Fuck Complete
This is the talk I gave at Videobrains in London on Jan 26. It contains a lot of swearing and some bits I skipped through on the day.
Hello. My name is Mary. I do stuff at the Guardian, and I write about games sometimes, and some of you might have seen what I can do with Super Hexagon if you were here last December.
I am here today to swear about games.
Fuck complete. Fuck games that think they deserve your valuable time but that they don’t have to earn it. This is a rant specifically about beating games.
Fuck beating games, because we are so far beyond that concept that for the vast majority of games it makes about as much sense as beating Michaelangelo’s David does. Some games are made of mechanics, and if you’ve mastered a mechanic as much as you want to, then you can stop. Some games are made of stories, and if you’ve experienced as much of a story as you want to, then you can stop. You don’t owe games your time. If they’re hard and you love them and you want to throw yourself at them over and over again for hours on end: you can, and that’s OK. If they bore you or they fatigue you or they just don’t interest you: you are not obliged to continue. Even if you’re still in the tutorial. Especially if the tutorial is more than an hour long.
Related: fuck 80 hours of gameplay. Games that are more than ten hours long are — almost without exception — paced awfully. There is no possible way that a game can take into account the varied human contextual needs for pauses, breaks, interruptions, basic stuff like sanitation, over the course of three hours, even if they’re paced perfectly. Three times that length is even harder, and you start needing to think episodically, in the way a TV series does, about what happens when someone puts the controller down. Ups and downs, easy get outs. But 30 hours? Or more? You can’t sustain and maintain traditional linear storytelling that way — even if you keep the plot together, the pace collapses.
And in order to pad a game out, what you get isn’t traditional linear storytelling. It’s collectables. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: collectables in a story-based game are straight up shit. They are the narrative equivalent of bear-traps. Every time Batman stops fighting crime to go figure out how to get a massive metal marble out of a magnetic maze, or Alan Wake stops running away from the super creepy ghosts because there might be a fucking thermos flask on a cliff — your pacing’s gone, your world makes no sense any more, and you might as well be telling your players directly that you think their time is literally worthless unless they’re playing your game.
I am here to say that your time is worth more than that.
Remember Skyrim’s infinite quests? And it turned out that, actually, all of those quests were things like “acquire six sapphires” or “fetch for me these rare and ancient herbs, which are just over there, brave hero” or “kill six snow moose”?
In reality, what players wanted from Skyrim wasn’t infinite quests. It was moddability, the capacity to make up your own ridiculous dreams and then fulfil them, incomprehensibly, the way you really wanted. Items in games are fascinating, and: collecting stuff is interesting when you’re doing it for your own reasons. Whatever those reasons are. Running around GTA San Andreas collecting 50 oysters so you become irresistible to your in-game girlfriend is grunt work. Your time is worth more than that.
I played Divinity: Original Sin using a 3-player mod for a while, so I played Jehan, who’s a water and air wizard. Jehan’s main feature is making everyone else either stop moving or fall over on the ice, so I collected and crafted hobnailed boots to give to the rest of the party so that when I rained and then froze everything, they wouldn’t slip over. They kept throwing them away and falling over, so I kept making them. The game didn’t care that I did that — it enabled me to make something meaningful out of its systems and its world. If it’d asked me to collect them? I just wouldn’t.
Collectibles do make sense in some games, for sure. Platforming games where they become an incentive to show additional skill, for example. And if the collections make sense within the context of the game world and the fiction — giving you something meaningful. Audio logs do not count (and can also get fucked). Generally they make sense in games that aren’t trying to hold themselves up to some sort of movie standard. But any game that feels the need to drag you through its core mechanics purely by playing on the human tendency to orient ourselves around goals? No. That game is lazy. If it was really, really good, you’d play the whole damn thing anyway. Instead, you get this ridiculous overlaying of external motivators — map icons, helix glitches, treasure chests, flowers, Ithildin, blahblahblah — and those things make playing the game less fun. The minute you replace an intrinsic motivation — something I want to do innately because it’s enjoyable or rewarding — with an external one, something I do because you give me a reward? The activity actually becomes less fun. There’s research on this. It’s bad. Don’t do it.
