This indeed. My "friends" are constantly hounding me in an effort to get me to go out occasionally, my grandpa (who I live with) is on my arse for being "depressed" when really I don't give a crap about much, and for some reason when I do go out I'm invariably filled with a burning hatred for my friends and end up slinking about five feet back from the group, waiting for the day to end. Apparently there's something wrong with me.

Multiplayer games I also understand, especially where good single players have a multi player crowbarred in if only to "fit in" with the rest of the big names. I only ever go on one online server, but the people I know there are pretty much family to me, and I never go on any other multiplayer. (I spend most of my time chatting on it rather than gaming anyway).

I hate the way jobs demand employees be extroverted. They want out going "work hard, play hard!!", TEAM PLAYER types, because apparently they are the only people capable of working in call centres or filling out databases.

I can see why employers do it, but they fucking shouldn't. Everyone knows how to communicate, or work with others. Who the fuck doesn't? Grave diggers? As an introvert, I fucking hate this attitude, and the constant nagging I have to deal with to "go out and have fun". I don't like going outside all that much, and I don't like the implication that my anti-social attitudes are an inadequacy. I love staying at home. And counting my money.

Combine Rustler:
Whelp. That sure was a rant from the ranty mc rantpants ranter of the rantlands.
He does have a good point though. A point that I'm just gonna go ahead and stab in the carotid artery.
Society hates the introverted, and always has. Always will. 'Humans are social animals' is a fucking cliché way of putting it, but it's the truth. Expecting fair treatment as an introverted person is like expecting to have an actual chance at olympic archery without arms. I can certainly understand being really fucking angry about it (and indeed, said really fucking angriness is well justified), but it will never ever accomplish anything.

TL;DR: Apathy hurts less.

Yeaaah...no. Not even close to the same thing. Being a social animal means that when we see another human we don't automatically have the urge to hiss and start spraying piss at each other, it doesn't mean it's healthy that we should have the urge to be kept up to date with the mundane thoughts, opinions and activities of 60+ people on our friends list.

This installment of Extra Punctuation is brought to you by the crisp, dry taste of Strongbow.

The introvert is not fully human. Society abhors the introvert because he doesn't contribute to society. it's nothing new.

I remember being thunderstruck by this passage near the end of The Hero with a Thousand Faces:
(skip to the near-final chapter "The Function of Myth, Cult, and Meditation")

"... the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. ... the totality - the fullness of man - is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; ... If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence."

Campbell goes on (and on).
But basically his point seems to be that cutting yourself off from the rest of humanity makes yourself less of a real human. You're a leach in the bit torrent sharing structure of culture.

Which is depressing for us introverts. but hopefully suggests a justification for TRYING to allow outsiders into your play time. (I enjoy playing L4D with strangers, for example, because it's fascinating to see the weird things they do, and the awful ways in which they act.)

might seem a bit extreme to claim introverts are shitty human creatures. But i'm just trying to think it through. I think it's a major problem in modern times, because the whole fucking world is becoming one society, and it's hard to make time for billions of neighbors. hmmf.

I'm prone to hyperbole, but this is one of the best things Yahtzee has ever written. I feel like I am this person (to an extent) or at least was. I'm changing, not because it's "better" or anything, but because I am just a different person than I used to be. However, I still don't play multiplayer games for exactly all of these reasons. This is my "me time" and I really don't need a 15 year old howling in my ear about nonsense. When I do play online, it's never in depth and I never feel like I learned or accomplished anything.

A rather interesting article. Not that I care what YOU think!

It seems that games like Borderlands & Son, Brink[1] and maybe even Diablo III are having the opposite problem as the single player games with multiplayer tacked on: they're multiplayer games with single player tacked on. And it's even worse because all they do is let you play without being connected to anyone. Games like Team Fortress 2 and Killing Floor are great fun even without anything called single player, but publishers are adamant to get a sale from the guy who only plays single player games even if there's nothing their games can offer that he'll like!

Look on the bright side, Dishonored won't have any multiplayer at all!

Theminimanx:
Yahtzee, I am disapointed. You had the opportunity to make everyone's free time disappear by linking to tvtropes and you didn't do so.
I must correct this at once!

STOP MAKING ME WASTE TIME! I would like to think I had things planned.

warrenEBB:
"... the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. ... the totality - the fullness of man - is not in the separate member, but in the body of the society as a whole; the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; ... If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought and feeling, he only breaks connection with the sources of his existence."

Sounds like the kind of rubbish Margaret Thatcher would say. There's no such thing as the 'fullness of life'. These 'techniques of life' you talk about are nothing to do with the sources of existence, just survival mechanisms for living in a group, which has an obvious advantage over living alone. Life in society means people trying to get you to do what they want you to do for their own sake and vice versa, nothing more.

