At a Sony-sponsored event last night, veteran game consultant Mark Cerny predicted the death of the single-player game. The event, according to Eurogamer, was about the future of games. Unfortunately, that future will apparently be devoid of games you only play by yourself.
"I believe the traditional single-player game experience will be gone in three years," predicted Cerny. “Right now you sit in your living room and you're playing a game by yourself – we call it the sp mission or the single-player campaign. In a world with Facebook I just don't think that's going to last."
"We're already seeing the wall starting to crumble a bit," he said. "Demon's Souls, even though on one level it's a single-player game, as you're walking through the world you're seeing the ghosts of everybody who died in that world via the internet. You can leave messages for them. They can leave messages for you. There's actually a boss you fight in that game which is controlled by another player.”
"We're talking five, 10 years out. I believe three years from now, if you aren't doing that, you are being criticized in your reviews for your lack of innovation."
Nintendo recently submitted a patent application for a “massively single-player game”, leading credence to Cerny’s claims.
"The funny thing here is, we don't even know what to call this. Is it single-player or is it multiplayer? We don't even have the words. It's kind of Orwellian. If you don't have any word for freedom you can't have a revolution. How can you be talking about design when we don't have the words to describe it? Yet, that will be the standard, I believe, in 2014,” he surmised. "A game without the presence of other players in it – you go out three or five years, I believe that is unthinkable given how connected we're becoming.”
Do you believe the era of the single-player game is at an end?