While we’re on the subject: achievements. Fuck achievements.
Achievements are pretty much the embodiment of making a fun thing less fun by adding an external reward system. Very occasionally they encourage you to play a game in new or unusual ways — so you can get some pixels that tell you you’ve done it. Not because it’s fun or interesting — but because you get some pixels. More often, they encourage you to play games in ways that are less fun than you’d like, because you get some pixels. The human need for achievement, for reward and for the appearance of success is so great that this shit actually works on us, really well! There’s an entire industry built around it — gamification is almost always nothing more than taking the way games make us feel rewarded and applying it to things that shouldn’t ever be rewarding because they are shit things to do. So fuck bad gamification, and fuck the gamification of games. You don’t need badges to tell you how to enjoy your time or consume your media. Some of the best achievements satirise the use of achievements — creating ones that are impossible to complete, or that just mean the developer gets cake in the mail, or turning them into the entire point of the game (but that tends to fall victim to the Cow Clicker principle: if it’s indistinguishable from the thing it’s satirising, is it successful satire?).
The single worst achievement-related thing I have ever seen is this:
Six perfect games. As though the perfection of the game or of my playing of it is purely a function of whether I played the metagame. I played Gone Home perfectly, and it will never appear on here — because it doesn’t have achievements. Why would it have achievements? It needs achievements in the same way Gone With The Wind does: precisely not at all.
In addition: fuck grinding. Fuck grinding to get an achievement in particular. But also fuck the idea of gating my game until I’ve made numbers go up. Gate things that need me to go do more story first, for sure. Definitely gate things that don’t make sense! But gate them behind something that does make sense, and not just “you shouldn’t be here: go level up”. Don’t make me go over the same mechanics again and again as a way of padding out the experience. And if you want something to be hard, to be complex, to represent mastery — high end gear in MMO games, say — then give me different ways to achieve it. Let me do the difficult, long bits of the game in a way that’s actually fun. And if you’re just filling in time to get to 80 hours of gameplay: stop it. Let me get to the fun fucking part of the game. In fact: START me in the fun fucking part of the game, because you do not have a long time before I will stop playing the game and go do something else that is actually fun.
Because fuck finishing a game before you make your mind up. I have played some awful games for less than ten minutes and I do not see why I should have to play more of them to check whether they’re still awful after an hour. I’ve played some games that are fine but not for me, and I don’t need to waste my life failing to learn how to shoot people in the head from a long distance in order to understand that Sniper Elite is for other people who actually enjoy that sort of thing. I can have a perfectly cogent and informed opinion on a game’s mechanics very quickly. Samorost 2, for instance! It’s a perfectly lovely adventure game and I cannot be arsed with it, because I don’t get a huge amount out of traditional point and click mechanics. I strongly support you buying and playing it if you do, but I don’t actually need to play the whole thing to know that I’d rather play The Binding Of Isaac.
I reviewed Wasteland 2 for the Guardian once, but I did not have the time to play the whole thing. I’d have needed to take about three days off work and play solidly, full-time, at a rush, to get through the game in time. And that would have been a shit review, right, because if I’m rushing through to finish it I’m not going to experience the world the same way. So I wrote about the first eight hours.
If, in the first eight hours, a game doesn’t tell you everything there is to know about itself, then it has missed its chance to shine. Someone once told me Final Fantasy 13 gets good about 20 hours in. No. No it doesn’t. As an overall experience, it remains bad, and it’s surprising how the sunk costs fallacy kicks in to make otherwise sensible people believe that the first 20 hours weren’t a total waste of their time.
So: embrace stopping playing if you aren’t having fun. Embrace the idea that games that waste your time don’t deserve your attention. Embrace the idea that even really big games with lots of marketing spend can be bad. Embrace weird delightful things that only take you 20 minutes to play, because they don’t have any time to waste and they will — they must — get straight to the interesting part of the game. Embrace serendipity and strangeness. Embrace weird, because weird will at least fuck you about in ways you’ve not been fucked about before. Reject time-wasting. Embrace not needing to play everything. And fuck complete. Your time is worth so much more.
