‘To Do: Finish Any Game’

An interesting post was made on Kotaku yesterday about an article over at the Escapist. Tom Endo takes a look at game culture and reasons for not finishing games. He talks about not being embarrassed to say he’s played a game but not finished it. This made me think. Am I embarrassed to have not finished the games I’ve got? I’m not so sure. It bothers me that I have such a long list of games that are unfinished, or even unstarted. And trust me, I do have a lot.

Here, I’ll list them!

PS3: Army of Two, Burnout Paradise, Guitar Hero III, Lego Indiana Jones, Metal Gear Solid 4, MotorStorm, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Resistance: Fall of Man, SingStar, Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, Rock Band.

Wii: Mario Kart Wii, Rayman Raving Rabids 1 and 2, Twilight Princess, Super Smash Bros Brawl.

PC: Call of Duty: World at War, F.E.A.R, Bioshock, TimeShift, Gears of War, Mass Effect, World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King.

Now there’s some good reasons and some bad reasons for not completing these games. Some are quite new and I’ve just not got around to it (COD: WaW). Some are fucking terrible games that I can’t bring myself to play (Army of Two). And some of those games don’t really have definable ends (Burnout Paradise). But I’ve not even worked through most of the content in those games.

But there are those games that I am genuinely interested in playing. Uncharted, Ninja Gaiden, Mass Effect… these have been around for ages and yet I’ve not even started these games yet. Why is that?

Tom touches on the idea of a cultural bias against video games preventing serious investment. Video games aren’t treated with the same respect that reading a book or watching a movie might be. While that might be true for some people, it’s not an issue for me. The other main point he brings up is time.

It’s this relatively low cost of entry that allows me to eventually rack up 80-plus hours of game time with a version of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and only six to eight hours with a game like BioShock. When people sit down to play a linear game, it requires a psychological investment. Players want a two-hour narrative experience, even if games today only demand 15-minute intervals of time. Nobody wants to watch one cut scene and play for 10 minutes before dinner. Still, properly enjoying this type of game requires commitment, and when that adds up to even 8 hours over the course of a week, that turns into a large singular commitment to one thing. Stay away from a game for too long and you forget the controls, your next objective and so on. After enough time, reinvestment in the linear experience becomes too big a hurdle to jump.

Looking through my list of games I see that most are single player campaign games. I think Tom might have a point. My job, and my life, revolves around web design and development. When I’m not at work doing that I’m at home working through the list of work I’ve foolishly committed myself to, or working on any one of the projects I want to get off the ground. Right now I should be finishing of a content management system I promised to finish over this weekend, but instead I’m writing this. But I see that as ok. This will only take 20 minutes or so to do. The COD5 box is sitting right in front of me and I keep glancing at it, wanting to pay it, but stopping myself because I know I have work to do. If I sit down to play Call of Duty now I won’t stop. You can’t just jump into a game like that for 30 minutes and stop. You want to commit serious time to working through as much of the game as possible. And I can’t afford to do that right now.

One day I will have run out of games to play. That will be a sad sad day.

John Robinson - designer, developer, coder... John’s not quite sure exactly how he should be labelled. Why not check out his blog and make a decision for yourself. He mostly talks about CSS, jQuery and the crazy world of the Interwebs, with a little bit of personal life thrown in for good measure.