I said something at a game night maybe three years ago that I still think about, someone had brought up playing a game’s solo mode over the weekend and I said, more dismissively than the moment called for, that solo modes were basically a consolation prize, a thing you did if you genuinely had nobody to play with, and that the actual game, the real experience, needed other people at the table reacting to what you do. Dee pushed back on that a little at the time and I mostly waved it off.

Then this past winter our group’s schedule genuinely fell apart for about two months, one person had a new baby, another had a work crunch that ate every evening, and I found myself with a shelf of games and nobody to play them with on a Thursday that had been protected time for years. I picked up a solo mode almost out of boredom more than curiosity, and it turned out to be a completely different kind of good than I’d assumed, the automated opponent forced a kind of careful, deliberate play that I don’t think I actually do when there are people at the table to bounce off of and banter with.

What got me specifically was how much more I noticed about a game’s actual internal logic playing it solo, no side conversation to half-listen to, no one else’s turn eating up my attention while I plan mine, just me and the system doing exactly what it’s built to do. I went back and reread a review of mine where I’d basically dinged a game for a weak automa, and I stand by that specific critique, a bad automa is still bad, but I don’t think I’d have understood why a good one matters this much before actually depending on one for two straight months.

The group’s back to a normal schedule now, mostly, and Thursday nights are Thursday nights again. But I kept two solo modes in regular rotation for the nights that don’t work out, and I don’t roll my eyes anymore when someone mentions playing something alone. I was wrong about what that experience actually offers, and it took losing the thing I thought was irreplaceable to find out.

I’ve thought a lot since about why I held the dismissive view so confidently for as long as I did, and I think it’s that I was measuring solo modes against the wrong thing, judging them as a weaker substitute for the social experience instead of as their own separate thing with different goods on offer. That’s the same mistake I try to warn people away from when they compare an ebook unfavorably to a physical book on the grounds that it doesn’t smell like anything, they’re both books, they’re just not doing the same job, and comparing one against the other’s specific strength was never going to be fair to either.

Dee, when I finally admitted the whole thing to her, mostly just said “told you” and let it sit there for a second longer than strictly necessary, which felt earned. She’d tried to make this exact case to me years earlier and I hadn’t really heard it, not because the argument was bad but because I didn’t have the personal stake in it yet to actually sit with it. Some opinions, I think, don’t change from being argued with well, they change from running headlong into the specific situation that makes the old opinion stop being convenient to hold.