Alone Again, Naturally

I hate people, but I love gatherings. Isn't that ironic? - Randal Graves

I have accumulated across various online friends lists over the years, a catalog of names that might be described as McCarthian in scope; a profusion of personas with whom I could play virtually any game, and with whom I play virtually none.

The idea that many, if not most, of the games with which I entertain myself can be experienced in either competition or cooperation with another biped is, to me, an idea purely theoretical in nature, an academic hypothesis as practical in its application to my gaming style as a post-grad essay on the nature of spooky action over distance. When it comes to my gaming time I tend to be an isolated loner, and not so much in the cool James Dean kind of way as the first term Woodrow Wilson kind. Were I ever to be elected by the constituents of my gaming avatars, I might claim victory on a modified version of Wilson's campaign slogan – He kept us out of war "… at least against other people. With only a few exceptions a game's longevity can be measured entirely by the length of time it will take for me to lose interest in its single player components.

I wonder if this is some kind of generational phenomenon, a result of formative years spent in a era when games were either of the single player variety or required a partner's physical presence on the couch beside you, getting Cheetos grime all over your controller. Or, is this instead some indictment on my character? Should my wife put a minus mark in the box next to Plays Well With Others?

Were I Standard Internet Blogger Model #12, at this point, I'd make some kind of snide comment about the general quality of competition available in most public spaces, some derisive and condescending imperative about the perennial failings of adolescents bridging irrevocably the gap between my own generation and my progenitors who made pretty much the same exact indictments upon me when I was of the teen years trying to buy Busch Lite on a fake ID. In short, I could fulfill my destiny of dismal maturity by complaining about kids these days, and then perhaps stretch into a bloated tangent about obsessive lawn care just to really explore my curmudgeonly core.

I see the traditional path laid before me on fertile and familiar ground where I classify the general gaming populace into categories of racists, supremacists, illiterates, druggies, cheaters and griefers as anecdotal evidence that multiplayer gaming is DOA, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the single player game is where the only pure experience can still be found, except, as it turns out, I have very few serious complaints about the times that I have played in public games. I am adept enough at navigating virtual red-light districts to either neutralize or avoid entirely those who might otherwise ruin my online gaming experiences, so that I really have very little room to complain.

Besides, there's that friends list I mentioned, chock full o' quality opponents and trusted comrades just begging to get in a little game time. I have, as it turns out, no cliché ground on which to erect my isolationist fortress of solitude. The problem, in short, is not with the rest of the world, but with myself.

I recognize that this is not a familiar angle for one to espouse on the internet where "It's Everyone Else's Fault" might be the social catchphrase of the millennium. The hard, cold truth is that multiplayer gaming is only getting better. A glorious renaissance of co-operative gaming has swept across some of the best games on the Xbox 360 and PC, new styles of multiplayer gaming are creating genuinely amazing experiences in games like Halo 2 and Gears of War, the DS offers handheld multiplayer gaming with startling convenience and new modes of party gaming are making experiences like Guitar Hero and the entire Wii catalog a huge hit. The days of the traditional and often tedious deathmatch slugfest are not precisely coming to an end (see: Half-Life 2 DM for some of the best multiplayer fun available) as much as they are being augmented by genuine creativity in gameplay styles.

And here I am, like some 15th century Milanese art-hater at dinner with a young Leonardo DaVinci, missing the renaissance entirely.

Except, of course, on the online roleplaying front, where I am a hopeless and still joyous addict. As I admitted last week, I've put over a month's playtime into World of Warcraft, a game that finally puts the Massive in the M to the M to the O. A game populated by millions of people joined in obsessive bliss providing limitless opportunities for some form of human interaction, either competitive or cooperative, and a huge sense of shared community bound in near unanimous disapproval of rogues who roll need on what is clearly hunter loot. So what do I do in this game of vast poplations?

I solo.

I manage to turn the MMO into a single player RPG with less interesting quests. I strike off on my own, dismissing opportunities out of hand that require more than the resources I alone can bring to the table, and engage in long lonely excursions to barren stretches of real estate where I am alone with myself, the grass, the wind and usually some animated bubble of glue from which I need to extract seven or eight glowing flowers for some yahoo back in Pirate Town. What am I doing in this world designed for shared play? Where have I failed myself in grasping the joy of partnership?

I see shades of myself in my online avatars, and begin to understand that perhaps the way we play our games often says something unexpected about ourselves on a core level. I have never had any difficulty making friends in this mortal plane, and have been blessed with a personality that inexplicably draws people to me. I am confident around crowds, comfortable speaking to large groups, easy-going in intimate settings and a pleasant conversationalist, which makes it all the more unusual that I virtually never task myself with interacting in social environments. I am, it seems, terribly insular and worse still entirely satisfied with the walls I build around me. Am I just extending my own persona into the my digital spaces?

