Jimquisition: Only The Lonely

[Jenvas1306]

sometimes you watch movies alone, for the movies sake, sometimes you watch them with company, ome are good alone, some are better with others, some are good just with a certain person (horror => BF). books are mostly enjoyed alone, but they can be great entertainment when reading them to someone else...
games are good at both. just comparing bioshock singleplayer to its multiplayer makes it obvious what singleplayer has to offer...
Other games are more fun with friends, like left4dead. playing alone or with others is quite a different experiance while using the same medium, just shows what potential games have.
Being alone shouldnt have such a stigma. while being alone a lot in my past I had moments of the most growth as a person. meditation requires to be alone and works for everyone different. I think a person who constantly needs the presence of others might be afraid to be alone with themselves, case there is nothing than ones own thoughts...

being lonely and being alone is not the same.

 

[Beautiful End]

I always thank Jesos for Jim. I can see now that Jesos is the wrong entity to thank for Jim.
Thank you, Jim, for showing me the way once again.

OT: That's...pretty much what I tell my friends every time they complain about me buying a game that lacks multiplayer. I love playing with my friends. But sometimes you just gotta play on your own. and I'm blaming kids nowadays that feel the need to be connected to the internet 24/7. Yeah, I said kids.

On a related topic, I was playing Portal 2 today and I noticed that I was missing a bunch of trophies, all of them obtained via multiplayer. Now, I'm not a perfectionist so its not like I was shooting to have all the trophies in the game. But it does bother me that I can't get the trophies not because I don't want to but because I MUST play with others. I mus change the way I play, and the way I've played the game so far, just to get those achievements. Whether the multiplayer is fun or not is irrelevant right now. I just don't like being forced to interact with others if I don't feel like doing so.

I do prefer to play on my own, most of the time, mostly because my friends only like FPS and I don't like people breaking my immersion in the game by yelling "OMG U N00B WTFBBQ!11!!1!" and then watching 'DatA$$86' proceed to face-crouch me.

As it is, Left 4 Dead, a game I love and play almost religiously every night, a game that is, for the most part, meant to be played online, is hard to take seriously or even enjoy when people start being dicks and kick you out or start cussing for no apparent reason at all or ditch you or they left their 5 year olds grab a hold of the headset (Something that happens very often, apparently).

It's okay to play by yourself. It doesn't make me forever alone. And it certainly doesn't mean all games should have multiplayer just cause its cool (Right, AC?). That's why I respect Bioshock Infinite for it.

 

[Ronin1325]

What Jim said about playing games 'to *be* lonely' is spot on, though as others have said, 'solitude' would have been a better word. (No offense, Jim. ^_^ )

But as others have also pointed out, this isn't really the issue. It's a front. The vast majority of AAA game companies out there have been trying like the dickens to change their games from a Product to a *Service*. From something that you can buy, own & play at your discretion even 20 years after you bought it, to something you must pay a monthly fee for, forever. Or at least until they shut the servers down. (R.I.P. City of Heroes...) Keep that in mind as well. People invest years of their lives in some of these games, and all that can be lost permanently at the flick of a switch...

Personally I've never played an MMO & won't for that reason. I can pick up my 15 year old copy of Fallout 1 & play it without an internet connection & without paying anyone any more money. This is something game companies want to stop. It's 'lost revenue' from their perspective. And they're not the only ones, most software companies out there want to take us back to the 1970's where you logged onto a server, paid a fee & used an app on the server. That's The Cloud and it's a very, very bad idea.

In any event, what's ironic about much of this conversation is that for many games, particularly RPG's, it doesn't have to be an either/or situation in regards to multiplayer. Baldur's Gate is a perfect example. You can play it single player or co-op with no loss to the single player experience. There is no reason that a more modern game like Mass Effect could not have used that exact same model. But I should stress that that play over a LAN/WAN peer-to-peer does NOT generate revenue for the companies, which is why they don't want to revist that road either.

 

[Soak]

Welcome back to the church of Jimqisition!
Our collective prayer today shall be:
Thou shalt not question nor doubt our saviors preachings and shalt not accuse him for blasphemy when he shows generous gratitude towards god for creating him tho it makes you the blasphemer.
Amen.

On topic:
I haven't thought that would be an issue. I mean, while i enjoy time around others and are good with people in general, i really need my "alone time", even more than some others, as you said, to get away from all those stupid buggers and recharge to deal with them again
But i have no problem finding the singleplayer games i enjoy, if anyone would ever try to make a Zelda multiplayer i would personally fly to japan and shit on that developers desk... wait, what you say? "Four Swords"?... ehm, yeah, maybe i'll fly over another time.
But seriously, i think i get what you want to say but on the other hand, multiplayer has always been there, Arcades were stuffed with both single- but often even more multiplayer games, consoles had more single- (i think), but also good multiplayers. Focus on multiplayer might seem increased (or even have increased statistically, but not that much i guess) considering the higher connectivity, but none the less we're provided with awesome singleplayer games as well and i can't imagine that will change soon... or ever, even if multiplayer will continue to grow there will always be demand and therefore supply of good singleplayer games. While the industry might support multiplayer more - because of money obviously - developers will always want to make good singleplayer games as well, because it is like "high art" to many of them.

