To the Only Children who are gamers...

I grew up an only child in a single parent household, and moved to a different country when I was 9 with my dad so I had a bit of a lonely childhood that was spent on unmonitored Internet access (I'm 31 right now for context, so this was mid 2000s), and gaming. I was always the "weird kid", and didn't really form many meaningful friendships until high school. Since I had no one to play with, I always gravitated towards single player, story oriented games (mostly RPGs, action adventure games, some platformers, etc), that I essentially treated as interactive novels.

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As I've grown up, I have noticed other people tend to be more into social games like multiplayer shooters, party games, fighting games, or multiplayer focused sim games that I dabble with but fail to get into as much as the aforementioned single player story games. My fiancee has an older brother, both are gamers, and the games she has a lot of nostalgia for are couch multiplayer FPS games, party games, a few fighting games because she played them a lot with her brother growing up while for myself most games that were best enjoyed with other people are games I steered away from for obvious reasons.

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To this day, my friend group will want to play online multiplayer focused games that they really seriously get into, while I will play mostly to humor them but when by myself I will gravitate back to my comfort zone, genre wise. I do like some fighting games, but mostly the really stylized ones like Dragonball FighterZ, Guilty Gear, Skullgirls, but mostly for the art/animation and am not very good at them as I'm accustomed to playing against CPUs which only takes you so far. Is this an only child thing and does anyone else have a similar experience? Do you notice your friends who grew up with siblings/relatives their age have gaming habits different from yours? Or is this just a me thing?

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For added context my favorite games of all time in no particular order are Fallout New Vegas, Pikmin 2, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Cyberpunk 2077, No Man's Sky (which I rarely play with others), The Last of Us, Luigi's Mansion (GCN), Zelda Breath of the Wild, Red Dead Redemption 2, Baldurs Gate 3, Paper Mario Thousand Year Door, and some others that I'm probably forgetting at the moment but should give you an idea of genres I enjoy most.

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u/HotDecember3672 — 2 months ago