Blog - Endings in Games

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Reading another book on screenwriting today, the book mentioned an old Hollywood axiom:

"Movies are about their last twenty minutes."

It's interesting to compare this statement to games.
Are games about their last twenty minutes?
(Note: I will use the 'twenty minutes' a bit more metaphorically for the rest of this article, since games are not nearly as uniform in length as film...)

Given how it often seems like game developers take many of their cues from film (those of Hollywood itself, commonly) it's odd that I don't feel this statement as ringing quite as true for games. So what is it with games and endings then-- is it something about the video game medium itself that makes them fundamentally different in this area? Or is this a case of developers neglecting lessons from our media cousin out of ignorance or stubbornness? I suppose the two aren't mutually exclusive and it's a bit of both and on a case by case basis.

On the one end of the spectrum, I recently read an article where someone was venting their frustration at having to beat all of the puzzles in Braid to unlock its ending. It's a valid point-- that is a game with one of the most astounding endings I've experienced in a game, yet it is fairly frustratingly difficult to complete a few of the puzzles. Some of them aren't even brain-teasers-- a few require real physical skill like timing button presses. What is the player to do if they just completely lack the coordination for such a puzzle? Either they have to find a way to cheat past it, or give up and miss out on the brilliant ending.

On a much broader scale-- I've read that most players won't make it to the ending of most games. This is, of course, completely unlike films-- you can't help but encounter the end of a film unless it bored you so much you walked out or fell asleep. DVDs even make cheating and skipping to the end an always instantly accessible option (and easy for anyone who's ever used a DVD player before-- i.e. much more accessible than video game cheats). The closest thing I can think of in film is more cerebral or deliberately disjointed movies which require intellectual skill of sort to comprehend them-- but even then you're at least experiencing the ending even if you don't 'get it'.

But games are often far longer than films and generally require you to actually beat areas with some kind of skill (intellectual, twitch, etc.) to unlock more of the content/story/etc. If you hit a wall-- you don't get to the end. You won't get those supposedly great last 20 minutes. Hell, forget a great ending-- you don't get any kind of closure at all. And human beings crave closure...

Then you've also got your largely multiplayer fragfests or competition games like when friends get together to blast each other in Halo or play Super Smash Bros. On the one hand, you could say those NEVER end... how can the last 20 minutes possibly be great if there is no end at all? On the other end-- each match could be seen as it's own little mini-story and those usually do build to some kind of climax as things get down to the wire of the last few seconds/lives.

But finally, consider the game Indigo Prophesy.
If you read the postmortem for the game, the developers lamented their mistake at focusing too little on the ending-- since, again, they figured not as many players make it all the way to the end. So, when players DID make it to the end, and cried out "What the hell is this?!" the developers realized their folly.

In fact, a game with a bad ending is worse than a film with a bad ending, because the game makes you WORK for that terrible ending. If a film ends up as a dud, all you've lost is a couple hours and the price of your ticket. When a game's ending flops? That could be after weeks of grinding, or blood, sweat, and tears of trying to beat that last damn final boss or level. In other words-- it was possibly frustrating even BEFORE you saw the bad ending. Not to mention that to that frustration you add the lost cost paid for the game, which if it was a new $60 game can hurt a lot worse than a wasted movie ticket.

So, this seems to be a problem. Indigo Prophesy's ending proved that endings may be just important in games as they are in film (maybe it's not the best game example, as it is a very cinema-inspired title... but meh, you get the point.) However, make a brilliant ending like Braid and maybe only half your audience will actually make it all the way there to see it-- and that's the best part of the game, if you're following that axiom. Players are missing your best content. So what's a developer to do?

There is, of course, the overall "dumbing-down" of games to make them appeal to a broader audience, and that is part of it. Only the hardcore were insane enough to play through the challenges to see the endings of games, which frustrated everyone else who didn't have the skills to achieve the closure they seek in their media experiences. But at the same time, this dumbing-down is somewhat despised by gamers-- although, admittedly the ones complaining are only the hardcore minority who never had this problem. But they do have something of a point-- if it's too easy to get all the content, you lose any
sense of accomplishment.

Of course, as the article venting about Braid pointed out-- that notion only appeals to players who seek fiero, which isn't everyone-- especially as games branch out to larger audiences. It's an issue of balance between players who are achievers and those who are explorers-- either way you're disappointing one of those two sides.

So, is there a way to find a happy medium for both achievers and explorers?
Maybe returning to something similar to the old favorite-- difficulty modes?
Have, say, an explorer mode and an achiever mode: Achiever mode has you play to unlock content, and explorer mode makes it easy to skip ahead, ala the New Super Mario Bros for the Wii (presumably-- haven't yet got to play it!)
I'm thinking if you have players decide in advance their play styles it won't sully the achiever's sense of accomplishment if achiever mode has no way of 'cheating' to get ahead like explorer mode. And just completing achiever mode could, of course, have an xbox-live achievement attached to it, as further enticement for achiever players.

Thinking about it, an interesting case study would be Jason Rohrer's game Passage, which has a brilliant, brilliant ending that the players can't help but get to, like a film-- you basically get there even if you do nothing other than start the game and then just sit there. It's so easy to get to the 'end' that the game goes further and actually makes any attempt at achievement you made feel very intentionally frustrating, depressing and empty -- and that, in this game, serves to make your ending even more powerful and charged with meaning.
So, in a sense-- Passage DOES appeal to both explorers and achievers-- if you try to achieve as an achiever, your ending can resonate stronger in failing to achieve a state of fiero than if you did not even try to 'win' a high score, and explorers are free to explore the entire gambit of meaning from achieving to not even trying at all (I did!)
Can most other games pull that particular trick off? Probably not-- but it's an observation I felt was worth noting nonetheless.

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posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:16 PM  0 Comments Links to this post