A fearsome warrior engages in battle in the classic, medieval-quest RPG world of Fable II.

Screenshot Courtesy Microsoft Game Studios"Why do you want to play alone?"

A friend of mine recently asked me this, during an argument about Fable II. I'd recently begun playing the game — a classic, medieval-quest RPG world — and had devoted hours to leveling my character into a fearsome, beloved warrior. I'd amassed Ninja Gaiden-esque skillz, learned flesh-singeing lightning spells and won sacks full of bling. I'd explored the far ranges of the amazingly detailed land, and the townsmen were bowing and scraping for my favor. I had four different girlfriends.

But to my friend, this made no sense. He's a hard-core online gamer — a member of a long-running World of Warcraft guild — so single-player RPG worlds seem completely baffling to him. Not to mention antisocial.

In Fable II, you're the only "live" human around. Sure, it's crammed full of "non-player characters" — but they're all 'bots, spouting fairly crude dialogue lines, with none of the unpredictability and spontaneity of a multiplayer game. You have no friends with whom to share your feats, to brag to about your awesomeness, to marvel at the beautiful sights. There are no epic, wargasmic, 50-person raids that will be spoken of over mead, four generations hence, in a tavern.

So it's a good question, really. Why do we want to immerse ourselves in a world that emulates all the tropes of a vibrant world like World of Warcraft — but where we are, essentially, alone?

I told my friend he was looking at it all wrong. The reason we single-player fans love world-games like Fable II is precisely because there are no other "real" people around.

Because really, who needs people? People suck. I'm joking, of course — but only a bit. The truth is that, in online multiplayer worlds, dealing with the delightfully unpredictable behavior of "real" people can be an absolute chore. Teammates fail to show up for a raid, or they leave everyone waiting for an hour, or they log out in the middle of battle and leave you gored by a howling mob. Have you ever actually tried to play Age of Conan? It's like the Stanford Prison Experiment in there, my friend.

Indeed, the dirty secret of online multiplayer worlds like World of Warcaft is that the vast majority of people play solo in them. As Nicholas Ducheneaut discovered, players who are piloting characters below level 40 spend a stunning 70 percent of their time questing alone. That means that the vast majority of World of Warcraft players treat their other fellow humans like non-player characters — 'bots they glimpse wandering through the forest, but never talk to.

But I'm being too negative here. There is an upbeat side, too. One benefit of being the only live person in a game is that the illusion of immersion is never broken. The designers of Fable II have complete control over what everyone in the game does and says, so they can make sure nobody drops any l33t-spe@k or references to Barack Obama. The world is all medieval, all the time.

More subtly yet, there's a sort of weird, existential delight in being the only truly sentient human inside a huge world. The fact that I know I'm the only person actually alive makes the game seem all the more dreamlike, as if everything — those mountain ranges, those creepy beetles — really is taking place inside my head. Sure, there's a co-op mode for Fable II, so you could play with another person if you wanted to. But I never bothered to try it out, because I preferred the solipsism of a world where I'm the center.

Indeed, sometimes I wish there were even fewer characters inside Fable II — and even more isolation. Some of my favorite moments were between battles, when I'd roam through a desolate stretch of forest at night, looking at the shadows and ancient ruins. Hell, I just enjoyed the peace and quiet! I don't get enough of that in my real life. That's why people loved Myst so much back in the day: The game was completely deserted — not a single other person alive — so you were literally alone for hours with nothing but your meditative thoughts.

Maybe this could eventually become an entire category of entertainment: You're dropped into a huge, lush, gorgeous, sprawling world, and all you do is just sort of ... wander around. We could even give it a name. Radical singleplayer: The game of solitude.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.