And I've made up my mind

I have a confession to make. It's practically a heresy in these ultra connected days. I don't like playing multiplayer games online. There, I said it. I don't play well with others, I prefer playing with myself.

No, wait, that came out wrong.

Considering I'm part of the wired generation, that I've replace of my spinal column with 100BaseT, that I've  blown a sizeable proportion of my post pubertal disposable income on a bewildering array of games, games consoles and game oriented paraphernalia this might be an odd thing to say. But it's true.

I'm not an antisocial person. I have loads of imaginary friends. I love 'party' style games. Give me a Wario Ware or a Buzz or a Singstar or Super Smash Bros then I'm in like Flynn. Hell, the old winner-stays-on Street Fighter II rules practically made me fail my A-levels not to mention epic lives-and-levels sessions on whatever game we were playing at the time (Castle of Illusions springs to mind).

Yet I don't play WoW, have never played any MMORPG to be honest. I don't have an XBL account any more and I never really indulged in Quake Death Matches, LAN or Internet.

Sure, part of the reason is that I actually suck pretty bad at most games which may seem odd but is sadly true. One of life's little ironies I suppose. Part of the reason is that I also don't enjoy having 13 year old Ritalin poster children from tract housing in the flyover states 'pwn' me repeatedly whilst shouting 'hacks!', 'gay', 'english fag' and 'joo' (sic) at me all the time - since when did anti-semitism become hip amongst the youth crowd again anyway?

I tried shouting "I love Dragonball Z" to try and fit in but they politely informed me that it's pronouced 'Zee' not 'Zed' and that I was a 'faggot' again. I politely pointed out that if it hadn't been for us saving their arses in doubleya-doubleya-two then they'd all be speaking German or French or limey or some shit  but they didn't  get the irony. Probably because they all have fetal alcohol syndrome or something.

"Ah!" you point out, and quite reasonably I might add, "Ah! But you can just play with your friends". And, yes, you're right. I've enjoyed getting my ass handed me to in a hat by my friends a few times. Project Gotham, Rainbow Six, Halo 2, PSO. A bunch of my XBL friends worked  at some of the major  UK games houses (all 6 of them) so I had a ready made excuse for when I lost horribly and dismally. They'd still call me 'gay' and 'fag' of course but would refrain from the more obvious racial slurs in favour of the more florid "cack handed northern monkey malco". Which was sweet of them.

Basically what I think it boils down to is ADHD.

Like many people who rolled that 1D12 for the great Character Class of life and came up Nerd, first class, chaotic aligned neutral my attention span can veer wildly from laser like precision in which time and social niceties, even food, ablutions and personal hygiene, become secondary to the task in hand and then swing back, like an elderly driver who's just noticed they need to take the next exit, to a state  of hyperactive meerkatting in which any activity longer than about 12 seconds is almost guaranteed to bore me . It's a wonder I ever ... oh, look. A doggy!

Where was I?

Playing with other people means you have commitments - you have to all be online at a specified time and you have to stick around until the mission's or race is done. To my detriment that's not how I game. I'm a snacker, an opportunist. I game when the whim takes me and, like Happy Harry Hardon sometimes I'm on for 5 minutes and sometimes I'm on for 5 hours. Part of the problem is that I have a low tolerance for frustration and if things aren't going my way or I'm sucking particularly hard at that moment or I think that parts of the game design are particularly retarded then I want to stomp my feet, throw my controller across the room and hit the off button. Fine when you're playing on your own but in multiplayer at best you're inconveniencing your team mates and at worst you're cheating.

Many moons ago, in a different life, whilst working for a games company, I wrote a report on mobile gaming for the DTI. One of the points I tried to make in that was that mobile games ought to have the facility to be turned off at any point - if I'm midway through a level of Super Mario Bros or R-Type and I reach my stop on the tube, or I want some chocolate milk, I don't want to lose all the work I've done. It requires a certain amount of finesse in the game design for sure but I think it's something we should be aiming for - or at least sensibly designed save points (and don't get me started on games in which it's possible to save yourself at a place in which the game becomes impossible to complete).

For what it's worth I think the best game I ever saw for the GBA was a port of Broken Sword. I kept a copy of a developer's diary for it I found lying around. In short they adapted to the limitations of trying to do a point and click adventure on a platform with no pointing or clicking by making the protagonist, George, moveable directly with the D-Pad. And, instead of having to click on items on screen, you cycled through them using the shoulder buttons. These two measure instantly eliminated the two main annoyances of P&C games which forced you wander aimless around and scrub your pointer over every square pixel or every screen in case the reason why you were stuck is because you hadn't picked up some obscure but vital item 'cleverly' hidden by a designer fresh from reading his well thumbed, hard back copy of "Lazy clichés you should employ to artificially make your game longer".

I actually tried to port the mechanic to ScummVM but lacked both the tuits and talent and instead became distracted by ... oooh, another doggy!