But then again
I remember the prayer and restrain myself from neither questioning nor doubting our savior because his are the words of truth and he is the one to tell what was, is and will be.

Thank god for you Jim

 

[Krixous]

I'm a rpg gamer so my alone time is some of my favourite time ive only found one person i can play with co-op style without getting pissed off cuz theyd do something stupid honestly people piss me off I deal with them enough at work when i get home the last thing i want is to join a random game on umm CoD and have a 11 year old call me a ****** for winning or losing generally doesnt matter.

 

[Wesley Brannock]

I for one love offline games. Fallout 3 , Super Mario Bros. , God Of War 1 - 3 my point is I use games as a form of escapism. I know that this is only one way of using entertainment I also know that entertainment can also be used as a format of self-expresion. I respect that and use it for that reason as well. However when I want to escape sometimes that does mean from other people. I don't mean any disrespect to the people I do know but it's sometimes healthy to put up some distance and escape from the familiar. So in that respect I agree completely with this video.

Besides I'd like to know whats so " fun " with children yelling screaming and cursing on online video game services. Really that is the point I have the biggest issue. That is a big deterrent with me playing online video games. I'm not saying they don't have the right to do it but it does make the whole experience LESS enjoyable for me. So in order to get away from that I PREFER to play offline games.

 

[sagitel]

for me its not that i'm socially deprived(at least i dont think i am) its that people are mostly douches and assholes in multiplayer. or spent the last 4 years training in it. most MMOs fall in the first category. people there were stupid and jerks so i just stopped playing.(they not giving a shit about me did really help)and games like CS fall in the first category. its not really fun if people kill you in the first 5 seconds. so for me its those two problems. outher than that i enjoy a multiplayer once in a while. but nothing can beat single player. never ever.

 

[Aetrion]

The biggest reason why I like some games to be single player is because I want to be immersed in the game, and other people tend to ruin immersion for me. For example, I got to playing Borderlands 2 and for a while tried to play through it in co-op. I didn't find it enjoyable at all. It's not that I didn't enjoy the frantic shooting and working with people, I just got tired of dealing with a bunch of people rushing through the level who didn't care to play at my pace. I enjoy looking at the levels and seeing all the little stories the designers have told with the item placement. There is narrative in the world that you don't even see if you just rush through it.
Even in games like WoW where you're supposed to play with others I often find myself wishing I could just do the first time through a dungeon by myself, and actually enjoy the environments and story behind it. Every time you get a new dungeon in an MMO these days you'll most likely be grouped with people who have been through it a dozen times over already and will make sure that your first time through will feel just as routine and devoid of wonder as their thirtieth.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

To be a little more fair to the game companies that think "single player games are lonely", I believe there IS something to be said for an enhancement of what Valve called the Single Player Plus experience. It's the "idea" that rarely do you truly play a game alone, even those of us who prefer single player games talk to our friends about said games, interact with an online community discussing said games, watch reviews and videos about said games etc. and there really is a LOT that could be done with this kind of experience.

Take Skyrim as an example, I don't want Skyrim to be a required multiplayer experience, I LOVE wandering the world on my own, discovering secrets, having huge freedom to effect the world the way I want and not have to deal with some random tool ruining my experience but at the same time it'd be awesome to say... be able to mark cool locations in the world and send them to my friends, or even have a "social area" where we can show off our characters to eachother in real time. Or even something like Dragon Quest 9's "Inn" where you could have your friends characters hang out.

At the same time this kind of thing is frequently used for "forced co-op" and can hamper the Single Player Experience. Case and point also being Dragon Quest 9, a game that squandered a legacy of fantastic characters and great storytelling for a Co-op Experience that was ultimately pretty damn lame. I mean I don't MIND being able to co-op the game with my friends, but if I had to choose between Co-op and a well written story with good characters I would take the well written story in a heartbeat. I guess most game devs are still too damn cheap to make games where you can have both co-op and a good singleplayer.

 

[Jasper Kazai]

I know that your point was multiplayer doesn't need to be in games, and not that it's a bad thing, but personally, RE5's co-op is the only reason I would play it. I love playing co-op games with certain people, and I have no interest in it otherwise.

 

[Roxor]

When Jim was going on about wanting to be alone, I was expecting him to also include "sometimes we need to be alone".

Oh, and Jim, you should change your sign-off to "Than me for God!", because at least we can prove you exist.

 

[Mike Fang]

An entertaining barb at the vapid, socially-obsessed hyper-extroverts. Now, I was going to say that people saying Jim's blasphemous for saying "thank God for me" is stupid, because it's not; he's -thanking God- for himself, which honestly is somewhat refreshing. Sure it's a bit self-centered, but it's also being appreciative to God for making him the way he is and giving him the life he has. There's lots of people who only ***** about what's wrong in their lives or what's wrong with themselves, so actually valuing what God's given you isn't insulting to God at all.

Aaaaaaaand then Jim starts playing the part of the shock jock and openly belittling God. Yeah...he really didn't need to do that. Maybe he was doing it just to push the buttons of the religiously hyper-sensitive, maybe he was being serious and actually wanted to sneer at God (though I think the former's more likely). Either way, it didn't come across as that funny to me, and even if it did to some, frankly I think it was a pretty mean-spirited laugh to have.