Are You Gonna Finish That?
A game is perhaps one of the few things that many of us never end up sticking with to its completion
When I grew older there should really be no excuse for not finishing games which you know deep down in your gut are great games. The games I end up not seeing through are in the RPG genre and they require a lot of time investment to complete. If you leave it for as little as a week you can forget the long-winded story and advance equipment/spell menu that forces you to spin the controller around your head like a lasso.
The strange thing I find is I will always play the game to death until I’m about ninety percent of the way through. After this invisible threshold my mind will for some reason find a new distraction. The thought of coming back to the game when I have a shiny new one in front of me is a fate worse than death. But why I hear you cry, and I can’t tell you. Perhaps I played a game when I was younger and at the end a scary clown leapt out of the TV and throttled me. Maybe my brain is shielding me from a lengthy cut-scene and poor resolution after my days of time-investing.
On the other hand, I find the beginning of the games I play to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the experience. Everything is (hopefully) fresh and you’re finding your legs in a new and exciting environment. More often than not a game can begin to lag during the middle or take an inordinate amount of time to pickup (ala FFXIII). As with anything, whether it is literature, films, games, we need a effective dramatic arc. Freytag’s pyramid is the classic structure with a proven formula: Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
This is a difficult structure to get correct for ninety-minutes, just think how hard it is to sustain for over twenty-five hours of gameplay. It’s no wonder that RPG’s fall prey to the trappings of blowing ones ‘climatic load’ either too often or too late, or failing to build it enough. With something simple like boss fights you normally notice they become bigger and nastier as you progress through the game. Not only does it make sense but there is the feeling of achievement. Who wants to save the universe from a fly? You want to end things by jettisoning into a beast the size of a small moon armed with a weapon so big the recoil rips your arms off.
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Jun 17, 2010 17:15:01 (Jun 17, 2010 17:15)
