My Backlog and Me, Part 3: Wrapping Up

The following is the final part of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

As I conclude this series, I would first like to bring up a few things that I could never quite fit into my previous articles, but still somehow relate to the subject at hand.

For starters, I must mention that stories in games do not interest me. The quality of games’ stories does not factor into this; I’ll leave the debate over whether or not they can stand up to stories in other media up to someone else. I play games for their gameplay mechanics, their challenge, and their entertainment value. So protagonist X’s struggle against problem Y will never compel me to finish a game, no matter how exceptional the narrative is. If anything, I prefer to make up my own stories as I play games. For all of the story beats in the various quests in Skyrim, the most fun I have when playing that game is when I’m either exploring the overworld or sneaking around in dungeons. This is probably why I am fond of sandbox, open-world games, but no so much RPGs, which in my experience do not always have the best gameplay mechanics. Now, games in this genre usually make up for this weakness by incorporating deep stories, and while I understand how these stories can appeal to other gamers, they just don’t appeal to me.  This does not mean that I can’t appreciate a game’s writing, however; I especially appreciate when a game involves good humor, such as Portal 2 or Saint’s Row the Third.

Secondly, I’d like to expand on something that I briefly mentioned in my first article: my gaming “mood”.  It’s pretty simple, really: sometimes I want to play a particular type of game, and other times I want to play something else. If I have a busy schedule, for example, I’ll probably play something that is easy to pick up and play in short bursts, such as Super Meat Boy or Audiosurf, while if I have an entire day ahead of me with nothing to do, I may play something a bit longer- this is when I usually try to get one step closer to actually finishing one of my unfinished games. Other times, however, I just don’t feel like playing any video games at all, instead choosing to fall back to the internet to fix my boredom. And most of the time I end up just playing Team Fortress 2. I cannot state enough how much I like TF2: not only do I not tire of the game’s core mechanics, but now there are a few particular servers which I regularly play on, so I have a greater sense of community when playing that game as opposed to any other game, multiplayer or otherwise.

Well, now that those are out of the way, I’d like to take a look at the main consequence of my extensive backlog: I probably won’t buy that many video games this year. Not because I’ve decided to finish all my old games first- I don’t particularly care if I finish a video game or not- but because nothing that’s coming out in the near future has really grabbed my attention. (Now, I know that I’m saying this a month before the year’s biggest video game convention, E3, but I doubt that E3 will change much for me, especially since most of the “new” announcements will probably be games to be released in 2013 or beyond.) When I look back on what makes me finish a game, the factor of a game’s novelty stands out. I realize that while I look forward to new franchises, with their own unique ideas that separate them from the crowd, the industry as a whole is going in the opposite direction, with the big hits being sequels to well-established franchises (Assassin’s Creed III, Halo 4, etc.) and many gamers wanting sequels to these franchises and others. Now, I’m not condemning the game industry here, far from it- I am just one person, and I do not expect everyone to cater to my very specific tastes, nor do I care that many people have different tastes in gaming than me. And yes, I know that the desire for sequels within the industry is hardly a new thing, and that it’s been going on for at least a generation of consoles or two, if not more. 

But this year is special for me in that I think I can safely say that having a bunch of unfinished games in my library, due to losing interest in them, has finally burned me out in buying new ones. Because while I did enjoy my time with those games until I lost interest, I want to stop that backlog from growing. It will be a while before I buy a game again without being sure that I will finish it. And since that is not something you can discern from a few trailers and/or a demo, it’ll be a tough sell to convince me that I will actually finish it. Ergo, the amount of game purchases I make in a year will probably decrease considerably from last year to this year. However, I may buy more small, “indie” games this year, due to their usually short lengths, and the fact that they have more room to take risks in game design and mechanics, often resulting in novel and varied ideas. Of course, there are always the games that can’t be “finished”, such as purely multiplayer games or games such as Audiosurf (where the amount of content is determined by one’s own music library; each song is its own “level”). Mostly, it will be the big-budget, “triple-A” games that I will buy less of, due to the fact that most of them will be stuff that I’ve played before in some fashion, and that they tend to be the longest games in terms of the time it takes to complete them.

