Dead End Follies

Last week on Kotaku was published an editorial about the state of Single Player mode in video games. As a Single Player enthusiast, I felt compelled to write an answer through the point of view of Single Player campaigns gamers.

I come from the old school of video games. The first game I've even played was Legend Of Kage on good old Nintendo Entertainment System with it`s eight bits of gamer hardships. It was a good and fascinating era for video games. Games changed a lot from these days. They changed for the best, of course, but are we loosing sight of some things that made video games popular at the first place?

I'm talking about the single player mode of course. I believe there are two kind of gamers: the competition seekers and the escapists. I'm a part of the second group. As an amateur mixed martial artist, I compete all day long, when I install myself in front of my Playstation to get an hour or two of relaxation, I want to be told a tale, be the participating hero of a story. I don't want to get repeatedly killed by someone who stays fifty hours a week in front of his console.

I understand the commercial appeal of building multiplayer games. You can decuplate your revenues by making friends play together. It's like a snowball effect. If you like a game, you can convince everyone of your friends to play it with you because it's a lot more fun than playing with strangers. It's a competition that requires no physical effort and since the gaming demographic isn't picking up exactly sports superstar, well it's another way to reward gamers.

Is Singe Player gaming vowed to disappear? Maybe, but not forever. I don't think video games can do as well without the identity Single Player experience can give to a franchise. I think that a multiplayer-only gaming world would be bound to collapse because every game would end up looking like the other. Who would need another first person shooter than Call Of Duty? If CoD decides to take a leap in the future and make a sci-fi based shooter, well, they would cover pretty much was online FPS fans are looking for. Same thing could be said for Real Time Strategy games, Civilization and Command & Conquer are covering already so much field in that type of gameplay that plenty of other titles would be left in the dust.

I think Single Player gaming is the artistic backbone of a game. It's not about mechanic, gameplay options or guns list, it's about feeling and attachment to a franchise. We're in very interesting times regarding that, because there is, what I think could be a turning stone in Single Player experience, that is about to be released as a Playstation exclusive. I'm talking (you will have guessed) of Heavy Rain. I'm expecting a lot of great things out that game. Why am I putting so much pressure on it? It's predecessor, Indigo Prophecy or Fahrenheit (whatever you want to call it) was a soul-swallower, which made innovative use of the quicktime event to just sucker you into it's world­.

Already, I know that Heavy Rain does not fall in a few traps Indigo Prophecy fell in. The prophecy was giving into supernatural and dark forces...and kind of dropped the ball with the ending. Heavy Rain is just a very gritty and dark tale. Cage mentioned he didnt touch any of the supernatural stuff. Right there already, it's insuring us of a better game. The whole 'multiple-point-of-view' and 'elastic story' are very puzzling concepts, but if they live up to the hype, there will be a new era in single player gaming. If it's well implemented, it will create a precedent in narrative design and some games with deeper gameplay mechanics will start to pick up the ball and see new horizons for single player campaigns. Thank god for David Cage and the Quantic Dream people.

There are other monoliths in Single Player gaming though. I'm thinking of Bethesda for exemple, who gives us huge single player campaigns, but Bethesda`s formula is getting old. People saw the Oblivion-Fallout pattern and it got some of them wincing. The customizable hero also proves to be a disappointing experience as you don't grow attached to someone who's basically just a transparent medium for the player. In that regards, Saints Row 2 had a great idea by having a fully customizable hero, but by giving him a voice and actions of his own. That made, in my humble opinion for the most interesting single player experience of 2008.

Gaming must not forget what made it great, giving players a way to escape everyday monotony the way movies and literature do. It can also be a place where you can be with your friends and also a confrontation arena. But, the main success of video games was to put you in a more interactive medium than cinema. By giving the players powers and responsibilities. So will the video games answer the challenge and put narrativity to new heights? A part of the answer lies in Heavy Rain...



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