It’s all doom and gloom and an incipient apocalypse for single-player gaming as we know it, according to industry veteran Mark Cerny.
“I believe the traditional single-player game experience will be gone in three years. 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,” Cerny said in a press panel hosted by Sony last night (via Eurogamer).
Cerny, a game designer, programmer producer, business executive, and industry consultant, with a Sony employment history spanning over a decade, cited games like Demon’s Soul, which sit somewhere in between single- and multiplayer gaming.
“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.
“I believe three years from now, if you aren’t doing that, you are being criticised in your reviews for your lack of innovation.
“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.
“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.”
There you have it, guys. It’s all over in 2014. Unless he’s wrong, of course, or the Mayans are right and everything’s over next year anyway.
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