We’re proud to announce the auspicious beginnings of an intermittent series and, perhaps, an accolade so esteemed and rarefied that you will never see it again.
On the other hand Rovio have a CEO who spaffs out astonishing amounts of guff on a daily basis, and David Langdell is still walking free, so there may be other entrants yet.
Anyway, this month’s comment of the month-hole goes to… Mark Cerny!Â
“I believe the traditional single-player game experience will be gone in three years. Right now you sit in your living room and you’re playing a game by yourself – we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook I just don’t think that’s going to last.”
That’s right everyone, Facebook has killed the single-player game.
In fairness to Cerny, he later goes on to explain that single player experiences will be populated by “social content” drawn from other players’ games or social networks, a bit like how enabling shared content in Spore populated your entire game world with giant walking penises and vagina tanks.
Presumably what Cerny actually meant was that in three years, all single-player games will have gimmicky “social” content shoehorned into them, regardless of whether it adds anything to the game to have your friends’ drunken Facebook antics mapped to your Battlemech as a custom skin. We can but hope.
Comments
7 responses to “Arcadian Rhythms presents: Stupid Comment of the Month #1”
Yay! This series looks like a winner.
You should look up that recent Bogost essay on the beautiful trend of calling things out as being a "historical anomaly" and basically doomed forever very soon.
That was an interesting read indeed. I don't find much to dispute about Bogost's argument; ultimately design (and criticism!) should be an exploratory approach, not a proscriptive one. [I wonder at the overlap between these ideas and some of those I tried to explore in my pieces about a gaming canon, but I think today is not the day for me to try and explore *that*.]
I think his actual plan is to engineer a virus that wipes out people that have the audacity to play a game which doesn't involve other people.
Good idea. I wouldnt mind a 2nd and third place. I suggest a short description of who the winners are.
Love the fact that you mentioned PSP Vita in the picture, touches me in a special place.
If it were 2008 I would've written "PS3". Good old Sony, always keeping us supplied with running jokes!
I love to socialize. With bots… and humans too!
Usually only humans I want to socialize with in the first place like, ya know, friends and all… not 12 years old kids playing AVP, or random raging strangers.
I understand coding a game to ONLY play with bots is obsolete: but why should playing with bots AND/OR humans be taken out of the market when it's been a more-than-welcomed feature decades ago and in a handful of titles nowadays?
Can you imagine how much SHITTIER Gears of War would be if you'd ONLY be able to play with human players??? I know Battlefield 2 would be utter shit if you'd end up having to be forced to play with armies of ACTUAL players to fight around whenever you'd… o wait, that's how they turned it in Battlefield BAD COMPANY 2…
Those facebook games… those are accessible games in the first place. I'm sure it's not the ''social'' aspect that gets to Mr. and Mrs. X to ''choose it over a single player game'', it's the fact that it's there. Free. And a click away. Not to mention their popularity is so easy to track. Try to track down all the Newgrounds single player games being played to add to Cerny's equation, I wonder if people end up REALLY wanting ''only social games'' in the end.
For all those ''social games'', which of those could be enjoyed ''in single player'' anyway… where's the option to do so now? I guess that's just ''not how the game is/was designed for in the first place'' and people just go ''DOH WELL'' and take it as it is. Battlefield comes to mind as an example… YES you do have a single player campaign, but that multiplayer mode they have which is entirely different and AWESOME with bunch of vehicles you can't and won't ever use in single player? They used to have that as a single player GAME MODE in their previous games. Now it's social-only. You can't host unless you BUY a sever. O and you can't play with bots. Since I guess that would ruin achievements and who the HELL would want to play a Player Match even if it had bots anyway if achievements and unlockable stuff coded in the game can ONLY be acquired in Ranked Match? HERP DERP Fun times.
If you're discarding all that, might as well say North Korea isn't starving its nation; since the option to EAT ENOUGH isn't there/taken in consideration, looking at the numbers, we could average out that ''the norm is a meal a week! What? Look at how many people eat only once a week!* Surely this means it's normal and to be considered the accepted and popular choice!''
I hate how the market goes around the lines of ''multiplayer is the future'' nearly entirely because they've stripped the design and features of games to FORCE it to be that way. Taking options away and than claiming whatever's left is ''the good stuff that everyone likes'' just sounds like lazying out on elections; and getting the opposition shot out of the race so in the end ''why wouldn't you look at that! I got majority! Go me!''.
*I don't know whether it's a meal a week or a meal a day, but you get the point. I'm sure. I hope.