Multiplayer (Off-Topic)

by Schooly D, TSD Gaming Condo, TX, Tuesday, February 11, 2014, 17:41 (3937 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Not only is your opinion wrong, but it's a bold claim coming from the guy who started the thread about how he's burned out on single player.

Lol where did I say that? Reading comprehension is a good thing to have dude.

I not only comprehended what you wrote, I super-comprehended it. It's obvious that you never wrote "I'm burned out on single player" exactly. But I know what you meant. I know what you're feeling. I'm already arguing from farther down the line where we've established that you don't get the same level of enjoyment and engagement from casual run-throughs of games that you got from speedrunning, even if you think you do. You need to keep up.

Put another way, to borrow a way-overused analogy:

Single player : multiplayer :: checkers : chess

You started playing checkers. You got pretty good at it, but eventually you hit The Wall: checkers is a solved game. So you and your friends started playing speed checkers, trying to see who could remember the correct sequence of moves while under duress. Or blindfolded checkers. Anything to make the already-solved game more challenging. Eventually you got burned out because the underlying game was already solved. There was nothing intellectually new or refreshing about it. It was the same damn game over and over, and contests were just about execution with razor-thin margins for error.

So you started doing things differently. You started messing up the game on purpose, getting into new situations just to see how you could get out of it. You'd play against your old Perfecto-Checkers buddies, both of you making wrong moves at will, and you'd also play with your normie friends and relatives, throwing things to keep it competitive. But even if you got some pleasure from this, we know it's just a shell of what you felt when earnestly beating your friends in Perfecto-Checkers.

But it'd be a mistake to say you only got burned out on Perfecto-Checkers. You got burned out on checkers, bro. It's ogre.

Meanwhile us multiplayer buffs are still playing a 1000-year old game, fueled by a greater complexity and the freshness of human creativity.