In the end, for me, I think it simply comes down to control. A multiplayer gaming experience is fundamentally shared, whether cooperative or competitive, and when one plays a multiplayer game both the outcome and the general experience as a whole are dependent of variable and unpredictable factors. I suspect for many single player gamers, this is fine when the person you play with is sitting next to you, controller in hand, and the entire event is experienced in tandem, but when I've got nothing beside me but a snoring cat, yet can't control the entire gameplay experience I feel a strange frustration. I was raised on static environments and digital predestination where the outcome of a game was dependent only on one's ability to manipulate and navigate the virtual realm given. I was raised on Ultima IV, Bard's Tale, River Raid, Pac Man, Final Fantasy, System Shock and Fallout, worlds where either one's own skill or cunning proved the final factor in deciding outcome. In short, there's no one else to screw it up.

Of course, there's no one else to help or enhance either, but somehow that doesn't factor into the equation.

This enforced isolation is the foundation on which I seem to built as a gamer, and when married to my own natural introversion, I must overcome great tidal forces to participate in truly multiplayer gaming. Occasionally I best these inner demons, excuse myself from my own shell and wander into a few weeks of Half-Life 2 DM, or Battlefield 1942 or even the occasionally World of Warcraft Raid, and almost without fail I enjoy the experience deeply.

But, that doesn't change my gaming nature. I solo.

- Elysium

Comments

Get out of my head!

Other than your conclusion, it's almost like this was written about me. Especially, when it comes to World of Warcraft. I solo'd to 60 then quit.

Same here. Great piece, Ely.

That's why the end game didn't hold any appeal for me, and why they don't get my $14.99/month.

Excellent article! You're not alone my friend, you could have easily replaced "Elysium" with "Swat" and it would have described me to a T.

I love solo gaming. Just like you I grew up on games where I alone was responsible for the outcome of some big adventure. And just like you in Warcraft, I thoroughly enjoyed my soloing and kind of preferred it in a lot of situations. My girlfriend, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. She hates soloing, and would always forgo any of her own plans to help out a fellow guildy. I was always more selfish.

I also love multiplayer gaming, but I'm very, very fickle. The last time I really got into multiplayer gaming (other than WoW) was Halo 2. I played the hell out of it with other Goodjers for a few months solid, played against a ton of strangers - then I just stopped. That was it - fin. It was like someone flipped a switch, and I felt like diving back into the solitary, single player experience.

Now, as I look on my friends list and I see the extremely social gamers like Edwin, Zero, Souldaddy, etc on my list, I feel a bit guilty for wanting to play single player so much.

A lot of it comes down to me being distracted while gaming as well. If i'm playing a single player game, or soloing, I can easily go in the other room and see the girlfriend, pick up the phone and call someone, put the dinner on the stove, etc. When I'm in a big group of people, I always feel like a jerk if I have to leave, so I plan to commit to a couple hour block of time.

I think it's that commitment to the group that keeps me out of a lot of multiplayer matches. In a perfect world, you would be able to seamlessly pop in and out without having the team suffer in any way.

That being said, I'm still a huge supporter of local, in the same room gaming. I regularly have friends and family come over for a night of gaming, because no matter how slick Xbox Live is, nothing - absolutely nothing can match the feeling of fragging someone literally right next to you

Yes, I'm a flaky multiplayer gamer. But when I really get into it, and set the time aside for it, I absolutely love it. I guess I'm just weird that way.

I fourth (err, fifth) the "That's Me!" comments.

A lot of it comes down to me being distracted while gaming as well. If i'm playing a single player game, or soloing, I can easily go in the other room and see the girlfriend, pick up the phone and call someone, put the dinner on the stove, etc. When I'm in a big group of people, I always feel like a jerk if I have to leave, so I plan to commit to a couple hour block of time.

Bingo. I won't join a multiplayer game unless I am able to commit the time to play, too. As a result, I almost never join a multiplayer game online anymore. Not that it ever happened very often to begin with.

I'm also a solo gamer. My WoW class was hunter: arguably the class most suited to soloing. When I look at games like Quake 4, my primary consideration is the singleplayer mode. I only got BF2 and BF2142 because I knew a lot of respectable people who played.

