Raph Koster certainly thinks so. He feels that single-player gaming is a phase we all went through, and that online, interconnected gaming is simply the next evolutionary step -- or, possibly, a return to form. 'People always play games together. All of you learned to play games with each other,' he said, citing a reason for shared gaming's return to prominence. The problem is, however, that MMOs don't exactly scratch the same itch that single-player games do, and ironically, that's an itch engendered by the mere existence of single-player games, a kind of weird self-fulfilling prophecy. We learned to like single-player games because we were offered single-player games. So how does this affect the MMO experience? With a sophisticated enough platform, there's no reason to think that a fully-immersive single-player experience couldn't exist cheek-by-jowl with an MMO experience. People talk about soloing, but that's just a concession, a way around the issue. What if, for example, while playing Bioshock, you arrived at endgame and left Rapture, only to discover a world filled with other players who've gone through the same experience? Is the future of gaming synthesis, rather than exchanging one form of gameplay for another?