But lest one thinks that I am getting burned out on video games in general, let me assure you that this is not the case- while I may not be spending as much money on them this year, I will probably spend around the same amount of time on them. I still have plenty of games that I am still interested in playing, and who knows- maybe I’ll get back to some of the games that I didn’t complete long ago.

My Backlog and Me, Part 2: The Other Side of the Coin

The following is the second part of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

Last week, I confessed to not finishing most of the video games that I play. But what about the ones that I do? What is it about these games that compel me to finish them? Well, just like how there are several factors of a game that can make me lose interest, there are also many ways by which a game can hold my attention. More specifically, there are certain qualities that these games hold, the most important of which being novelty, variety, and brevity.

Of course, just like the list in my previous article, I’m sure there’s a game that I’ve finished that doesn’t really “succeed” in terms of any of these aforementioned qualities. While I can’t think of any off the top of my head right now, one could probably start listing off a bunch of games which would remind me of a counterexample. So while the following factors generally determine if I will finish a game or not, they are by no means a concrete set of rules.

Novelty

 Like many other gamers, I enjoy new experiences in video games. So when a games sets itself out from a myriad of others by presenting itself as something unique (at least in a relative sense), I take notice. See Dungeons of Dredmor for example (which I have discussed previously): its charm and sense of humor is something I rarely see in a video game. Similarly, The World Ends with You, an RPG for the DS, won me over due to various factors that help set the game apart from other DS RPGs. Not only is it set in the modern-day Shibuya district of Tokyo — a far cry from the usual fantasy setting shared by most of its counterparts — but the game also features a unique and entertaining battle system that takes advantage of both the touch screen of the DS and the system’s two screens. Suffice to say, I beat the main story and then some of The World Ends with You, and all of a sudden I have an interest to play it all over again.

This is not to say that a game has to be completely new or ground-breaking, but just new to me. Going back to Dredmor, I realize that it is not the first game of its type (a “roguelike”), but it is the first of its type that Ihave played. In addition, consider Resident Evil 4 and Assassin’s Creed II: these games, while not the first entries of their respective franchises, were my first forays into said franchises. Thus any and all of those series’ signature tropes and mechanics, whether introduced by those specific games or by their predecessors, were fresh in my mind when I played them. However, I’ve found that novelty alone usually only holds my interest enough to finish one game per respective franchise- while I completed RE4and ACII, I never got around to finishing Resident Evil 5, and I’ve been quite lackadaisical in my progress to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood through to its end. Brotherhood is perhaps the more representative example here- unlike the Resident Evil franchise, where I feel that RE5 lacks a certain element of terror that its predecessor had (for various reasons), I don’t think that Brotherhood is any worse than ACII; the problem is that the additions included with Brotherhood did not differentiate the game enough to extend my interest in the series as a whole.

Variety

 It feels like I am stating the obvious here, but how much a game mixes things up is something that very much impacts whether or not I finish it. Take Super Mario Galaxy (and its sequel), for example: the different levels (“worlds”) in that game vary quite a bit, and although some levels can be similar to others (there are a few worlds which heavily feature underwater exploration, for example), the objectives themselves are also varied enough that I rarely felt like I was doing the exact same thing more than once. (Full disclosure: I have not beaten Super Galaxy 2, but that is mostly due to not having my Wii with me at college. It’ll probably be something I’ll try and complete this summer. Hopefully.) Even small variation in games can sometimes be enough: while the base gameplay of the Genesis-era Sonic games remains relatively unchanged throughout the individual games, each zone has its own distinct theming, enemies and quirks to keep things interesting.

