I was talking to a friend recently, and he told me that he'd bought Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 and had been playing it for the last couple of days. I asked him about the controversial "No Russian" level (where, posing as a Russian terrorist, you murder civilians in an airport), and whether it made the game deeper or repulsive. He told me that he wasn't there yet, and, when I asked him how he could possibly have been playing nonstop for two days and not gotten to "No Russian" yet. He informed me that he'd only been playing multiplayer.

Many other people confessed this, too. According to them, the single-player mode was an unnecessary addition to the game: it was kind of fun, maybe worth an hour or two, but it definitely wasn't the game's main show. Well, pardon me, but I'd always thought it was the other way around. While multiplayer could be a fun diversion, I'd always thought of single-player mode as the true star of the show.

I suppose this isn't a big problem, really, and anything that sells more copies of good games is a positive, but I feel faintly offended by it, too. After all, developers spend months writing and programming an involving main story to suck you in and wow you with its depth; the experience is, in good games, supposed to be a monumental occasion, like the first time you saw Saving Private Ryanfor the first time. When you just brush this off in favor of multiplayer, you're doing the game a disservice. It's like skipping the actual movie on a DVD and heading straight to the extras.

Now, you could say that how other people enjoy a game has no impact on me, and, in a sense, you'd be right. After all, it doesn't really matter. However, games could change their development process based solely on appealing to multiplayer players. When Bioshockhit, critics everywhere agreed it was one of the best games ever, but a lot of people whined about its sub-Call-of-Duty-level multiplayer. Now, the new game will feature a much-improved multiplayer. This in and of itself might not hurt the quality or length of the actual game, but one can see a future in which Bioshock 6: Big Daddy Warfarebecomes the best-selling game of all time, despite its lack of a single-player campaign longer than 3 hours.

So, no, it doesn't impact me much right now. But I sincerely hope this isn't the start of a larger trend, where games no longer offer the kind of thrilling single-player campaign that makes the best games today so great. Right now, the medium of games is evolving, from weak-story shoot-em-ups to intense, plot-driven affairs with movie-quality dialogue and plot twists. Let's hope that multiplayer doesn't make gaming take a step backwards, instead.