"The earliest I remember was Wing Commander on the Amiga," says Simon Matthews, a PR manager based in Egham, Surrey. Many players still want those epic all-consuming narrative experiences, and that sense of personal responsibility. A great single-player game is the perfect solipsistic fantasy, it's you by yourself, saving the world – and everything revolves around you, not a guild of friends, or an army of strangers.
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Talk to gamers over 30 and they'll often be nostalgic for classic adventures like Secret of Monkey Island, Deus Ex and Final Fantasy, games that wrapped you in a world for many hours – days even – and allowed you to wallow in them alone, like good books or epic TV series. I really liked Grand Theft Auto V, and I'm big-time into racing games such as F1 2013 and Forza Motorsport, but I play all of them exclusively single-player." "Maybe that's a subconscious influence on me even today. "I grew up in the 1980s when single player games were – with few exceptions – all there really was," says veteran gamer Dave Kirk. The chances are, if you played games before 2000, you mostly played alone by default – or you occasionally allowed one friend into splitscreen sessions. Partly, of course, it's a preference that's steeped in the history and tradition of gaming. The industry may be mystified by these digital era luddites, but there are good reasons for their intransigence: they represent a whole way of thinking about what games are and the experience they provide.
Plenty of gamers, even in this age of cloud computing and continuously connected games consoles, just want to play alone. There's just one problem: plenty of gamers don't want it.
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