Everything is the same.

Play MMORPGs and you'll hear words like "missions", "experience points", "NPCs", "PvP" or "skills". MMORPGs are designed to waste time, to keep you online for 24 hours a day and to take 15 bucks out of your pocket every month. In MMORPGs you'll meet a lot of other players and soon you'll grow tired of them. You'll grow tired of other people. Either they can't spell right, or they are just too lazy to write anything. I've probably seen 100 different versions of "definitely". I've also met people who just come to you and start trade requests without saying ANYTHING. If you decline, they run away, if you accept, the trading window pops up and you're waiting for about 10 minutes for the guy to do anything, until you finally give up and move along.

Another word you'll hear when playing MMORPGs is "grinding". Basically - in case you, dear reader, have never heard of that before - grinding means to sit at one spot and click the same routines for hours and hours. I bet you played Diablo: Run, engage, kill, get experience points, run, engage, kill, get experience points. In MMORPGs you craft the same item for like 5 hours to get another level, or you waste your time by killing the same type of monster over and over. Repetitive, boring, useless - that's what those things are. Why do I pay every month so I can sit around and waste my time while I could do the same by throwing a pencil against a wall over and over for free? You can even note down how often you've thrown the pencil against a wall and every 100 times you get a new, better pencil.

For most people, the reason to go through grinding is because of the community of MMORPGs. Social playing. Chatting. You can't log off now because an ingame friend just came back online. No, you can't leave the house now because you're in a hunting group and you don't want to piss people off. It would've been okay if those were NonPlayerCharacters, but you can't be rude to real persons, right? Because they'll kick you from their friends lists, and that's not good for your ego. Oh, and after 2 months of playing, you can't quit the account because you promised your whole friends list to stay.

I don't want to pay 15 bucks a month to make new online friends who I'll grow dependent on because of human social instincts or whatever. Now you're stuck in a game you dislike just because you don't want some guy with no life in the USA (alias John1845) to get angry on you.

I also don't want to pay 15 bucks a month to be reminded on how stupid everyone and everything is. I don't want to see people who created characters named "I'm With Stupid", or "Imwatchingyou". I don't want to see people writing "humping macros" just so they can stand in front of NPCs and use an emote bug so it looks like they're humping them. I know that everything and everyone's stupid, I don't want to pay 15 bucks every month to get a reminder punched into my face.

There's also a rumor that you can't play with people who are 15 years old or younger. Well, you can't play with people who are 15 years old or older either. Try to play with a 29 year old who's always telling you that he's a businessman in real life, and that he knows how to make money, everywhere and anytime, but then he wants to place player vendors 7000 meters away from starports in Starwars Galaxies. Also, why does he not help me recruit people for our guild? Instead he says "what am I paying you for". If he acts like that in real life, I wonder how his business is doing, if he never actually helps his business grow, but instead just hires people to do it, while he can sit around and have fun. I don't want to cope with other people's attitudes or opinions, I don't want to be a slave to someone just because he's made a lot of money in LineageII and got it transfered to SWG. And why are people never reading the fucking manual? Instead, they're just telling people to look it up for them. And when they make a mistake even though you've told them what's in the manual - it's your fault! What the fuck?

So, 15 dollars a month for all this? No. Is there an MMORPG out there without these problems? No. Everything takes time. You'll always encounter people. And people are all the same. Even me. I'm stubborn, I can't play in teams because of that. I'm heatheaded, I get into fights really quick. I'm probably one of the worst players you can encounter in MMORPGs. And still, I like to help people out! But, sometimes I wonder - what for? I once healed someone by standing next to him for like 10 minutes, then all I got was a "ty" and he was gone. How about a "thank you very much! sorry that it took so long ):", and a /bow, /tiphat, /handshake or whatever. People are so goddamn lazy that they drown in their abbreviations and leetspeak. Or they just can't type fast enough, so they use this. In that case, I guess I understand. Still, it makes playing a pain in the brain. If you have one.

And people are not only lazy, they're impatient. Oh, so impatient. "Is it far?" "Is it done already?" "How long until we're there?" "Dude, this is FAR!" "ETA?" "When is it finished?" "Where are you?" We're playing a goddamn STARWARS game, ongoing jedis should know something about patience.

Away from MMORPGs. Away from multiplayer games. Away from games that periodically get patched by frustrated developers, in an attempt to fix bugs, but unfortunately adding more of the same.

Back to the offline world, back to single player games, where games have a beginning and an end. The question is: Do you still want to play single player games? When playing single player games, don't you feel like you're missing something? The friendslist, the items given to you by friends, the chat, the immersive huge world...

Something's wrong with Single Player games once you've played MMORPGs. Probably also because there are so many single player games, and probably because every single player game is kinda a copy of another one, just with a different name and better graphics. The recent SP game I played was Shadow Hearts II Covenant, I have to say, it's really nice. But the sidequests are so MMORPG orientated with all its grinding, walking through dungeons - what's the deal with all that? And what's the deal with quests you won't even FIND without looking up walkthroughs on the internet? Something's wrong with games. I can't even hear that word anymore. Games. Ack. When I read developer blogs I could just throw up a bitter green mass. "Finally got cool particle effects", "We'll deliver the best looking water effects currently available", "Skills, Missions, blahblahblah", "This will revolutionize genre XY". When they talk about making games, it doesn't feel like a game, but rather a big business plan of how to squeeze money out of the citizens pocket. What is a game? I don't know anymore. Why do people still play games? To waste time until something better comes along? Haven't you seen everything already? What CAN you do besides playing game? Create something? What do you want to create that hasn't been here before? Another tetris clone? Another MMORPG idea, which will revolutionize the way games are played? Why have I tested WoW for three days and uninstalled it right away, only to see other people do the same FINALLY after 2 months of playing and tell me how boring it was? Why are people playing WoW and giving it such high ratings? Do people even know what good games are? What was the last game you really enjoyed? A game that absolutely had NO flaws at all? Oh, such a game doesn't exist? Well, there you go. Nothing is perfect. Then I hereby suggest that all commentaries to all games that read "BEST GAME EVER!!!!" are lies and only human attempts to belong to the majority in order to "be on the stronger side when it comes down to discussions", or, in case of "individualists", to join a minority to appear as "different" or even "geek" (some take this as a compliment).

Now that we've finally declared games as useless waste of time, what is there left to do? Writing useless and unnecessary lengthy news posts for 10 people to read? Or should we just say, because we're wasting time anyway, why not pay 15 bucks to waste it with thousands of other players together?

We could also argue now, that nothing is NOT a waste of time, but that goes a little bit too far, right? Eating is not a waste of time for example. I love eating. In fact, that's the only thing I really look forward to every day. What am I gonna eat today? Go buy it in the supermarket, ignore all the stupid people who think they're better than others because they carry a ton of make-up, and prepare the food at home, sit back and eat it while reading about upcoming games and shaking your head at the "new innovations" and "revolutions".

We don't need revolutions. We need games.