I'm not antisocial (anymore) & I'd love to play D&D in a group, but when it comes to video games, I'm strictly solo. Never played on a Minecraft multiplay server, never talk to other players in MMOs. To me, an MMO is just a (mostly) stroyless grind timekill with a vast world to explore, so I run through a few FTP MMORPGs every year, never staying long enough to merit even a month's subscription.

Experience:
---------------
Gamer A: "Dude, you're soloing in my multiplayer games. Not cool."
Gamer B: "Dude, you keep demanding MP be added to my singleplayer games, less cool."
Gamer A: "You soloers are missing the whole point of the MMOs."
Gamer B: "& your tacked-on multiplayer cuts into time & money that could have been spent making better SP campaigns."

I don't care for the tacked on multiplayer to SP games either. The Minecraft crowd seems to have a sort of silent stigma against single player (players always feel that they need a legitimate explanation for why they weren't playing online, like "I use it to test mods"), then there's reviewers like Angry Joe who give games reduced ratings for not having multiplayer & then having his review focus mostly on the multiplayer if it's there. If it has optional multiplayer & it's bad, that's the only thing anyone talks about.

I wish Charlie Brooker would make more Newswipe/Creenwipe/Gameswipe/How TV Ruined Your Life.

EDIT: comment deleted by poster.

Steve the Pocket:
From what I hear, Borderlands 2's single player is identical to its co-op, but without teammates. Like, they don't even scale down the enemies to account for you having a quarter of the firepower and enemies having a quarter of the targets to shoot at. Is that true? Magicka did the same damn thing, but at least the co-op in that game is often so hectic that additional players can be as much a liability as an asset.

I still don't understand why the idea of making games that are multiplayer-only, a la Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, never stuck. Seems to me like more and more it's the single-player campaigns that are tacked on and rushed out of some feeling of obligation. Do Sony and Microsoft have some sort of guideline requiring games to be playable without a working Internet or multiple controllers? And if so, wouldn't a bot mode (like in Left 4 Dead) satisfy that requirement just fine? It's not like we haven't spent the last decade and a half improving and perfecting multiplayer AI technology. Valve seems like the only company left that still understands this.

And speaking of Valve, I'm surprised you didn't bring up Gabe Newell's recent statement about how Portal 2 would be their last game with an "isolated single-player experience." Given that they're just about the only video game company you still like, I was hoping you'd use the excuse to rant about that.

I didn't think he needed to, after all, this is about the problem in it's entirety, from Spec Ops: The line to the fact even Gaben wants to join this stupid craze to Nintendo seeing the Wii-U as a facebook alternative.

I've spent my entire life trying to convince friends, family, etc that I enjoy being alone and they really do make it sound like I'm "doing it wrong" when it comes to, living. Honestly what is wrong with enjoying piece and quiet and not talking to another person fucking 24 hours a day.

I kind of agree. I love multiplayer shooters and I've met some truly awesome people online whom I call my friends. But, devs gotta realize there is only room for 1 or 2 multiplayer shooters in the market for extended periods of time. Right now, it's Call of Duty and a variable from quarter to quarter.

I haven't played a game regularily online basically since the original starcraft, and that didn't last long either. FFXI is the only MMORPG I've ever tried, and I found it incredibly boring, not the game in and of itself but to play online, with others, having my game-experience hampered by the whims of strangers. I remember the only lan-party I ever went to. After getting bored with playing cs over and over again (despite the fact that I am a pretty decent fps-player), I spent the rest of the time playing single-player games. Multiplayer is not for everybody, although the industry seem to think so.

I dont of course mind that there are multiplayer-games, but like Yahtzee I do get upset when games like Diablo 3 suddenly becomes an online-game where you are more or less forced to play with others. I know some think playing Diablo 1 or 2 by yourself is "playing it wrong" (as if there were such a thing), but I WANT to play them alone. I had great great fun playing them alone. Is that truly such a bad thing?

Strange thing though, when at social functions I am extremely outgoing. I wonder why that doesn't translate to liking multiplayer-gaming as well...

Very well put.

It's this perspective specifically that makes me treat Yahtzee's reviews as reviews rather than simply amusement. It's so utterly rare to find another reviewer who can see the beauty in a self-contained, anti-social-media-linked, strictly single-player game.

I'd like to point out that multiplayer actually makes it easier to interact with other people. If they turn out to be dicks or the conversation doesn't flow well you just shoot them. You can't do that at a party when someone talks to you about things you don't care about.

Now, I'd like to say more, but the thought of Strongbow dry clouds the mind. And I don't even know what Strongbow really is.

Agree with you on all points but one yahtzee, strongbow is foul stuff.

