“I think my first reaction when I heard some news about [BioShock's] end was like, ‘People got to the end?’” said 2K Boston’s Ken Levine at a New York Comic-Con panel last month. Now, in what other storytelling medium would you ever hear that come out of a creator’s mouth?
An incomplete film or novel is an active decision. You walk out of a theater, turn off a DVD, or put down a book. On the other hand, videogames tend to just fade out of your top-level consciousness after a while. You’ve seen my list of shamefully underplayed games. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon. If you’re into videogames, chances are you’ve got more than a few lying around that you never finished yet always meant to revisit. But why does this happen? Why don’t we finish games?
Well, as you may have guessed, I have a theory.
It starts with a basic, general assumption: Game stories suck.
I just deleted a couple paragraphs full of examples, because I know you don’t need proof. It’s just a given. For every story delivered as elegantly as Portal’s, there are a thousand games full of derivative garbage with incoherent narratives and forgettable characters. There are a number of reasons why game stories suck, and we can go into them all another time, but what does it have to do with finishing games?