Contemplative, if long, musings on single-player gaming in the age of MMOs

So I finally finished Okami. I started playing this back in...let's see. March. Well, comps sort of killed that, and then a summer of not having the PS2 hooked up to a TV. Then, WoW kind of ate all my gaming time. But I finally beat it!

All I can really say is, holy shit. Okami was amazing. It's one of the prettiest games I've ever played, but more importantly is has one of the best storylines and cast of characters that I've ever encountered, in a game or really anywhere short of a good book. The game's about 60 hours long, and there's a lot still left to do - I'm told it's very much like a Zelda game in that respect. But more importantly, the game consistently sent chills down my spine, and I have NEVER seen a more beautiful game, either in form or in spirit.

I wrote a little review for it over at the Great Games Experiment. The GGE was something I signed up to about ten months ago but never got into because of time constraints - I guess it's part game review and database site and part social networking tool. It's apparently in something of a recession at the moment because Garage Games, the people behind it, haven't been paying much attention to it in the last couple of months, but I see it as having a lot of potential. Hopefully they'll get back to supporting it at some point, but in the meanwhile there seems to be a small group of people who're sticking it out, so we're seeing what we can do to revitalize the community, if possible.

And speaking of revitalization....I'm in need of a bit of that myself. Only in terms of gaming, mind you. But now, after a couple weeks of being happily WoW-free, I've realized just what WoW has done to my gaming style. I still think that WoW is a great game, whether or not I want to devote the time to raiding and whether or not the damn thing spent the last two weeks of play time crashing every ten minutes because Blizzard can't keep its code straight. But WoW has done really weird things to the way I game, and I don't think I like it.

Basically, now whenever I spend more than an hour or two on a game that isn't WoW (or, for the sake of argument, any other MMO), I have this nagging feeling like I'm wasting my time. It even creeps into conscious thought sometimes. But like it or not, at the moment part of me seems to believe that if what I'm playing isn't contributing to some kind of perpetual, global world that everyone can see, it's less worthy of my free time or gaming efforts. Intellectually, I know this is absurd - I'd say that my most enjoyable gaming times came out of Okami, Homeworld, Half Life 2, and Dinopark Tycoon (when I was but a wee gamer lad). Those are the pretty much the peak of my gaming experiences, when I've felt most connected with the world, or the characters, or so damn engrossed that I can't put the game down.

And yet lately, I have a tough time picking up something like Okami, or getting back into God of War, or starting up Gears or War or anything like that. I've spent much of my time procrastinating, looking for a good browser-based multiplayer strategy game (which I am still looking for) or going through reviews of games I don't have and really shouldn't even bother looking at until I've finished more of those that I already have. That's when I realized that some part of me - the part that made me procrastinate - had come to dread gaming a little.

Dread it! It makes no sense at all, but there it is. Part of me was afraid to play games that weren't persistent, multiplayer grindfests where there was some kind of definite goal and reward, however probabilistically distant it was. Now I don't want to fall back on the popular pastime of WoW-bashing, because ultimately I still like the game, but when it stops being fun, even temporarily, what does it say about the genre (and about me, for that matter) that I can't just slip into some amazing single-player games that I've been waiting months to play?

Why is the variable-schedule reward schema of WoW so damned rewarding while the storytelling and characters of the game are, admittedly, about as deep as moderately-sized puddle? With Okami, which I can now safely consider my favorite game yet, I routinely get shivers up my spine from the story and character and music and raw visual beauty of the game, and yet it was tough sometimes to boot up the PS2 and just get going. Once I was playing there was no hesitation, but leading up to that....

So what is it that makes WoW so easy to pick up and come back to, to monopolize your freetime, even after you've stopped playing? Will this weird nagging complaint in the back of my mind ever shut up and let me get back to my old, free-flowing gaming self? I've always been very slightly neurotic, but this is a bit much.