Bad Gamer Gone Average: What Happens when a Single-playa Soulja gits gud?

This is a bit of an expansion on my post about getting attached to games, and a side-note about gaming modalities. Enough table stakes. The past year has been a story of colliding worlds. A historically single-player focused gamer, I have had my brief flurries of infatuation with multi-player, both co-op and PvP. But over the last year, the thirst got ahold of me something big. A brief history.

I dropped PC gaming and re-acquired consoles in the mid-90s. In the early 2000’s, I returned to PC gaming with a force, and started building my own gaming PCs.

During all of this time, I was one of those who was a naysayer about the bolting on of multiplayer to games that were single-player narratives as their primary focus. The Last of Us, Uncharted…I booed Electronic Arts and Activision when they said they would not publish anymore games that did not include multiplayer. As a major fan of the XBox Live Service, and a brief time in PC gaming when I had enough friends to do frequent LAN parties, I did like multiplayer. But it was just a side-dish. Sure, I played Call of Duty with my friends on XBox. But around the time of Modern Warfare 2, online gaming became far too toxic, and about this time the control of a single player always being in charge of any given lobby also went away. I’d had tons of fun for years playing Project Gotham Racing and Forza because you could always kick an idiot out of your lobby if they didn’t jive with the ethos of the rest of the room. This is when you could still make friends with randos (in fact, the term “randos” didn’t even exist, because everyone was a rando and comms were not almost entirely done in party chat). I clapped out, and went back solely to my single player roots. Concatenated with my disgust of the loss of player-controlled lobbies and toxic players, my skills were also eroding with age, both because of…well…age…and because as I became a homeowner and job priorities took over, I didn’t care as much.

Star Citizen? A brief foray into joining a corporation, discovery that our priorities were misaligned (it’s a game and I have real-world stuff to do, too), and I was back to flying solo. But the nostalgic appeal of Call of Duty: Black OPS – Cold War got a hook in me last year. I am an 80’s era, Cold War kid. And my time running alongside the streaming community, where there is almost a sole focus on multiplayer games to the ignorance of anything else, left me very susceptible to a multiplayer addiction I had long avoided.

Key to this gravimetric pull that I eventually would fall to was the fact that, somehow, due to game design, my own give-a-crap factor, or my acquisition of higher-end hardware and a FIOS connection, I became competitive again. Not tournament winning good, but at least no longer I spawn-I’m dead-I spawn-I’m dead-match ends-I’m in the bottom two level bad. Average. And that is fine for me. To cop a frequent quote, it’s Enough 2 Keep Going. And on Call of Duty: Mobile, which I play with controller, there’s something even stranger going on. I’m MVP with the most kills and the highest score 90% of the time, even in Ranked Matches, which I admittedly don’t play enough of to have a long trend of stats. I play with a controller, but so does everyone else in my matches because it’s a binary trigger-condition in SBMM for CoD: Mobile. I think here it is because I play on tablet while almost everyone else plays on a phone, and I have a tactical advantage in my ability to see and discern tangoes on the field.

Where the rub comes is that, while I am not a teetotaler when it comes to season passes and microtransctions, I find it very difficult to balance the time between PvP and single-player games. It is very hard to play a Season-based game and take breaks to go off and spend some time in a story-driven game, or even a sports game that has Franchise mode and multiple seasons, or a game requiring high-skill and cognitive focus like a flight sim or racing sim, and get back to the Seasonal PvP. You can, maybe, if there is one PvP game that is your focus. And a small set of games that you like to bounce back to. But it’s not only the friction in keeping up with the Season. There is also a pace dissonance in many case. CoD is a balls-to-the-wall, hopped up on adrenaline, Keanu Reeves in Point Break or Speed kind of experience. For those two or three hours that I’m in it, it’s high pulse, quick breathing, high-paced action that I feel like I need a drink and bath after. It’s tough to make that your main, and then go back to something like Civ or Death Stranding.

I’ve since pivoted back to the style of gaming that has more so typified my career. And I miss the PvP. I dipped into CoD Mobile last night and immediately felt that surge of making progress and unlocking tons of items, but, most importantly, winning. And not just winning, but being anointed. Winning almost every time. The buffering factor is that in the recent weeks, my turn back to single-player games has yielded some absolutely incredible experiences that I think have moved me to a point where I cannot let go of those opportunities, now. The aforementioned Death Stranding, but also Psychonauts 2, finally giving The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim a go, Diablo II: Resurrection, and Mini Motorways, to name a few. Tonight I flip back hopefully to finish my run in Halo 2. The stickiness of the PvP games is something I am looking to skew away from now, in order to retain my latitude to dip in and dip out of a game without feeling obligated to commit to it without interruption. But, man, I still feel the burn when I step into those PvP lobbies. Perhaps there will be a time when I return to PvP full-force. But for now that addiction is in regression. Thankfully so. Because I cannot find a way to time-manage it and do PvP half-force.