Actually, I find the current style of advertising for alcoholic beverages far more offensive than they could possibly be if they depicted people drinking alone. You know the ones I mean, the adverts that are set in entirely fictional worlds full of impossibly cool attractive people who live lives of fun, non-stop partying. It didn't do any good for Slurms Makenzie, did it? I mean, I saw the most recent Budweiser advert (in the UK) recently, and I actually felt insulted. I mean, I'm probably more introverted than I care to admit - well, probably not introverted, but I'm far more misanthropic than I let on - and I don't have that many friends in real life - particularly ones that I see regularly - but this kind of advertising does vilify that. It sorta says 'hey! Look at us! You're not cool and popular like us, so you don't get to have fun!' which, ironically, would probably push moe people towards drinking, to numb the pa...

Oh shit! Thats genius!

Anyway, back OT. I too loathe multiplayer crammed into everything. One of my (few) friends has been excited about Borderlands 2 for months, so much so that the day before release, he was barely able to sleep. I'm far more reserved in this area, maybe because I'm so used to waiting for stuff (like this exciting fun life that I'm waiting to come along) and I said to him that I'd play co-op, as long as we could play it my way (I'm an RPG person, he's more of an FPS guy), because I like to take things slow, explore, look around and admire the scenery and so fourth. He agreed, saying, and I quote 'yeah, I appreciate that too, probably more so than you.' which I was kinda offended by.

But as soon as we start playing, he goes rushing off to kill everything, while I'm exploring. What I disliked more is that he's grabbing quests, completing them, and turning them in, and so I'm missing content, all because I've got a different playstyle.

Though thats kind of an issue I have with Borderlands in general, when some of the quests involve picking up ECHO devices, and a lot of the time, the dialogue is going to be drowned out by the fact you're in combat at the time, and you have no way to relisten to them.

There is a strong pull to prevent introverts from being left alone to their own devices.

Agree a fair bit with yahtzee, I'd agree wholeheartedly, but I've had some brilliant multiplayer experiences and got into the mp really strongly of a few games. There sure is a sp and mp divide, and sometimes I'll leave mp off for whole weeks. Which explains why yahtzee didn't like dark souls. That can get very intrusive.

A story.

The Wind and the Whiskey.

Once I was in a second story bar, with plenty open to the night air, almost a 360 balcony. Some friends were around, and acquaintances, but I was not interested in talking to people. I only cared about my whiskey and enjoying the night air, that cool breeze that tickles across your face on a slightly windy night. Over and over, this small labourer guy kept hassling me to join his crew. To drink with them. At first it was friendly, then it was pitying me, then it was insistent, then it led to anger. The guy was furious I wouldn't drink with him. I had no idea who he was or his name, but an introvert just enjoying the wind and the whiskey was wrong. We almost got into a fight over this, for not drinking with a random stranger. If I had been smaller, less assertive, yep, it would have gone that way. The extrovert was a smaller man, a more needy man, a more desperate man. Not someone I was interested in drinking with.

Random fucking strangers can fuck off.

Having followed Yahtzee for a few years, this article doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that Yahtzee owns a bar. How do you own a bar and not like people?

You've never met a barman that didn't like people?

Yahtzee Croshaw:
I once heard from Charlie Brooker's excellent Screenwipe program that TV adverts for alcohol aren't allowed to show people drinking alone, because apparently this is unhealthy behavior. But I like drinking alone. What's unhealthy about settling in of an evening, reading a book or watching some Let's Plays, and enjoying a lovely crisp dry Strongbow while you're at it?

Hmm. Drinking alone, perhaps wallowing in your depression, perhaps just relaxing. Versus drinking in pubs in a social group, becoming loud and obnoxious watching some athletes run/skate back and forth across a field/court/rink of some kind, eating fatty starchy pub food, foisting unwelcome attention on the opposite sex, getting into a fight, vomiting on a bar floor, a taxi cab seat, or someone else, getting behind the wheel of a car and hurting someone. Yeah, I can see how drinking alone is completely unhealthy behaviour.

On the other hand, I'd only drink Strongbow at the bar. It only tastes decent on draft.

Mike Fang:
YES! YES! OH FUCK ME YES!!!!

Okay, I'm probably getting a little overexcited here, so I think I should clarify my own p.o.v. a bit. I don't hate multiplayer. I actually really enjoy playing with friends most of the time. Borderlands, Guild Wars 2, Team Fortress, Payday: The Heist, my online D&D campaign nights, I love them, warts and all. I'm also not adverse to certain social media (obviously).