I'm a solo gamer, I don't own a console that's hooked to the internet (well, the Wii, but no multiplayer online I've seen yet), and I quit online PC gaming years ago. I very much enjoy my solitude, except I feel a slight pang every time I see a new "We're having fun playing against each other online!" thread, or a comment about how people sound across teamspeak, or how great we all know luna is at teabagging. There's a desperate, primal urge to want to be included in the group, but that passes quickly. I enjoy my solo gaming very much, but I do wish someone was there on the couch for me to enjoy it with. Some of my favorite gaming experiences were playing through Metroid Prime and Wind Waker with college roommates, one of us playing the others just watching and having a good time.

I'm a solo player, but maybe not for the same reasons.

I played a lot fo CS back in the day and did a fair bit of UO private shard gaming. I didn't stick around in open MMO and online games for long, though. The differece was that the online games I stuck with were games that I had out of game friends playing with me. I'm terribly social in real life, but don't make friends easily in online environments, especially not in games where it seems like everyone else is already doing their own thing.

I just imagined my original UO character standing outside the bank in Britain and yelling, "I'M SO LONELY. WHY WON'T ANYONE LOVE ME?"

Man, I should start a LiveJournal or something.

Unlike all you wierdos I relish the competitive nature of online games... Unless I suck at them in which case I flounder around offline as AI doesn't make fun of me. Civ 4 comes to mind. Fun game but once Industrial age comes around I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

You have an interesting way of looking at frustrations with online gaming. Playing Halo 2 I found that multiplayer with a friend was much more satisfying when said friend was in the same room. Sure, he could be at his house a mile away and play Halo 2 on his XBox and the game would still be entertaining, but that creates a bizarre feeling of isolation. Voice is never an adequate substitution for flesh and bone.

I keep seeing the title of this thread, getting the song in my head, and then unintentially transitioning to "Forever yours... faithfully." (Journey's Faithfully)

I once owned an Archos mp3 player. It got dirt and sand and such in it. Couple that with French engineering, and the resulting mess of half-played songs and skips might explain how my mind works.

("It's like a laser!")

As much as I enjoy multiplayer action, I'm another "me too." I soloed through WoW for the most part and then jumped ship once I got to the end game. I had a blast when I was playing with friends, but I spent most of my time just having fun exploring and wondering around.

Other then the loner / explorer part of me, I also enjoy playing the evil bastage from time to time, which I don't particularly enjoy inflicting on other living people. If I'm just beating down NPCs and the like I can have some fun or let off some steam without screwing someone over.

I heard something cool about the concepts of "introverts & extroverts," supposedly from the people who invented said concepts.

Extroverts are not people-lovers, and introverts are not loners. Obviously everyone likes a little bit of both. Rather, an extrovert is a person who gains energy from being with other people. If they are alone they feel lifeless and tired, so they rush to social situations to build themselves up. Introverts get energy from being alone - they need a few hours alone everyday to recharge their batteries.

I'm an introvert who loves people.

Maybe I'm an extrovert who likes to be alone, then.

Unless my books count. I do talk to them, sometimes.

I feel like all of us solo gamers are timidly raising our hands out of the crowd.

I Solo'd a Druid in WoW to level 58 or so. I want to play more multiplayer games, it just doesn't seem to work out all that often.

Swat wrote:

I think it's that commitment to the group that keeps me out of a lot of multiplayer matches. In a perfect world, you would be able to seamlessly pop in and out without having the team suffer in any way.

Like Swat, I think a big part of it is that I have a hard time committing a large enough chunk of time so that I don't feel like I'm bailing on my teammates when I have to leave.

souldaddy wrote:

Extroverts are not people-lovers, and introverts are not loners. Obviously everyone likes a little bit of both. Rather, an extrovert is a person who gains energy from being with other people. If they are alone they feel lifeless and tired, so they rush to social situations to build themselves up. Introverts get energy from being alone - they need a few hours alone everyday to recharge their batteries.

This is a very, very true concept. I enjoy socializing, but I have to have a good amount of "me" time to recharge myself. Too much social time is horribly draining and leaves me tired and battered-feeling.

Introverts also gain energy from a small, close circle of friends. Extroverts gain energy from a wide circle and strangers.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Introverts also gain energy from a small, close circle

And so it begins!

I get energy and candy from strangers. I used to draw my energy from coffee (mmm, espresso -- but I'm trying to quit). Does that count more as a stranger or as a close circle of friends? What if I enjoy consulting cups of coffee?

I'm so antisocial I can't even stand playing by myself.

Introvert here, that likes to give. Maybe a bit too much. But to give energy I have to trust the people around me not to take advantage. I think this costs the most energy: filtering who's worthy (the ones that give energy back through gratitude, showing hapiness, ...) and who's just a leech (sucking where and when they can).

