A small social Commentary: Online multiplayer gaming vs solo and in-house multiplayer gaming
There was a time when online multiplayer was the dream of a bunch of idiot techies who thought it was the best idea it was possible for anyone to have.
Those were the days, lol.
I'm not kidding... I can mark the general era when I stopped playing games with other people to the days when online multiplayer superseded in-the-house multiplayer and split-screen coop games. For better or worse, I don't like playing games with strangers. It is uncomfortable, and I never have time to get used to people's habits before I play with them. So, I pretty much dropped about a third of all the game genres I used to like because the online multiplayer had become the center of their experience. I still occasionally buy and play FPS games, but I wait until I can get them used for under twenty dollars because that is all their solo campaigns are worth. I still keep an eye on the strategy game market, but more and more often, the online portions are coming to dictate the designs for the main games (the removal of pause and fast forward functionality is one obvious one for RTS games).
So... when I take a look around the gaming market, I see a massive portion of it that I'm not even remotely interested in simply because it went in a direction I couldn't follow due to my personality. VNs and classic jrpgs are comforting because there is no possibility for a stranger to come in and screw up your playing experience (one of the main reasons I hate online multiplayer). There is no need to compete with faceless strangers for resources in a Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, and I don't have to deal with people screaming about 'noobs' when I go back to replay Suikoden II.
In other words, I loathe the poisonous nature of online gaming. Sure, there are positive elements, but the peer pressure tends to resemble the worst of my high school and part time job experiences. I go to games for stress relief, not to have my stress increased, lol.
I guess it is because I go to games to manage stress as much as for enjoyment that I can't stand online gaming. Social elements of gaming are like a poison pill to me and to a lot of solo gamers... so why is it that they continue to add social elements even to games that really don't have a need for it? I chose to pick up No Man's Sky when it became apparent that even though it was a shared world, there was no need to actually deal with other people to enjoy it. For once, someone is using game servers for something other than proxy socialization and petty one-upsmanship under the guise of gaming... and I'm immensely gladdened by that fact.
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