However, in person I -am- more introverted than a social butterfly. I'll go to a party if invited, but mostly I'm going to be enjoying a drink and the snack bar and talking with maybe 1 or 2 people. I do NOT want to be surrounded by a half dozen or more vapid, shallow twits with the collective social courtesy of a Jerry Springer episode. I don't find enjoyment acting like a 'tard in front of a crowd, and frankly, I hate how society at large is going to great lengths to convince both me and everyone around me that I have some kind of major dysfunction for not wanting to have so many personal acquaintances I could form my own political party. And if someone doesn't think that's any meaningful way to live, fuck them.

I just wish I could always feel that self-confident about my social lifestyle. But there's no denying I feel pressure from societal expectations and like I'm being made uncomfortable with not living up to what the mainstream expects of someone my age, gender, etc. So yeah, reading stuff like this week's EP is actually pretty relieving. It helps me remember I'm not completely by myself on this matter and I just might actually have a right to feel the way I do.

My thoughts exactly.
Just to add a few more, I like hanging out with people, but usually only in situations where we have something to Do. For example having a lan-party, or drinking... Or both (tabletop rpg's are also a pleasurable pastime). On the other hand, in cases where I've been invited to have a cup of coffee at a friends house in the middle of the day, I usually haven't gone to visit them. I just can't sit there doing nothing except talk about stuff, it is awkward when you don't have anything to talk about, and if you do, you have to make an effort to keep the conversation flowing. So, hanging out with friends all well and good, but that's stuff for the weekends, when being hungover is sanctioned. On weekdays, it's me-time. I might drink few beers (etc.) here and there while playing or something, I don't need friends around for that, and I doubt they'd come over to drink with me when they have work the next day or something. I might play MMO's while having that me-time, but I always choose when I wish to play with others. As someone mentioned earlier, I hate those people who seem to not have anything else to do except bite your ear off in TS or Skype "Hey, you're online let's do dungeons and raids and...!!?!" everytime you log in. Just one of the reasons I like GW2 is that you don't have to group up to tackle a hard boss rumbling around in the PvE-area, you just go up that boss without having to socialize with anyone if you don't want to.
Let's just say that I appreciate my personal space. That sums it up quite well in my opinion ^^

I agree with this for the most part except for Driving games and Demon's Souls. Demons Souls had fun multiplayer because you didn't have to play with anyone and if you did you had the option of being a complete &%*$ and screwing them over.

I agree on all counts.

It's only been recently that I learned (from my dad, also an introvert) that introversion is unduly demonized by our culture, and I'm not a broken person for preferring solitary activities over social ones. I have tried to be the outgoing social butterfly, but the problem there was that it felt dishonest, and social interaction is really tiring to me. It's why I don't have a Facebook.

Also tiring: playing browser games and getting pestered to link my account to my Twitter or Facebook so I can let my friends know what I'm doing. Dammit, even if I had friends I wouldn't be so cruel as to spam their feeds with bullshit I'm doing on my own time. But it's free advertising, so I guess the Facebook connectivity thing will just never die.

I do find myself agreeing with you for the most part. I take exception to sitting with Strongbow, however, stuff's horrid. Although apparently Strongbow is owned by a different company in Australia, so your stuff may taste better.

I am okay with playing coop with a couple of friends.
It's good fun once in a while.
But, developers strop trying to cram multiplayer down my throat.

No I don't want Sim City to be some kind of always online connected experience. I just want to build my city peacefully, on my own.
And then burn it to the ground.
I don't want some wanker from wherever to be the city next to me and fuck up my game.

Also seriously what's with the multiplayer in Dark Souls? The game is made to have you struggle and suffer and die and struggle and die again forever.
Then a red asshole pop in your game with his over optimized build and backstab you while your fighting against two armoured giants. What the fuck game.

Anyway, enough ranting, Just let me play solo when I play solo, There is enough MP oriented game already I would be playing them if I wanted to have a shitty social impaired time.

I always thought Yahtzee had good taste, but it's good to know it extends to alchohol. The only point of contention is that he appears to prefer normal Strongbow to sweet.

Also, it's depressing when multiplayer gets crammed into a game that doesn't need or benefit from it "just because". A lot of (extremely thick) reviewers gave Spec Ops: The Line reduced review scores because of its mediocre multiplayer (lower than they might have given it if it had NO multiplayer), completely missing the point that it's a spectacular single-player game.

Also, I find Borderlands to not be great in multiplayer. Oh sure, the actual fighting is better, but in-between quests you have everyone running ahead racing through things, heading off in their own direction when you'd rather sit back, take your time and do some more sidequests.

I appreciate you speaking out for us introverts, Mr. Croshaw, even though I'm not entirely adverse to playing online with my friends. I'll never touch a random lobby, though.

I will say there's nothing like having a couple of beers while enjoying your favorite single player game. And while playing online with some friends is a lot of fun, I refuse to play along side strangers. I've had my fill of my worth as a human questioned because my reaction time isn't that of a mongoose. Thanks, Counter Strike.