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What is Video Game Completion?

In the gamer scheme of things I am a freak of nature. I finish nearly every game I buy. Weird right? The fact of the matter is that most narrative based games are not completed. It was considered an enormous success by the developers of Bioshock that 50% of those who played it reached the end. Even the Half-Life 2 episodes, which are only about 6 hours long and have extremely friendly level design aren’t finished more that that. It’s been compared to elsewhere, and for the life of me I wish I could remember where, to imagine if 50% of people walked out of a movie mid way through, every movie. It’s strange.

It begs the question: what drives a player to complete a game?

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Obviously the answer is going to be different for every person. Not every aspect of every video game is going to appeal to every person in the same degree. Hell, not every video game appeals to every person. I’m not going to pretend I can break it down it wide ranging categories that cover the basics. Personally it’s the stories that drive me to finish games. I want to see what happens in the end, the gameplay is a means to that end. I recognize this; because I have played some god-awful video games that had little redeeming value and I have finished all of them, save for two types of instances. Instances where the game collapses in on itself in a wondering display of corrupted saves, code or disc or the fact that its an RPG where I reach the point where there is no story and all grinding gameplay (in most cases a JRPG).

For example, a game I received as a birthday gift, Orphen: Scion of Sorcery. Go ahead and look it up, I’ll wait. Suffice to say the game was next to unplayable and the story a little loose unless you were paying attention. The combat was plodding and the puzzles trial and error. I dropped over 10 hours into that game to reach the end only to find the game sending me back to the beginning and tell me to pick up the second storyline. Apparently there were two narratives you could choose from and enough time travel to make you choose both. Two hours later I found myself in a room with no exit running in circles with a camera trapped behind the cramped walls most of the time. I looked up the walkthrough and found that I had to leave via a door that didn’t exist in my copy. Game dropped.

The other instance is when an RPG stops telling a story and continues on for long periods of grinding before you can move on to the next stage or doesn’t tell you where to go next and expects you to wander around the world map until you find it. This happens with regular frequency in the Final Fantasy series around the three quarters mark and I find myself stopping around that time too.

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But then comes the exception to the rule. One of my favorite games of all time, if not my favorite game and yet I have never beaten it. I have started Baldur’s Gate on three separate occasions, sunk a good 40-60 hours into each play through and end up not finishing. Either due to a poorly chosen save point, changing computers or lose of data over a few years. I love the game and its story, but I cannot get myself to the end of the game.

Which brings me to my second question: what counts as completing a game?

I’m still speaking of narrative games only for the purpose of this question. Once again the answer is going to be different for every person and even different with every game. It could be as simple in reaching the end credits and maybe seeing whatever might be on after them (I’m looking at you Prince of Persia). Does epilogue DLC or extra episodes count towards the original game or do you subconsciously think of them as different games? For the actual end, if you put in the work, but couldn’t quite get to the very last spot is it enough to watch someone else complete the game? If there are multiple endings, is one good enough or do you have to play it through multiple times? And now with achievements and trophies, is complete all the points or the platinum trophy?

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With Black I got through the whole game except the last room of the last level. It was nearly up to the point where I wanted to heave the controller at the screen, but I still wanted to see the end and couldn’t afford to pay for a replacement TV, so I contacted a friend to do it for me, saw the end of the story and felt I had completed the game.

With Kingdom Hearts I could have beaten the game long before I actually did, but to me that wasn’t finishing the game. I went and grinded up so I could get the ultimate keyblade and take out the two side bosses and finish all the tournaments. Then I went and beat the final boss. That was completing the game for me.

With a movie or book, or play, completing is seeing the ending. Only with video games does this become a near philosophical question to the nature of the medium. I am curious to hear your take on it and any stories of your own.

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4 Responses to "What is Video Game Completion?"

Nick says:

March 2, 2009 at 12:13 pm

Hmm… well, on the subject of your second question, isn’t that why the term “100% completion” exists? I mean, consider a game like Jak and Daxter (the good one, before they turned it into Jak Theft Auto). You have a plot, you follow the plot, you finish the quests, and eventually you reach the end of that plot. That’s completion. But at the same time, you can also go back into the game and get all of the Power Cells and Precursor Orbs. This is beyond the plot, though, and the only new thing it nets you is a spiffy extra cutscene. That would be more like 100% completion. Same sort of thing with multiple ending games like the Fatal Frame series or Silent Hill.
Just my two cents, anyway…
The Swain says:

March 2, 2009 at 5:14 pm

First of all not all games have those percentages of things that can be done in game. Secondly, my point is how far are people willing to go with those challanges to feel as if they have completed the game. Many games now, especially sandbox games, have numerous challanges and side missions that can take months to finish. How far is far enough for player to feel that they’ve completed the game? Most play until they’re satisfied, fewer to the end of the game, and fewer still go for the 100% completion if there is a definition in the game for what that is.
Craig says:

March 8, 2009 at 2:08 am

I’m working on a blog with a very similar subject: “Why don’t gamers finish games? Is this a bad thing?” There’s a lot there to talk about.

Personally, I think a lot of it has to do with the state of story in games. We haven’t gotten to the point yet where the majority of game developers are able to use a cohesive narrative to tell a compelling storyâ€”i.e., a story we care about, one that we’d want to see to completion. That last part is key.

But I won’t write my entire blog post in your comments section… Consider it a sneak peek! 😀
Vincent says:

March 12, 2009 at 10:11 am

To understand what video game completion is, we must first understand completion in other media: What compels a viewer to watch a film from beginning to end? What compels a reader to read a piece of literature from beginning to end? Its our expectations that a narrative needs to be closed or else our endeavors in the work would feel all for naught.

However, we know for the cinema narrative completion is not the power which films entail over the consuming public. If this were true, films would not be as ubiquitous as they are today, with the film industry reaching a state of global reach with its product. No, the power of the image lies in its ability to present images of reality. Without this, a film becomes powerless, cheap, a bad film. The book needs only narrative to engage readers to compel them to complete a story but the film needs more than a good narrative. Undermine the implicit reality proposed in a film and immediately the film becomes a “bad film.”

As such, we know narrative completion is not the initial draw for video games. Just as the first film reels were captivating as “moments of reality,” the first video games did not need narration to captivate its audience. Simply completing the task at hand, such as preventing a ball from entering a goal, or moving a square through a large castle, had no semblance of narrative. The consumers of that day simply did the task that was handed to them, no questions asked. Thus, the power of video games doesn’t lie in any sort of narrative. It lies in the fulfillment of conquering tasks.

Of course, there are different tasks in a video game one can complete, from simply moving the story from point A to point B, to 100 percent completion, but it is the nature that our direct input completed the task which is so alluring about this medium. We are drawn to the idea that our own actions conquered the game creator’s challenge presented. For Final Fantasy, the ultimate challenge and goal is to move the narrative from A to B. For the player, the sheer fact that a narrative would not exist without player interaction is evidence enough for the player that he is in control of the narrative, and to some extent he actually is. The player also has freedom to complete the narrative in various other ways, which is why we are compelled to grind in the game: Our direct interaction influences the quality of the characters in the narrative. We are drawn to the fact that video games present to us the idea of existence, that we are in charge of our own destiny.

Though there is a paradox that exists with this idea. Any choice in a video game has already been predetermined by the creator.

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