Hostile Takeover

I was recently talking to my roommate about Fallout 3. He had been playing the game pretty religiously for the last week or so and then completely stopped. This was strange because earlier in the week he was telling me he really wanted to finish the main story because he realized he was getting close to that point he always seems to hit with many games where he stops playing entirely. What we realized after he stopped Fallout 3 was that the point where he quits playing isn’t based on how long he’s been playing the game, but how far into the story he is. After looking over my library of games that my roommate has really enjoyed we noticed that he quit almost every single one right near the end of the game, let’s say around the 85% point. He described it as the point where the story “completely takes over the game.” According to another friend of ours this is a common occurrence among gamers, but it is the first I’ve heard of it. Maybe after talking to him more I’ll have more to say on the topic, but for now I just want to explore possibilities for why my roommate quits games right near the end.

First off, my roommate whom I’ll now just refer to as Conor, said he quits playing after the story completely takes over the game. This most likely because games generally don’t have the most compelling stories. If you are primarily playing games for the fun game mechanics then stopping at the end credits is as arbitrary of a line as stopping anywhere else. Unless you are continuously getting new power ups that vastly change how the game is played there is no difference between quitting halfway through versus quitting at the end. Sure, different things happen farther into the game, but with most games the core mechanics are laid down and mastered early on. Therefore if you do not care about story at all then quitting once you grow tired of the gameplay makes perfect sense. The reason Conor would always make it to close to the end, but not quite, is because once it is clear the game is coming to a conclusion it is essentially the same thing to him as the game actually coming to that conclusion. There is no point in finishing the last hour or two when all he thinks the game has left to offer him is the finale of a story he never really cared about.

Another possibility is once the story takes over then the freedom of an open world game is lost. This of course only applies to genres where you don’t necessarily need to complete everything in the main storyline immediately. Several of the last handful of games Conor played were sandbox games, including Assassin’s Creed, GTA4, and Fallout 3. In all three of these games there is a main quest, but at any point in the game you can find something else to do. Assassin’s Creed is the exception because the story literally does completely take over and forces you down a linear path for the last hour or so of gameplay. The other two however only do this artificially. There is a bit of ludonarrative dissonance going on when you are mere moments from reaching a games epic conclusion, but decide you want to go to the strip club with Jacob or wander around post apocalyptic D.C. looking for a U.F.O. instead. Even though you can do these things instead of finishing the main quest, the story in sandbox games eventually become so much of the focus that it feels wrong to ignore them. So instead of actually finishing them or ignoring them, Conor ends up quitting because he cares little for the story, but still feels a sense of ludonarrative dissonance if he chooses to ignore it.

I wonder how Conor would feel about playing a game with a more compelling narrative. I have a feeling he would have stopped playing Bioshock almost immediately after the major twist around the 3/4s mark. Same with a game like Far Cry 2, where the ending was absolutely fantastic, but the pacing started to lull a bit after completing a few missions in the southern half of the country. I am fairly certain he never would have made it through this lull before the ending. Both of these points mark a change in the story that don’t necessarily fit into the category of “taking over the game”, but are where the story starts to feel almost irrelevant. Far Cry 2 recovers wonderfully from its pacing problem, but for a gamer like Conor it would be too late. As for Bioshock, it never really recovered, that game would have been better off ending shortly after the twist or perhaps adopting another ending entirely.

After talking to Conor last night, I found he still defends a few games for their storylines, specifically Final Fantasy 7 and 9. We both tend to agree that JRPG’s storylines are far too long, but something about those two were interesting enough for him to finish through to the end. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just because he played them when he was a lot younger, but it would fit nicely into my theories above if it is just because they are interesting and well presented stories. He certainly seems to think this is the case. I haven’t played FF9, but I can vouch for 7 being a unique and well presented story, especially considering where video games were from a narrative standpoint when it was released in the late ‘90s. Also, it might be interesting to consider that Conor is a film major that has focused a very large amount of his effort into writing screenplays and the art of storytelling. Would he have a different reaction to games if he didn’t know all the technicalities of how stories tend to unfold and the narrative devices employed? I have no idea.

Anyway, it’s something to think about. I might have more on this later, but don’t hold your breath. :)