Digital Nightfall on 13/6/2011 at 12:51
Ah, gamer philosophy!
So which, do you feel, is the better situation...
To have completed (or discarded) every game in your library, or...
To have many games in progress, few of which have been finished (or discarded).
I am chronically the latter. I'll routinely pick up a bargain title (these days on steam, but in the old days from the used games rack, back when stores sold used PC games) and then either never touch it or play it for a few hours, max. People will give me games as birthday/xmas gifts and the same thing will happen. Looking at my games list on Steam, I've only finished maybe fifteen to twenty percent of these titles, and maybe twenty five percent of them have never even been installed once.
So do you rigorously complete every game you own, or do you just collect random interesting titles that maybe you'll dabble in a bit some day, but probably never finish?
demagogue on 13/6/2011 at 13:21
When I was younger I'd complete every one.
Now I pick at a lot simultaneously.
A little is because of age & maturity(?). I kind of see behind the veil of games more, so I realize a lot of them are mostly about the mechanics and there isn't anything magic about completing them like I used to feel. But I'll still want to play enough of a game to get its mechanics and place it, "Ok, this game does X."
And some of it is just the times were in, where there's a glut of media and demands on attention... It saps the meaning from individual projects, maybe. Or there's just too much I want to see, and I'd rather get a taste than nothing at all. I mean I never make a decision "I'll stop playing this now"; I may still want to get back to it; just something else gets in the queue in the meantime. Also a lot of games are built for periodically picking at, either sims or mission-based, Minecraft, flight sims, RTSs, war games, racing games, FMs; and I play a disproportionate number of those kinds of games maybe.
Also I want a game investing as much into me (meaning-wise) as I'm going to invest in it. If it's still paying off with new meaning as I go on, then I'll still be playing. And there are some games I'll sit at and be sure to finish off consecutively, especially story driven ones. I'll finish off interactive fiction & adventure games because the story will drive me to the end. And a good FPS can. I finished off Half Life 2 and Mirror's Edge this last year.
Koki on 13/6/2011 at 13:41
Quote Posted by Digital Nightfall
I am chronically the latter. I'll routinely pick up a bargain title (these days on steam, but in the old days from the used games rack, back when stores sold used PC games) and then either never touch it or play it for a few hours, max.
So you basically buy a lot of shit games.
Good job.
Vernon on 13/6/2011 at 14:04
Dwarf Fortress
Shadowcat on 13/6/2011 at 14:31
I've no idea what the "better" situation is. When I had more time and fewer games, I more or less played everything to completion. Now I have a big backlog which well matches Digi's description.
These days I have a couple of conscious efforts going on gaming-wise:
1) Have one "main" game on the go, and play it through to completion. Preferably something from the backlog, but it doesn't really matter, so long as it's good. At present it's "Blood" (although I'm currently diverted by "Frozen Synapse").
2) When thinking about buying games, actually stop to take reality into consideration. This is especially useful when sales come up :) In more recent years I've succeeded in passing on a lot of ludicrously cheap and well-regarded games after reminding myself that I have a backlog of well-regarded and already-owned games to attend to, and that if I really really want that other game in the future, it'll still be there.
That hasn't completely stopped the impulse buys by any means, but it has drastically reduced them; or if I do still pick something up for next to nothing, it's often with the expectation of probably only playing it a little bit (unless it really grabs me), knowing that I'll still have had value for money. I don't feel as bad about an unfinished game if I wasn't expecting to ever finish it!
henke on 13/6/2011 at 15:57
I play most of what I buy to completion. I have a hard time justifying new purchases to myself if I have a bunch of games lying around that I still aim to finish.
gunsmoke on 13/6/2011 at 16:47
I only finish games that deserve it. If it is the least bit annoying, frustrating, etc., I shelve it.
june gloom on 13/6/2011 at 18:56
I tend to finish most of my games, eventually. I have a few that sit around unfinished, but whatever.
Kuuso on 13/6/2011 at 19:04
I tend to get games that I will finish, which in my mind means they are good enough to retain my interest till the end.
Sulphur on 13/6/2011 at 21:21
Back when I was a kid, and times were tough, and I had to copy Ultima VII on eight floppies from my friend's Sound Blaster CD which came with complimentary editions of Shadowcaster, Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empire/Martian Dreams and Wing Commander 2, and then get back home only to howl at the error message the screen spat at me at disk 5 that went 'Read error on drive A: Abort/retry/fail', and then went back and copied the whole damn thing again using MSBACKUP with its data-eating CRC error correction confabulation option, and then finally installed the game to find I had to juggle through five hundred variations of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to get the right memory configuration loaded...
...once I had leaped those hurdles, I used to play the fucking game obsessively until I finished it so thoroughly and exhaustively, it was a miniature achievement in its own right. Either that or I gave up in disgust and moved on. The fact that I had a game so amazing, so excellent, so fucking brilliant meant I devoted all my spare time to it - even if it was just Wing Commander, just Ultima Underworld, just Diablo, or even just fucking Mortal Kombat. Each game was special, because each successful title screen intro meant I had battled risk and chance to get it on my hard drive, and I had won.
This didn't change with Windows 3.1/11/95/98/Me, until I stumbled upon a game vendor who whispered in my ear in a back room, 'Hey, I can give you a copy of Starcraft for 50 bucks*' and caused my face to lighten up with all the unrealised possibilities this meant. CDs and DVDs -- more resilient than floppies! Storage capacity more than a hundred fold than that of floppies! It meant...
...yeah, I was a hardcore pirate in school and college. Even then, though, with a veritable cornucopia of titles, I still persevered through each one and then moved on to the next.
But slowly I started to amass a large collection of dreck, of cardboard boxes and jewel cases of games I'd tried, was enthused about for two days, then consigned to the scrap heap of the not-quite-interesting in gaming history in favour of the next unopened shiny. Searching for some elusive something that never quite seemed to come as often as it should have done, be it a Zork Nemesis or an Icewind Dale or an MDK 2.
This has been building for the past decade and a half, and leads to where I am currently.
Currently: Steam. 172 games at the moment - impulse buys, summer and Christmas sales, gifts. How many have I played? Most. For how long? Ha ha. Better question - how many have I finished? Maybe about 7%.
I can't be arsed to finish 75% of the games I own right after purchasing them. I'm working on it, but it's a Sisyphean task. Part of the reason is there's always a new shiny around the corner. Part of the reason is I'm searching for that elusive something that I found, all the way back, in Homeworld, and Ultima VII, and Wing Commander 2, and Psychonauts, and Silent Hill 2... and not quite finding it, so very often. Part of it is I'm wiser, wearier, more cynical, and can see through half of the games I play for the soulless dull time traps they are regardless of Metacritic rating.
Part of it is because I fucking can. It's trivial to get a game now. A single click, and it's packed, parcelled, and piped in millions of pulses of light directly to my hard drive. I'm not 9 years old any more and praying that the next disk doesn't give me a General Failure error, or hoping that the scratch on that CD can be remedied with a little toothpaste and some wiping. Part of it is I'm not a wide-eyed child bursting with pride at meeting the challenge of just getting a game to run and being rewarded with the title screen and the sounds of Swan Lake lilting from the speakers as Loom booted up for the first time.
Most of it is because I grew up.
Optimal situation? Somehow, neither option seems like it any more.
*Back then, this was the equivalent of one [1] [uno] American dollar and some change.
