Two things I've noticed about this story: First of all, you have surrounded yourself, and I hate to say it, possibly on purpose, with people who do not share your particular interest or passion. It feels very much like you have chosen these people to be in your life so that when you do get that moment, like first thing in the morning, you can drink deeply from the pleasure of enjoying a game completely alone...and not have to share. Indeed, hiding it sounds like a ritual. You don't want to share so that you can indulge in the pleasure of having something private to yourself in what sounds like a very public, very social world with very little alone time. Secondly, you do not wish to play games with others, and keep finding that the games people you know want to play are games that either require or heavily encourage and support multiplayer social gaming, which is an antithesis to escaping from the public group and having a quiet moment to yourself to indulge. But cutting yourself off from finding the right people, or even just person with whom you can share your interest and passion can be akin to amputating part of your soul.
This is not a world I know or inhabit. My first experience with games mixing socially was being with my friends in a room, filled with hardware, and everyone was playing their own game of choice, and only occasionally with one another, or occasionally swapping one kind of hardware for another. This college experience extended to the post college, enter the get-a real-job world for me, where I had a roommate from this social circle, and we would play a game, maybe an mmo, or maybe just a singleplayer game, and we would regularly play in different rooms of the house and if we were on computers we would often hook up our headsets and talk over skype or vent to achieve new heights in introversion and utter pathetic laziness. We didn't want to hang out in the same room because we already saw enough of one another living in the same house. But there is a pure and simple pleasure of playing a game in a room that someone else is playing a game. It is very similar to me, practically identical to being in the same room as someone else while both of you are reading books. It is a feeling of relaxation and absolute trust that you don't have to be anyone else but yourself with this person, they expect nothing of you except for you to do what you want at this moment, and you don't even have to talk about it or share with them. But you know that if the feeling arises, you can babble like some kind of maniac to them and they will listen and be able to respond and not make you feel totally isolated and crazy.
Look for those people. And stop amputating yourself. If you have to painfully teach someone who has potential to share your pleasure in video games, then do it. I certainly didn't start out very interested or knowledgeable or passionate about video games. It really was from blunt force social trauma with guys making me actually stop being a passive observer and become an active, very passionate player. And they did talk about games like they were high literature, all the time, sounding like madmen. But they made an effort with me. They actually let me try things even when I made just a noncommittal murmur of interest in the direction of something they were playing. Even if I sucked and had no controller sense. Even when I felt stupid and dumb for trying, they wouldn't take no for an answer. So don't give up on the people close to you, and let them into your world sometimes, no matter how terrifying it is for You--unless they really have no potential of ever being close to you or ever being remotely interested in your world. You gotta ask, why are you hanging around with them in the first place?