It's amazing how draining company can be. Last week I spent every evening in our youth bar and had ENORMOUS fun, but when I got home I almost collapsed under the energy drain. I needed to stay home the next day to recharge.

I like playing multiplayer games, and I wish I played more with y'all, but it's a matter of time and money. I don't have regular game times, and (as much as I'd like to) I can't justify picking up the multiplayer flavour of the week in case it turns out to be a game of the week. I also don't have a 360, which doesn't help.

I am hoping that the Wii (if I can ever get one) puts together a good online experience; I do like me some groans of anguish after I ruin someone's round...

dejanzie wrote:

It's amazing how draining company can be. Last week I spent every evening in our youth bar and had ENORMOUS fun, but when I got home I almost collapsed under the energy drain. I needed to stay home the next day to recharge.

I also find myself exhausted and wanting to spend a full day to recharge after spending the evening at some bars.

Wait no, I want to stay home and recharge every day, but I figure my boss would take issue with that.

And all this time I thought it was just me...For example when I got my 360 about a month or so ago I got two games with it BF2 and COD3...Since I was one of the last folks in my "squad" to upgrade to the 360 I was excited to get back on with some of my online buddies and my cousin J from the old Halo2 days...I played COD3 for about 2 weeks straight, beating the single player all while catching a couple games with my boys in multiplayer when they were online...

Then one day I just lost interest in it, swung by EB Games on the way home from work, and because I wasn't ready for the dedication of Oblivion, I picked up a copy of KOTOR II (I always wanted to play it on the orig. xbox and it was bc - mmm, $17 why not)...

For the next week and a half my cell phone blew up like a Japanese city in the 1940's...You would have thought I had dissappered from the face of the planet; and to explain to them that I had a 360 for only about a month and went back to bc games, I nearly got cussed out by some of my closest friends...They just didn't get it...I love gaming with people, and a lot of my fondest memories are rollin' together with my squad on an fps but, I have an inner geek that sometimes needs to be stroked with rts's or rpg's; and those my new found friends, are perfect for the solo geek in all of us...

Happy Holidays!!!

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Introverts also gain energy from a small, close circle of friends. Extroverts gain energy from a wide circle and strangers.

That's me right there. I would be perfectly content with five friends and three computers. Some days it's three friends and five computers.

I play mostly offline myself. I tried MMORGs, but I just couldn't find a group I meshed with. I play some online Halo, but not regularly. I play a lot of multiplayer within the house, but that's just a feature of having all these yahoos in my house every day.

I think the nature of solo gaming is magnified by the new existence of easy ways to see other people playing games online and inviting you in. Xbox Live is a natural, I can barely sit down on my 360 in the evenings for 5 minutes before the invites come flooding in. Even Xfire on the PC brings this element into play. It's made me a much more social gamer than I used to be.

It's funny that Elysium and I used to play games online together more when it was HARDER to get a game working. I think the penchant for solo play is pretty equal to the arrival of kids.

Certis wrote:

I think the penchant for solo play is pretty equal to the arrival of kids.

That is a great point which I can relate to. When I was single and also married without kids there weren't many online gaming options so my multiplayer was limited to couch sessions with a group of buddies. Now I have kids and the multiplayer options are numerous. However as others mentioned it's hard to set the time aside for multiplayer these days (but when I do it's a blast).

One other aspect to the kids 'factor' I think is the inherent socialization you get by having children. My normal days involve work interactions followed by early evening family "socializing" with my family. Once the kids are finally in bed that's about the only time I have for some introversion so it's not always time I choose to spend socializing in a multiplayer game.

Good article and an interesting thread.

Certis wrote:

I think the penchant for solo play is pretty equal to the arrival of kids.

I don't know how anyone with kids can spend any time online. I know I would get annoyed (if I had no kids) with someone who had to leave every 5 seconds to get their child out of trouble. Mine is only 18 months old, and I don't play anything without a pause button.

Certis wrote:

I think the penchant for solo play is pretty equal to the arrival of kids.

No kids, not even an SO. Solo in life, solo in games, I guess.

I found it somewhat ironic that in a game as solo-friendly as WoW I would sometimes get more group invites in 1 week than I did during 4 years of being /LFG in EQ1.

Also, the ability to 2 or 3-man a good deal of the outside world elite quests is another nice option.

You're never solo in a BG, either. Of course with some of the P/U groups I've been in, that's debatable.

Damn I missed a lot of articles... Thanks for so eloquently express what a lot of us are thinking (esp when playing WoW )

Though, if there are so many "loners" out there, you are not really alone right?