I think this also extends to at least some women regardless of generation, because when you don't have time to spend getting as good as everybody else thanks to pesky responsibilities you aren't just making yourself look bad, you're making your entire gender look bad. Fuck that. I will play my solitary games pressure free.
See, I am almost the exact opposite. Multiplayer games I can turn off my thinking brain, just learn a mechanic or two and stomp on people while basking their lamentations and tears. Nothing is more fun that whiny, pimply, cry of a 15-16 year old in voice chat when the old fart out runned, out gunned, out played him. And when they say something like 'teach me oh great on so I can pwn n00bs like you' I do what I can to help. Single player games, however.... I play what are lovingly called "bullshit map reading simulators" most of which are made by Paradox. (EU4, Stellaris, now Factorio, Galactic Civ 3 etc.) If there is a mechanic to learn, a ruleset to exploit, or a way to max/min the game? My autisim cranks up to 20 out of 10 and I dig in almost to where it is unhealthy. I get stressed that I am missing some trick, some exploit and after about 200-300 hours the games stop being fun and I have to go back to multiplayer. This is one of the reasons I can never, EVER play a Blizzard game again. I still have 100's of megabytes of spreadsheets and formulae on gear and crafting for when I went full sperg when I did high end raiding. Everything from figuring out the best foods to eat, the best skills in the trees, best healing rotations all of it. WoW was so addictive to me that I walked away cold turkey and did not even play any video games for almost eight months lest I sink back into habits. The odd thing about the way I play games is that I play FPS for fun and stress relief, which is about the opposite what everyone else around me does.Fuck that. I will play my solitary games pressure free.
Proof that it isn't necessarily generational. I play games to get away from the shitcamels, not to be pwn3d by them. My roommate plays Battlefield all night on a private server and getting fragged every 30 seconds from different spawn points is exactly the opposite of what I choose to do for fun.
I've played Guild Wars 1/2 and Elder Scrolls Online but they are not the same. They don't put me in that Skinner Box like WoW did.