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Is Solo-Gameplay Anti-Social?

"Man, those silly games made you rely on people for every little thing you did, didn’t they?" (Nerfbat)

Few people shared their opinion as of lately that the social element of MMOs starts to erode (as compared to the “good ole’ days”), probably because going solo is so much easier than in the days of Ultima Online:

“Ryan goes through the list of things that made games social back in the day and emphasizes that the reason why we’re no longer social is because we do not depend on each other while we play anymore… We no longer deal with harsh death penalties, complex zones, real quests, or forced grouping…
‘Social game’ and ‘accessible’ are polar opposites in MMORPGs because it’s in each of their nature to suppress the other.“  (Keen and Graev’s Gaming Blog)

I don’t buy the theory that better accessibility leads to lesser social games. Equally absurd is the contraposition, that unforgiving, inaccessible games (like in: no auctions, no maps, harsher death-penalties, forced grouping and so on) are more social. In my humble opinion, solo-play gained such a popularity because players were frustrated with the game-design (like forced grouping) of older MMOs in the first place.

When sifting through the manifold comments about this, you frequently encounter statements like “I just tend to play in a small group of close friends from time to time”, or “the constant analyzing of XP/minute and % of attack-power annoyed me, so I started to play solo.“
One could arrive at the conclusion that it’s not so much about the ease of solo-game-play opposed to the importance of relying on others or the ease of finding a group—it’s more about different types of “modes” within a MMO: group activities can get very competitive in nature the more players take part (i.e. raids, RvR and so on), partially because you try to gain an edge over other groups, partially because the game’s developers need to throw more hefty stuff at you to keep the challenge up for hardcore-players and -groups. Of course it’s okay to play like that, but it’s also understandable that people want to play in other modes too (i.e. in a small circle of buddies, or solo).

Seriously, I don’t see it as a problem that both group-game-play and solo-game-play is included in modern MMOs—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. MMOs are not in such bad shape these days, social-wise. As Paul Barnett of Bioware Mythic put it lately at Videogamer.com, pretty much all games will be social soon:

“There’s online games, and very soon there will just be games. They will all be online anyway. I don’t think there’s an MMO any more. I think there’s online games and there’s online revenue, and they’re sort of going to combine.“

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