never had friends like I did when I was 12 years old.”

Then again, that night elf rogue I just tried to gank probably was a 12 year old.