Brevity

To put it bluntly, it is a lot easier for me to reach a game’s finale if that game is rather short. Now, I’m not saying that games that go on for 20+ hours are a bad thing; they have their own niche in the market. But such games better have a good mix of novelty and variety in order to keep me playing through them. Pacing also plays a large part in holding my interest — if the game slows down to a crawl for some reason, such as due to some long and vast fetch quest, my interest wanes quickly. Another way for a game to hold my interest is to have short levels, much like Super Meat Boy or Sonic Generations; a stage in the latter game will take just a few minutes to complete, while a stage in the former will take just a couple of seconds, if that. These stages, while short, offer great replay value by challenging the player to complete them more quickly, for higher scores. The brevity of such stages also lets me play them in short bursts while still allowing me to feel like I have accomplished a lot.

So, you now know what makes me finish some games and not finish others. But what results from these decisions? How have these factors shaped my outlook on gaming in general? Next week, I will answer these questions and more, as I discuss some of the consequences that I have come across by not finishing most of my games.

What do you think? If you have any questions or opinions you’d like to interject, feel free to post a comment below!

My Backlog and Me, Part 1: The Confession

The following is the beginning of a three-part series reflecting on some of my ([WittySciFiPun]’s) gaming tastes and habits. 

I have a confession to make: I rarely finish video games.

Now, when I say “finish”, I don’t mean in the “get everything 100% done” sense. No, my deep, dark geek secret is that eight or nine times out of ten, I will simply not see a video game to its end, either by playing through it at an incredibly sluggish rate or just outright walking away from it altogether. But before any fellow gamers start to take out their torches and pitchforks, allow me to explain myself.

 Maybe the biggest factor that prevents me from finishing a game lies not within the game itself, but is rather the compounding of everything that interrupts my playtime of that particular game. As I have mentioned in my introductory post on this blog, I am a college student. This means that my time is often taken up by classes, homework, various clubs, and various other activities that occur during campus life. But even with this busy schedule, I still manage to have quite of bit of time to myself. However, these are not the only things I consider as “interruptions”.   For example, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the terrible effect that the internet has on my productivity. There have been several occasions where I tell myself “OK, just gonna check out a few sites, and then play [a video game],” only to then lose an hour or two just by surfing the web. Additionally, I will often stop playing a particular game due to other games. For instance, I have a habit of buying and playing new games even if I have yet to finish others, simply due to their novelty. Also, there is always the allure of multiplayer games, such as my favorite game of all time, Team Fortress 2. Multiplayer games appeal to me due to the human element involved, which has the potential to make a game more varied than any particular game mechanic. Of course, the more time I spend playing games that I can’t“finish” (since they don’t really have “endings” the way single player/co-op campaigns do), the less time I have to complete games that I can. Finally, while it may seem obvious, I can’t forget the 400-pound elephant in the room that is sleep. I am not one to pull all-night marathons to plow through a game- I enjoy sleeping a great deal, and I don’t get enough of it already. (I am, however, willing to take part in all-night gaming sessions with friends, but that’s a whole different story, as half the fun of those is the social interactions between the participants.)

Now, the games themselves (that is, the games that I have yet to finish) are obviously not blameless in this scenario, because while the aforementioned interruptions can be used as an excuse for taking an extremely long time to finish these games, they cannot really be used as an excuse as to why I stop playing some of them for an extended period of time (such as weeks, months or longer), or why I quit others cold turkey. No, these interruptions work in tandem with the fact that the games simply don’t hold my interest for long enough. Now, this may seem like an obvious conclusion to make, but I myself did not realize how hard it was for a game to hold my attention through its finale until I looked at some of games that I still haven’t completed: Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, the Bioshock series, etc. Heck, even Half–Life 2 took over three years for me to actually finish- started that game in the March of 2008 and did not see its conclusion until April 2011. (On the other hand, I then managed to get through Episode 1 and 2 within the next three months.) I’m not saying that these games are bad, or even that I didn’t enjoy (at least to some extent) the time that I spent with them.  Still, there was something or other about each of those games (and other games that I did not complete) that has kept me from playing them. Things like:

