I was faintly amused when multiplayer gaming first started to become popular. Sure, a few kids would naturally gravitate towards this novel approach to gaming, but I never imagined its popularity would reach such overwhelming proportions. As the last few years rolled by, my amusement has changed to alarm, and within the last year it has turned into outright horror.

I always believed we gamers had one thing in common: antisocial tendencies. Video games serve to assist me in my goal of occasional escape into another universe. My quest for escape did not include dragging real people along with me on my journey, since real people were the primary thing I was trying to escape from.

The entire appeal of gaming was in leaving this chaotic and unpredictable world for the comfort of a somewhat predictable but at the same time strange new world, created by programmers I envisioned as being a lot like me. Super Mario and Final Fantasy were among the first games I played, and I bathed in their warmth for a long time. Exploring their universes was pure joy. Sure there were enemies to fight and challenges to overcome, but they all existed entirely within other universes and had nothing to do with this one. My quest for escape had been realized.

The joy I felt would not have been possible had there been an umbilical cord attaching me to the real world. When I am experiencing a profound moment in gaming, it happens in part because at that moment I am relying on nothing from the outside world to do it other than electricity. I can go to another planet in the middle of the night without worrying in the slightest about an Internet connection, or finding a like-minded player to supply me with a part of the game experience. The best games are self-contained, which also means they are permanent. I can still enjoy a trip to the Mushroom Kingdom to this very day, and will be able to as long as I maintain a Nintendo to play it on.

Shigeru Miyamoto’s games (Mario, Zelda) follow these principles: they are micro-worlds bulit detail by delightful detail. In his Master’s Thesis for Georgia Institute of Technology, Chaim Gingold describes Miyamoto’s works as “miniature gardens.” Gardens, like games, are compact, self-sustained worlds we can immerse ourselves in… A miniature garden, like a snow globe, model train set, or fish tank, is complete; nothing is missing, and nothing can be taken away. Miniatureness makes a garden intelligible in the mind of a player, and emotionally safe in his heart. Miniature scale, clear boundaries, and inner life help players wrap their heads, hands, and hearts around a world. Miyamoto’s games delight us with their details and invite us to get down on our hands and knees to see inside.

Multiplayer games, on the other hand, generally rely on many things, not the least of which is the company of which is the company who made it still existing and operating servers. I have doubts as to whether you’d be able to relive your favorite multiplayer games ten or twenty years from now. The word “multiplayer” has come to be synonymous with “disposable.”

Standard multiplayer games don’t bother me at all, since most are designed with a thoughtful single-player component, and I can simply play that and ignore the rest. But the thing that caused my initial amusement at the trend to change to horror was the massively multiplayer game. The thought that anyone would even want to experience a virtual world with non-virtual people was foreign to me. And when these games became popular, it seemed like the entire world was flocking toward them exclusively, I began to realize that the “average gamer” was no longer a lot like me.

My opinion is hardly unique, although in recent years it’s become less and less common to see it spoken about, since those who admit to sharing this outlook are quickly chastised and branded a luddite by the teeming throng of humanity known as multiplayer gamers. After years of being beaten into submission on various online forums, I had given up and returned to my hovel with my tail between my legs. But I now emerge to climb to the soapbox proudly wearing my red badge of courage.

It has been a very difficult thought process for me to accept: That this is the way of the future. That it is no longer acceptable to be antisocial. That when video games became mainstream, normal people would begin to dictate which games would get produced, leaving social misfits and outcasts behind.

Yes, I’ll always have games like Metroid Prime and Shadow of the Colossus so that I can still realize my fantasies. But I used to look forward to all technological breakthroughs for the computer, since they were furthering my cause. In recent years, those breakthroughs have been tremendous, and yet I cannot enjoy them since progress is now geared toward people who have no real need to detach from life for a few hours, and when they do, they don’t want to do it alone.

Am I bitter? No. It’s just an example of evolution at work. I’m just disappointed that the potential I dreamed about for this medium has fallen by the wayside to make way for the needs of the masses.