It’s getting bad. Ugly even. A friend walks up to me and asks the simple question, “Hey, John, what are you playing right now?” Then I think of the backlog. It’s a pile of games sitting by the consoles, a gargantuan mass of briefly played games, none of them seen to completion. I started Persona 4 in December! MadWorld? Yeah that first stage was a hell of a good time, for sure. My plan to beat Vagrant Story by March? Didn’t work out so much. What’s worse than the line up of single player games sitting by the boxes is the pile of those other games. Some of them I’ve even “finished”. You know the ones I’m talking about. The games that you’re supposed to play with other real live human beings over the internet. Resident Evil 5 without pushing around an artificial intelligence. Left4Dead with more than two people in split-screen. Racing in Burnout Paradise against, you know, drivers. Those games. The ones that keep slipping to the bottom of the backlog.
As playing online has gone from niche to ubiquity over the past decade, I’ve found myself completely unable to jump on the bandwagon. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good multiplayer session. I can sit down with a group of like-minded folks and play Street Fighter (any of them really) for as long as everyone’s willing. I adore a good splits-screen session, co-operative or competitive, racing, shooting, puzzling, or, hell, Jenga-ing in Boom Blox. I’m all for it. When it comes to playing with people online, though, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm. I’ve had just as many positive experiences playing with complete strangers as I have miserable ones. Like everyone else, I’ve had some intellectual cripple call me every racial/misogynistic epithet, real and made up on the spot, during a simple game of Halo 3. That’s not what keeps me away. Even playing with friends, people I know, doesn’t appeal to me in the same way playing with them in the room does, not to mention playing solo. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.
My question for you is how do I break out of the cycle and learn to embrace anytime-anywhere multiplayer? What is it about playing together in a room that just can’t be replicated by playing across broadband? What am I missing here?
Related links:
Question of the Day: Valkyrie Profile and the Need for Voiced Dialogue
Question of the Day: Ogre Battle and How Much Tutorial is Too Much?
Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?
Question of the Day: Yu-Gi-Oh! And Card-Based Videogames?