Rage Against the Machine

Playing video games in the late 80's and early 90's generally involved you, and maybe another person who was in the same room as you, trying to defeat the computer. Nowadays however, there tends to be a much larger focus on online multiplayer, with some games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield only having a short single player campaign, because it's not the reason people want to buy these games.

Personally I never found online multiplayer with unknown people all that appealing. The first reason for this stems from game balance. When playing against the computer the game follows a set difficulty curve which slowly ups the ante as the story progresses, however, when going online the random nature of your human opponents removes this curve. I am aware that many games do now include ranking features to try and prevent new players being paired up against more experienced ones but such features only work well with a large player base, and even still there is a significant amount of randomness associated with having a human opponent. When playing with another person in the same room I don't mind this issue of randomness because in these cases I'm playing the game for social rather than story reasons.

The other issue, and what really is the deal breaker for me is the lack of control over the kind of people you end up playing with. The first time I played Counter Strike I was greeted with a string of profanities and as a result turned off voice chat, meaning that I could no longer communicate effectively with my team mates. This problem seems to be linked to certain games, because when playing Monster Hunter Tri online I have never had any problem with people being vulgar and anyone seen to be even slightly rude quickly finds them self without a hunting party.

While I tend to find that I am happier playing cooperative than competitive games online, I have never really warmed to the MMO market. In general I would rather play an equivalent single player game than the online one, which is slightly odd as I'm a big fan of table top roleplaying. I suspect that this again stems from a preference for face to face social interaction, coupled with a desire to take the story at my own pace. Monster Hunter Tri is one of the few exceptions to this rule as I do spend quite a large amount of time playing it online. However, the online game doesn't really have it's own story so I guess that removes the concerns about pacing. Regardless of my personal feelings towards online multiplayer the market for it is huge, and will only continue to grow in the future.