A strange feeling has crept up over me lately when I play my favorite Role Playing games. I feel more and more lonely. I didn't use to feel that way about older titles while I played them. But somehow even if I come back to the best of them now I end up getting the feeling that I'm talking to myself. I try to role play my character, but I'm still alone, there's no one to share my thoughts with. There's really no one to listen.

Loneliness in RPGs is a new phenomenon for me. It probably started back when I first started playing MMORPGs. Now, I'm not the most sociable person you can find online. I will answer you if you ask me something, and I will even bow to someone when they are next to me to show that I do have manners. But I tend to keep to myself for some odd reason. Maybe it's because that's exactly how I am in life. But then, that's the whole point, isn't it? Gaming (dare I say art?) imitates life.

The fact that I can just turn to someone and courteously bow to them as a sign of friendship in an MMORPG is something that you can almost never do in a single player game. Actually you could, but what makes a multiplayer game special is that there's a good chance the person at the receiving end will reply to you in some way. They might bow back to you, wave, say hi, strike up a conversation, anything is possible. They might even say nothing and move on, to which you'll start thinking how bad mannered this person is, and try to remember his/her name so you can rant about him/her with your friends...

Single Player Boundaries
Single player RPGs are confined to the realm of programming. If the programmer made it possible for a certain Non-Player Character (NPC) to answer your bow, then he will. But try and insult the NPC with the worst words you can think of and there will probably be no consequences. Do that in an MMORPG and there's a big chance you'll end up on someone's black list.

It's this lack of consequences to your actions that tend to get to me when a single player RPG is concerned. You could do anything you want, say anything you want, it's almost as if there's just no one there to listen. Often times you don't even have any outlet for your written skills, like a chat line in which you can freely type. The single player games often keep the dialogue options to a few very specific lines which could depict different possible moods you might be in. But for some reason it just rarely works with me. Except for a notable few exceptions, whichever answer, in whichever tone you choose, the game will still move along. The worst that could happen is that you might inadvertently screw the main quest and have to start over again if you ever want to complete it (as in Morrowind). Artificial intelligence being in the state it is right now, we probably won't see a fully reactive game engine in my life time. I'm even doubtful that we'll ever see that at any point because of MMORPGs.

Multiplayer Possibilities
Those who love MMORPGs, or any form of online gaming, do so mostly because of the interaction with other human beings. Even online action games attract the most expert of players simply because playing against another human player is far more challenging than against any computer opponent. The way you kill an AI controlled opponent might work once or twice against a human, but it's pretty certain that the human at the other end will have understood your little tactic by the third time and come up with his/her own little trick to counter yours, something you didn't anticipate.

With MMORPGs it's a little different of course, although Player vs. Player (PvP) is more and more popular even in that genre. The interaction with fellow adventurers, and even more importantly the possible cooperation of these players is something that cannot find its way in a single player game. Most players that get their first taste of this way of playing a game are very quickly hooked, if their experience was good of course.

Once you have lived with the virtual community and spoken with some of the good natured people that "live" in these artificial worlds, it's hard to truly appreciate the statically programmed responses of an NPC. Once you've experienced playing with a game in which 90% of the character avatars you see running around in the game world are controlled by humans, it's hard to accept the waypoint-following NPCs walking around in every single player game.

If I start talking to myself out loud in an online game, there's a good chance that people will hear me at one point and ask me if I'm okay. In a single player game I'm just another nut who will never be heard. My thoughts are vapor, meaningless. In other words, MMORPGs help close the gap between a player's avatar and himself, effectively creating a higher level of immersion. The defining line between the two is blurred. The avatar becomes your own persona to a much higher degree than any single player game can ever achieve, simply because it is your own words and voice that come through your avatar's mouth, not specific words a programmer chose your avatar could say.

It's a Love/Hate relationship
The emergence of online games, virtual interactive chat rooms in 3D, opened up a totally different experience to those players willing to try it. Some hate it. Some love it. Rarely do we see anyone in between, or unsure. It's always black and white. Perhaps because it's the same as real life. Ask someone if they like their lives, and there's two answers you might hear : "I love my life", or "I hate my life", very rarely do we hear "I'm not sure..."

I have decided to come out with it: I'm an official MMORPG junkie. My recent self-enforced absence from DAoC has proven me that I can never go back. I love MMORPGs because of the social interaction they make possible with other players. But I also dislike them for their inability to focus on interaction but rather on combat and loot gathering. But that's another subject entirely. Suffice to say that I love to hate MMORPGs.

I'm still lonely in single player RPGs. I think I'll always be now, there's no avoiding it anymore. MMORPGs have caused it, there's no denying it either. So what do I do now? I go back to DAoC and find friendly people I can play with. When's the last time you could say that about your favorite single player game?