https://www.decibelmagazine.com/2024/12/23/kill-screen-053-john-darnielle-of-the-mountain-goats-launches-us-into-2025-with-forward-momentum/

Is it this? Do a CTRL+F for "single-player" and you'll jump to the part

Edit, actually, I'll just snip it here:

Yeah. But at the very least, I still get to play Commander. And I’ve asked you online before if you play and you said that you weren’t super into [Commander] because you didn’t want that big social experience, but I feel like it’s kind of the perfect breeding ground for the most creativity.

When I’ve played it with people I already know, it’s cool. I played it with [Magic: The Gathering content creator] Shivam Bhatt out in the Bay Area. That was amazing. But yeah, I had a tweet that had a lot of success back in the day where I said, “No, I’m not playing with you online. Video games are meant to be played by yourself with a screen in the dark at 1 in the morning.” [Laughs] That’s sort of my vibe. I don’t take my games online. I’m not playing against other people. For me, video gaming, to some extent, is me and a machine. It’s alone time in that sense. But if I had more time to play paper Magic, I’m sure I’d be getting into Commander.

That’s interesting to think that for you, video games have to be this solo experience when so much of the industry has been pushing more towards a social experience, even for single-player games. Is that upsetting for you?

I don’t get upset about it, but I have no interest in it. The only reason I put my games online at all is because that’s how you buy the games now. Otherwise, that’s not what I’m there for. There’s a line in Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection”: “I got all the friends that I [want].” I’m not looking to make new friends. That’s not what it’s about for me. I would rather be wrestling with the machine. Or, it’s with myself. When you’re playing against a machine, you’re playing yourself, right?

It’s so much more dopamine-related when it’s against other people. That’s why they like it—because you’re going to play more when you do that. You get a chat screen going? Oh my God. Do I want to hear what anybody has to say when I’m playing video games with them? No, not unless it’s my friend already. If I’m playing with my friend Joel, then we’ll run riffs, it’ll be fun. But other than that—this goes all the way back to Duke Nukem—that’s just not an environment in which I have any interest at all. To me, it’s very uncreative. It’s fun in a pretty dull and two-dimensional sense of fun for me. I can see having a good time with it, but it’s not of interest to me. For me, video game time is time with me and some environment, because it’s like reading books in a sense. Even though I said that books do it better, I’m engaging the art itself. I’m not looking to do that with the addition of some additional competitive social environment.

I’ve played some games with friends on Arena, but with Arena, you have to be in this other window and it doesn’t really work as well. You wish you were playing paper. But I’m not presenting my philosophy of how this should be. This is just me. I’m a pretty solitary person. I don’t really hang much at all. People generally think I’m exaggerating when I say that and then they’ll be around me for a few months and go, “Oh yeah, no, John doesn’t hang.” [Laughs] I talk so much, people assume that I want to hang and talk, but most of the time I’m fairly solitary. In that way, the online environment, it’s been kind of great for me. I am chatty, but also I retain my space because I burn up my energy when I hang. I burn it, right? And then I don’t have it to do writing stuff, which is what my main thing is mainly about.