Finishing Video Games

Do you finish what you start? Do you read to the last word of every book, or sit through the credits of every movie? If you start a video game, do you finish it? I used to. I'm more flexible now, though; the older you get, the more you worry about time. 

I still finish every novel I being, and I still don't like to walk out on movies--seeing these through to the end gives me a sense of closure. But I can read a book in a few weeks, and watch a movie in a matter of hours.  TV shows and video games are a much longer commitment, so my newfound flexibility is mostly to accomodate them.

If I start to watch an episode of a TV show, then I finish that episode. I may or may not move onto the next. If I do, then how I proceed depends on what kind of show I'm watching. If it's something with a strong emphasis on continuity, like Arrested Development or Breaking Bad, then I try to watch the show at least once a week, if not more, to make sure I don't forget where I am in the story. If I'm watching a more episodic TV show, like The Simpsons or The Twillight Zone, then I treat each episode as a self-contained story, watching them whenever I feel like it and allowing for very long breaks between.

I used to treat video games like books, because they are not easily broken up into "episodes" in the same way a TV show is. When I started one, I'd finish it before moving onto another. There were too many unfinished games from my childhood, so I decided to change how I approached them. But my new approach almost ruined video games for me, as I'd often find myself playing one while wishing I was playing another. If something that I was excited about had disappointed me, then I'd be stuck with it for weeks--sometimes months--while waiting until I could get to the silver medal.

I've been trapped with books, too, but then I can finish a medium-length book much more quickly than a medium-length video game, and being stuck in a frustrating segment is much harder when it's you, and not the characters, who have to get out of it.

Then there's the question of what constitutes "finishing" a video game. Do you just need to see the ending? Do you need to finish all the subquests? Do you need to get all the tropies? Do you even need to "win"? Should older games with brutal difficulty be handled the same as newer, easier, story-focused ones? And what about even older games, where your real objective was the other players' highs score? If I play Pac-Man, do I need to see the kill screen to "finish" it?

I still love video games, but, for practical reasons, I simply can't finish every one that I start.