Whats the attraction?

For me, it's a way to keep my mind active - particularly now I'm older and retired. According to research conducted in 2017, video games "help seniors with cognitive training and reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's".

I like to play RPG (role playing) games - they provide puzzles to solve and in the case of assassins creed Odyssey (set in ancient Greece), Origins (set in Cleopatra's Egypt) and Valhalla (set in England at the time of the Vikings) they also gave me lots of historical information about what it was like to live in those times. Sometimes there is a choice between good and evil - like in BioShock, where you can choose to harvest genetic material from genetically modified little girls, or save them all. And sometimes it's just playing out a fantasy, like being able to do magic and defeat evil in Hogwarts Legacy.

I also enjoy Sims 4 which is a life simulation, and allows me to build and decorate homes, restaurants, museums, etc. It satisfies a creative urge.

D you lst me there, what are co-op games? I know what solo ones are, I think thats where you play alone and some are multiplayer games.

As I have PTSD theres no such thing as good adreniline, adreniline means danger, fighting for my life and freedom, I'm borderline adrenal burnout, so if I get in a situation where adreniline is involved theres massive amounts of it, way to much for the situation, my brain and body can no longer make the distiction between a spider in my bedroom and someone who means me physical harm. It also takes days to come back from an adreniline release.

I used to play D&D, proper old school pen and paper, this was before computer games became sophisticated enough to even begin to compare with what the mind could conjure. I don't do sport and am not competitive to be bothered about the outcome, i'm more of a you have it, if its that important to you person, I just can't be bothered, I find competitive people overbearing and boring and the PTSD starts to flicker as competitive people are unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

With Sims, do you have to have people live in your spaces? When I was little, my Dad built me a dolls house and I loved it, but everything had to stay the same and I remember having a massive freak out when somebody put some dolls in there. It was my house, not the house of these miniture invaders!

I wonder if part of the problem is that being an only child, I never really played with others much, and in common with many only children, my parents would buy me board games, so as I had something to play with my friends with when they came round. Only I rarely had people round and when I did, we didn't play board games, so I sort of learnt to play board games by myself. I still sometimes play scrabble by myself, I don't compete, just make good words from the 7 tiles your'e allowed in one go.

I know this is a difficult thing to answer, and I ask the question in the OP, because I genuinely want to understand, I guess I feel like it would be useful to have a mask that would enable me to engage, however briefly or imperfectly with these online worlds. But in order to create a mask I need facts, I need to know what the attractions are as well as what the things, games, metaverse etc actually are. 

Hi again Catwoman

As D has explained, co-op is where people get into teams and play against others. You can also play against other single players online. But I don't do this and I also wouldn't want to join a metaverse - I'm a bit like you in that I like to play things on my own. There are lots of games where you can just play as a single player though, and they are not all adrenaline fuelled fighting or racing.

In Sims 4, the first thing you have to do is create a household of between one and 8 Sims to move into a home in the game. You can decide their age, gender, appearance and choose 3 personality traits for them and an aspiration (a goal for them to achieve) But if you don't want to play with them, you can move them into a pre made home and then leave them there while you go off and build houses on other lots. There are also pre made Sims in many of the pre made homes, but you can evict them and then change their house or knock it down and rebuild it. You can also create parks, museums, pools, bars, libraries and gyms.

I quite like chess, but I'm not very good at it. I don't like playing it with other people, but I have a chess game on my Xbox where I can choose the skill level and then play against the AI. I also have the video game version of cluedo, which is a board game I enjoyed as a child.

I've also always loved scrabble, and I have a game on my kindle tablet called "classic words" which is the same as that, and I also enjoy trying to make up good words with it.

So, online worlds are not for me, but I spend time in fantasy worlds in single player games. To me, it's not a lot different to reading a novel, creative writing, puzzle solving, D&D or board games.

You're not their landlord, you're their God/Goddess. You can give them full autonomy and they will just happily go about their lives, or you can command them to do stuff. They won't care.

You're not their landlord, you're their God/Goddess. You can give them full autonomy and they will just happily go about their lives, or you can command them to do stuff. They won't care.