The rise of the MMO has also been a feature of the recent years. I began with Everquest and have ventured through a whole stream of them (WoW, SWTOR, TSW, GW2 SWG to name but a few acronyms!) As games in and of themselves they were varied experiences but the thing that has kept me in any of them has not been the gameplay, it has been the community of people I've played with. The friends, real life and otherwise have been the life-blood of the game and I've enjoyed playing with them as much (more in some cases) than I've enjoyed the game.
There are elements of this outside the MMO community - Call of Duty and its ilk all rely on the multiplayer game and my best experiences of the game (which I am pretty bad at) have been when playing with friends in a team.

I play a lot of games and often one of the criteria I look for is 'can it be played multiplayer', is it co-operative multiplayer? is it 'tacked on multiplayer'? I spend many hours playing all sorts of games (see perhaps some of my Games I'm Playing posts) with my friends. I really enjoy that time and it brings me closer to friends who I can't see as often in the real world as I might want to.
But there is something I miss and it's taken me a long time to get there in this little write up. The really good single player game. I remember the days I used to rush home from school or college in anticipation of finding out the next plot twist in Final Fantasy or Baldurs Gate II. They were brilliant, or perhaps I just remember them fondly. I've found it hard to recapture this recently, Tomb Raider is almost there, but it's still been overtaken by other things. Bioshock stands out as being good, I liked the first Dragon Age and Mass Effect II was very good, but of late my desire to 'play a bit longer' has been limited to my multiplayer experiences...
Maybe I'm alone, maybe creating single player experiences is just too expensive. I can see that argument being a good one - the single player games I've played have been quite short, they need a skill that perhaps isn't needed from multiplayer where emergent game play and fun can come from what your friends do. Bioshock Infinite is said to be a good example of it, and no doubt I'll pick that up soon, but I do wonder and find myself thinking more and more about the demise of the single player game...
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