Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Shamelessly single-player

I stupidly bought a racing game in a sale recently which was crap, and I won’t give it the publicity of naming it 9It never worked),. But anyway, before I even discovered that it was a buggy mess, i had to go through a bunch of account-based social-networking bullshit to play the game I just bought. In other words, I had to endure the indignity of a singleplayer game being deliberately forced through a ‘social-games’ sized hole.

There are some games that are social and multiplayer by default. MMO games, clearly, and first-person shooters based on teamwork. Even if the bots were awesome, I’d still prefer to enjoy battlefield 4 with real people. But conversely, there are some game designs and genre that are absolutely firmly SINGLE player and NOT social. City builders are one. Almost all turn-based empire games are another. Single-player games have a lot of plus-sides. You can play when YOU want to, Nobody can ‘ruin’ the game for you. You don’t need to have lots of friends with similar interests. If you get bored, you just quit, without spoiling anyone else’s fun.

For people my age, bought up on the ZX 81 and it’s ilk, gaming was almost always a solitary thing. It’s a thing you spent ages doing alone, a world you lost yourself into, without reminders that the real world was out there. I was a space pilot in Elite, not a kid sat in his bedroom.

These days big AAA studios hate that. What on EARTH does that kid think he is doing sat there alone playing elite. What good is that? He should be tweeting about it, or sharing it on facebook, until all his friends are sick of hearing about elite. What? he doesn’t want to? then FORCE him to by dangling extra in-game rewards in front of him until he tweets about the game. INSIST that the game will not even run unless he signs up for an account with us we can spam. This is the future. isn’t it great?

tweet

No. Not always.

I tweet, I love twitter, I use social networking, I don’t think it’s *that* evil, although people who put their real first school, first pet and date of birth into facebook might as well wear a t-shirt saying ‘please steal my identity’. I never understand that. But anyway… I just think we need to be warned if a game is going to treat us not as a player but as an unpaid member of the publishers social-media campaign group. I Don’t hate marketing or advertising. I use paid advertising, it feels more….honest.

I have a facebook link on Democracy 3‘s main menu. It’s there. It might offend you, but you don’t have to click it, and you don’t ‘get’ anything if you do, except updates on new features which I post about on facebook. If you like the game, I’d appreciate facebook shares and twitter mentions, but I’m not going to bribe anyone to do it, and certainly not going to degrade the enjoyment of people without social media accounts to further my own bottom line. that just sucks.

We have the generally understood concept of ‘DRM-free’, which is great. Maybe it’s time for ‘social-bribery free’?


9 thoughts on Shamelessly single-player

  1. I too grew up in a world where the only person that cared if I’d completed a game was me.

    The irony here is that on Facebook, etc, I tend to mentally filter out posts that contain anything like “X just did Y in Z” but if someone posts “WOW! Just played Democracy 3, that’s my weekend sorted” then I’ll go look at Democracy 3 and see what the fuss is about.

    But you’re being “forced” in to doing that, why would do once you discover that the game IS great?

  2. Great post! It brings back fond memories of that wonderful Jimquisition rant about “loneliness” in video games (his “ONLY THE LONELY” video).

  3. “But conversely, there are some game designs and genre that are absolutely firmly SINGLE player and NOT social. City builders are one.”

    Absolutely agree! I hate the last Simcity. I can’t wait for Banished, a one-man developed game about medieval city building.

    Also Prison Architect is a very nice builder game.

    Indie are better for simulations in the last years: less brand power, more attention to players, niche games, less marketing, more contents!

    1. the game he’s probably hinting about is one of the flatout games, I too bought the bundle on steam for a song and one of em makes you install ‘games for windows live’ crap just to get it to run at all, then they badger you into signing up to play which is total crap, the game itself is ok if you like the unrealistic type of play it is (fast and the furious kind of racing) complete with total destruction of the ‘track’ your on :) cause its like a demo derby all the time, you wreck your opponents or they wreck you kinda deal…. :)
      the games flatout ultimate carnage btw :)

  4. Flatout ultimate carnage is a great little game. I’ve had it for ages and I don’t remember getting social media crap with it.

    More likely one of the bullshit EA titles.

    1. its a steam bundle and for it to even run at all, ultimate carnage forces you to have the copy of ‘games for windows live’ installed something it doesn’t do by default like the c+ or dot net or directx stuff, but it dumps it in a support folder that you have to manually install, then it asks you to make a user id (if you didn’t have 1) before you could play (you can still back out of it tho)

  5. For me it was Galactic Civilizations 2 – so, so good single-player :-) Lost whole weeks because of it. The next version will have multiplayer, I really wonder whether that will make the game better or worse…

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