this might be more of a battle of east vs west.

now that north america has dedicated, popular development studios, their kind of games and gameplay end up dominating north american marketplaces. which also reduces imports, just cause the demand is being filled with something else.

it was either wolf kanno or someone else that posted a link to a blog that explained this in the same way, but i don't remember how long ago it was.

i guess evolution of a genre is unavoidable, especially if you want to keep old buyers coming back. however, new buyers (and they always appear) won't really care if something is a re-hash, as long as their experience is novel. cod, gta, etc.

i think there's a still a market for single player video gaming. i don't do multiplayer very often for example. if it's ingrained in the game play, ie quake or team fortress or demons souls or something, then sure. but if you have to do stuff to set up the multiplayer i get turned off, dunno why.

flower gets a lot of praise and it's definitely only a single player game.

but you're right i suppose. interactivity is conjoined with 'interacting with others' now. which is not a bad thing! one of the main selling points of the wii was the whole 'play as a family/party' thing, as are the music guitar games.

to be fair, pong was for two players too, so multiplayer isn't just now taking over. perhaps it evolved. it's hard to evolve the idea of a single player experience to anything other than a multi player experience... i guess, where do you go from 1 player? only up, right?