I was recently watching an interview of Tim Sweeney by Lex Fridman where Lex asked Tim about the future of games. Metcalfe’s law is basically a fancy way of saying that the value of a network is proportional to the square of its number of users. In the context of gaming, Tim was saying that if you told everyone to pick a single player game to play, they might choose a different game, but if they play together they might compromise because playing the same game would be more fun than playing different multiplayer games.
He goes on to say that this lends itself towards sort of a bleak outlook for the gaming industry–the large multiplayer games will consolidate because of network effects and because the economies of scale will enable the gaming companies supporting these games to do things that small studios wouldn’t be able to attempt. If you’re a smaller scale multiplayer game studio, you won’t be able to compete with the thousands of developers and artists working on fortnite. It paints a sad picture of single player games in my opinion if he’s just viewing them as sort of a “vacation” from the MMO worlds/metaverse games.
I haven’t really played any MMO/social games regularly since Everquest, so I’m probably out of my element making statements about the current state of them, but I wanted to draw a parallel between shallow and “Deep Work” with regards to single and multiplayer games I’ve played. I know games are supposed to be fun and not work, but in my experience multiplayer games have felt more optimized towards a shallow state of entertainment that you can pick up at any time whereas single player RPGs feel more like a movie where you need to get into a deeper state of thinking to appreciate. In some games the network effects of the internet and easy access to information has weakened player’s critical thinking skills for how to solve problems because it’s so accessible to look up “best builds” or “how to easily get XP”. I hope we can find a way to preserve totally offline single player experiences in the future where players can fully explore a game themselves.