A single-player video game is a video game where input from only one player is expected throughout the course of 🧾 the gaming session. A single-player game is usually a game that can only be played by one person, while "single-player 🧾 mode" is usually a game mode designed to be played by a single player, though the game also contains multi-player 🧾 modes.[1]

Most modern console games and arcade games are designed so that they can be played by a single player; although 🧾 many of these games have modes that allow two or more players to play (not necessarily simultaneously), very few actually 🧾 require more than one player for the game to be played. The Unreal Tournament series is one example of such.[2]

History 🧾 [ edit ]

The earliest video games, such as Tennis for Two (1958), Spacewar! (1962), and Pong (1972), were symmetrical games 🧾 designed to be played by two players. Single-player games gained popularity only after this, with early titles such as Speed 🧾 Race (1974)[3] and Space Invaders (1978).

The reason for this, according to Raph Koster, is down to a combination of several 🧾 factors: increasingly sophisticated computers and interfaces that enabled asymmetric gameplay, cooperative gameplay and story delivery within a gaming framework, coupled 🧾 with the fact that the majority of early games players had introverted personality types (according to the Myers-Briggs personality type 🧾 indicator).[4]