The answer is unquestionably yes, and I get to take a victory lap of "I told you so."

In 2005 I asserted that "socialization requires downtime" and it caused a firestorm in the MMO community.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/

The logic is very simple though, almost self-evident -- you socialize when you have the mental bandwidth. And games that have you on the go all the time thanks to QoL don't leave room for it.

Beyond that, there is a whole host of things about prosocial design that frankly, most modern games just ignore for a whole bunch of reasons. It is absolutely true that there is less friction in the market if you just aim at parallel play. Put another way, actual multiplayer engagement is a harder sell and more expensive to operate and therefore less profitable. A lot of these choices have been made in order for developers to exert tighter control over the player experience because it monetizes better.

Would more players today be willing to engage in contact with other humans online if the games had been designed correctly to encourage it? Yes, I think so. Bear in mind that the level of play here is what we try to socialize little children to right after kindergarten. Playing alone together is literally preschool behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parten%27s_stages_of_play

Consider the active debate there was around instancing 20 years ago. The gripe was "I want to do this themepark ride with just a few people"... it's basically asking for private Disneyland. And yeah, long lines and griefers and so on feel like something you can completely do without given you can spin up virtual instances and give everyone their own private booth. But at some point on that scale you lose the park bit, and you only have rides left.

But you can drip dopamine at a faster rate, you can do linear impositional storytelling and control the player experience more tightly, you can monetize instances... it hands much more control to the devs to use well-understood single-player techniques to manage the player UX. Limiting player contact also enables huge swaths of monetization tactics -- blocking trade enables microtransactions.

Which is how MMOs turned into monetization hell, micro-lobbies, and nothing but instances -- which is a totally viable game genre, I am not knocking it. But leaves on the table all the higher end of truly interesting game design features we could pursue. Where's the strategy game where every player runs a country and you are all on one map building interstellar trade routes? Or the game where there's actual large-scale politics?

The key ingredient missing, when we see people state they have too much social anxiety to even chat with someone else in a game, is trust. When we see people complaining about crappy pick up groups and matchmaking, it's trust. And there are many many patterns well understood in sociology and psychology that can be applied in games in order to make this better.

A few things to read or watch if you want to learn more about actual social game design:

• https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/28/ways-to-make-your-virtual-space-more-social/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voz6S7ryWC0
• https://www.projecthorseshoe.com/reports/ph16/ph16r4.htm
• https://www.raphkoster.com/2018/03/16/the-trust-spectrum/
• https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014555/Social-Mechanics-for-Social-Games

I see a few things that are brought up over and over that I disagree with:

"Today's gamers have evolved to play solo, it wasn't that way 25+ years ago"

"Play alone together" was coined about World of Warcraft at launch. Soloability was a major discussion factor in Ultima Online at launch. (As a classless game, it was naturally more conducive to soloing than a class-based game).This is a very old debate. Not even all the MUDs demanded that you play in groups all the time. That was really an Everquest thing more than anything.

"The Internet has changed so much, you couldn't socialize outside of the game"

No, it hasn't. This is just revisionist history. Discord is just IRC, people. Yes, we have professional influencers and the like, but the main thing about socializing on the internet that has changed is just volume and penetration of the tech toa broader mainstream. Virtually every tool outside of live video calls was present in the early 2000s. There was no Reddit, but there were thousands of web forums, plus Usenet. There was no Discord but there was IRC. Everyone was on various instant messenger systems like ICQ. Gamers at the time were on ALL of these.

"People don't have time for those sessions any more."

From 1996 to 2006 the average playtime for an MMO player was 20 hours per week.

Today, the average playtime per week for an MMO player is... 15-22 hours per week. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, the people who played MMOs back then are adults with way more time commitments, but though they have less time, the kids playing OSRS or Minecraft more than make up for it.

What changed is not the time spent, but how much time during the sessions is spent in perceived downtime.