A World of Their Own............................
The future for multi-player gaming looks bright indeed. The genre’s hard-core fans are
so enthralled with it that they often have no interest in single-player games. Indeed,
MUDs and the massively multi-player commercial games they have inspired have
attracted a whole group of fans that were never interested in single-player experiences.
It cannot be disputed that multi-player games, through their inclusion of multiple intel-
ligent players, contain a combination of emergence, novelty, and unpredictability that
single-player games will never achieve, regardless of how much artificial intelligence
improves. At the same time, multi-player designers have much less control over this
game-space and thereby the games can be quite hard to get into, especially when a
player finds himself a late arrival among a sea of veterans. The glory/shame balance in a
multi-player game can be intensely satisfying for the winners, but just as intensely
depressing for the losers. Furthermore, once other players are involved in a game the
level of immersion players can experience is severely diminished. As soon as one
player in the game-world discusses what he saw on TV last night, the other players’
suspension of disbelief is shattered and they are reminded that they are not really run-
ning around an enchanted forest or a World War II battlefield. This is all but impossible
to prevent, yet in the end, though developers may lose sleep worrying about the sus-
pension of disbelief being shattered, the players of the games are just happy to be
talking to each other. Players of multi-player games are mostly looking for a fun, social
experience, not an all-consuming immersive journey with a rich narrative. This means
that, for all the advantages and untapped potential of multi-player games, single-player
games will probably continue to be more popular for years to come because they can
provide a highly tailored experience that gamers can start and stop whenever they
want. Anyone who has played a multi-player game for long enough can tell you that hell
truly is other people. But for the ardent fans of multi-player gaming, the drawbacks are
more than worth the unique experiences that only social gaming can provide.
256 Chapter 13: Multi-Player