Online Gaming: Gift or Curse?

Much has been made in the past few years about online gaming, specifically online gaming on consoles. The advent of online gaming has brought much to the gaming industry, and has undoubtedly enhanced the market in ways that would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. Games can now be played for far, far longer, which makes the investment in a new game worth much more, and increases the value of that cash too. Unfortunately, online gaming has come with some major disadvantages, which have changed the way that many gamers play their games.

As I’ve said, online gaming brings enormous amouts of replayability to games, which makes the purchase of a game more worthwhile. Unfortunately, online gaming has a dark side to it. Online gaming, gaming against other people, has made single player campaigns more tedious at times. No longer do people buy the latest games, such as CoD, Halo, Resistance to play the campaign, they buy it to play online against other people. At first, the campaign will be excellent fun, as it will prepare you and teach you how to play against real opponents. Unfortunately, once a player has played online, the single player campaign/game modes playability is effectively ruined. People complain regularly about server downtime or losing their connection. Sometimes they lose internet in their area for a few days. Gamers feel frustrated when this happens, but 10 years ago the internet made no difference to console systems. Now online game is the focal point for most games, and it means that most gamers no longer enjoy playing a game by themself. This is a great pity, as many games out now are better than any games we’ve had in the past, but people are just too attracted to online gaming. While that’s all well and good now, it isn’t when people can’t connect to servers or have lost the internet in their area.