• Unpleasant mid/late-game mechanics: I appreciate variety in my games, and a game’s initial mechanics can only take it so far. Fortunately, developers realize this, and thus mix things up via level design, set pieces, and new mechanics, among other things. However, sometimes these things end up hindering the game for me rather than enticing me to play it further. For example, escort missions- I find it annoying to keep track of an AI character that can at times have a mind of its own. For as fun as I find Saints Row the Third, there was this one mission in that game which I had stalled on for quite some time. In it, you are tasked with protecting a plot-related vehicle from enemy vehicles by shooting an RPG from inside a helicopter hovering above the action. While in this escort mission the AI of the vehicle I was escorting was fairly straightforward, its health would be affected by the rockets I shot- a problem when I had to use these rockets to blow up the nearby enemy vehicles. Half the time, I would fail the mission by blowing up the vehicle that I was supposed to protect myself. Fortunately, I managed to get past that one mission, and thus the chances of me completing Saints Row the Third have improved considerably. (On a related note, I also get annoyed by important game mechanics being withheld from a game until a fair amount of progress has been made- for example, I would like to give a stern talking to whoever decided that the ability to doge roll in Dead Rising 2should be kept away from the player until they had already played the game for a good couple of hours. Yeah, not like that could have been useful earlier on or anything.)

• Ridiculous difficulty spikes and/or inordinately frustrating sequences: Before I get any flak for this, let me just say that I do like challenge in my games- I loved Super Meat Boy, for example, and managed to complete most of its stages (just need to finish the Dark World end boss, which I will….eventually). I just need to know what I’m getting into first. I like my games to have reasonable increases in difficulty, starting out relatively easy once I’m just learning the ropes and then reaching a more challenging level once I’ve mastered its concepts. What frustrates me is when I come across a part of the game that is much more difficult than anything up to that point and even for some time after that point. For example, I originally stopped playing Darksiders due to one miniboss early on in the game which took a lot of damage to kill and could kill me in just a few hits. This in itself wouldn’t have been too bad, except for the fact that each time I died I would be set back a ways away from my foe. So before I could try the battle again, I would have to traverse a barren landscape (there really wasn’t anything for me to do from this point except get to the miniboss) for a few minutes before waiting another minute or so for the miniboss itself to reach me. While this happening once or twice wouldn’t get on my nerves, those few minutes added up as I kept on dying and thus I stopped playing Darksiders for a couple of months. Eventually I came back to it, though, and beat that miniboss. And then I didn’t face anything that difficult until a good hour or so afterwards. I understand the concept of bosses being harder than other parts of the game and all that, but I still think that that one miniboss in particular was poorly timed. I’d like to note that this particular factor by itself does not turn me off from playing a particular game ever again, but just encourages me to take a break from it for a little while. If other factors are at play, however, this sometimes acts as the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

• Technical issues:  This doesn’t crop up too much, but I still want to mention it. I play most of my games on the PC, and while most of the time the games I play are pretty stable, crashes and other bugs do occur from time to time. While this doesn’t keep me from playing a game if I am interested in it enough otherwise (all the crazy bugs in Skyrim don’t stop me from coming back to that game, for example), for games that I have become disinterested in this can act like a death blow. A good example of this: a month or two back, I tried to get back into Resident Evil 5, after having not played it for a while; unfortunately, the game kept crashing on startup, thwarting my efforts. After trying a few fixes, all to no avail, I eventually gave up and moved on to different games.

The above list doesn’t account for all the games that I haven’t finished; a lot of the time, I don’t get around to finishing a game simply because it isn’t as good (or rather, attention-grabbing) as another game that I’m playing within the same timeframe. I can’t really further extrapolate on this point, as this greatly depends on my personal taste in games, as well as my current gaming “mood” at the time (something I will talk more about later).

Well, now that I have written so many words about not finishing stuff, how do I finish this article? Why, with a cliffhanger, of course. Stay tuned for next week, when I will talk about the games that I do finish, and how they succeed in holding my interest when so many others have failed to do so.