Why do people not finish games anymore?
Lately I found myself not
really wanting to play any games as much as I used to when I was
younger. For a while it really bugged me as I could not find an
answer to the question: Why do I keep starting a game and never get
to finish it? Is it because they are not interesting enough? Are
there too many games in my library? Maybe I'm getting too old for
games? In search of the answer I used both my brain and the internet
and I came up with some reasons as to why not only me but the gamers
in general don’t finish games any more.
One of the main
reasons as to why most gamers do not finish games is most probably
because people find less time to enjoy themselves nowadays due to
their grown busy lifestyle they had to adopt as they stepped in the
reality of life. From my own experience I have noticed that as I have
aged I adapted more responsibilities not only in school, and at the
moment in university but also in my free time. Time and time again I
found to have less and less time to relax and just simply enjoy the
game, and I do believe that nowadays there are more people facing the
same problem. Also as we became older games
stopped being a once in a year Christmas present but become more
accessible due to us paying for ourselves and it is no longer
something special but something regular.
Another possible problem
is that more and more games require a lot of hours to be fully
completed e.g. Skyrim or Monster Hunter series which to complete, it
takes 200-300 hours each. While they are very good games we have to
bear in mind that to sacrifice that kind of time on a game, we need
to have this time in the first place which many people don’t have,
when they work the whole day, five days a week. If on average an
adult gamer has 5-6 hours to spare weekly, he either will not want to
commit himself to the game that he knows is that long or he will try
and complete it, but when he realizes that it will take him a long
time to progress, he simply gives up on it and looks for a different
experience, which, with the amount of different companies trying to
get gamers attention is not a hard process which brings me to my next
point.
When looking at how
video gaming industry has changed, it is obvious that indie gaming is
becoming larger by the day and that inevitably means that gamers are
being constantly showered with new releases.
In many cases gamers end up with libraries flooded with games which
they will never play or they won’t even know they had in the first
place. From my own experience I know that having a lot of games at
your disposal provides, in theory more entertainment because of
variety, but in practice unfortunately means that I often can't focus
on one game and finish it before starting a next one. Apparently I am
not the only one suffering from this problem as CNN report from 2011
states that 90% of gamers do not finish their games.
Also another matter that
can easily discourage us from completing the game fully, can be
artificially lengthening game play that can be spotted in open world
games (pointless bonus collectibles to collect) which can lead to
repetition because of the nature of your usual side quest (Do this,
Kill this, Go from A to B ZZZzzz...) .Because of those cheap tricks
to feel like we are getting more value for our money we tend to get
carried away (if you are a completionist like me) easily and most of
the time we frequently end up not finishing the story as we simply
get bored of games like Fallout 3, New Vegas or Assassin Creed games
where we can just feel overwhelmed with the content. Grinding is
also frequently used as game play stretcher and can mostly found in
RPG games like Final Fantasy which, after a long period of time
changes our experience of the game from pleasant and exciting to
tedious and eventually frustrating.
The
majority of games, now and before have bugs where it will be a game
breaking glitches or sometimes the ones that makes us laugh for
example when
I first played Final Fantasy X on PS2 back in the day, a terrible
glitch in the game caused my save file to be corrupted which as you
can imagine rendered all of my 24 hours of gameplay useless and in
effect I never really wanted to do it again and finish it. Also while
that experience has ruined one game for me for a long time, there are
more known and frequent glitches out there, arguably the most famous
one being the cannon room glitch. This one can be found in The Legend
of Zelda: Twilight Princess this glitch happens when you enter the
cannon room and you save you progress then you turn off the game
completely and you try to turn it back on, after this you are forced
to go back to your other save if you have any or else you will have
to start the game again.
In conclusion, what makes
us not finish games anymore? Is it us or is it the industry? Looking
at the reasons I've given above I would say that it is both. While we
are constantly flooded with new titles and distracted from our
current endeavors at the end of the day, we are the ones that buy the
games, we are the ones that dedicate our self to complete a 100+
hours long game and we are the ones that fall into the same trap over
and over. What's the solution you ask? Maybe shorter games, or maybe
we should just stop, take a deep breath, relax and enjoy games like
we used to 10-20 years ago.
References:
http://www.gamefront.com/why-dont-gamers-finish-games/
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/gaming.gadgets/08/17/finishing.videogames.snow/
http://www.1up.com/features/gonna-finish?pager.offset=0
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