
There’s a very simple reason why the deep multiplayer experience of the future that many designers dream for never comes to pass. It’s the same reason why Draw Something has lost millions of users. It’s also why turn-based games usually only have niche appeal. It’s because players are unreliable, flaky, forgetful and selfishly motivated.
Any kind of game that relies on players to interact with one another exposes itself to this issue. The player who forgets to take her turn, the player who realise she’s hit a loss point and decides she doesn’t want to play any more, or the player who uses play as a conduit for inappropriate behaviour has a disproportionate effect on the experience of everyone else.
The games that successfully navigate this issue do so by keeping the format of the game short and allowing for substitution. Perhaps Left 4 Dead does it best, swapping players for characters at a moment’s notice so that at least your game can continue even if your partner disconnects.
Player unreliability is why meta-games fail where single player games succeed, why pen and paper roleplaying games find it hard to gain mass audience while World of Warcraft draws millions upon millions. It is simply easier to motivate a player to play if she knows that her game will always be waiting for her. No kind of game is more frequently thaumatic than a single player game, if only because you can drown out the rest of the world and its Xbox Live chatter.
This is why single player games remain the most important innovation of the videogame age.