I just finished watching an episode of Sessler's Soapbox entitled Games Are Made To Be Finished. It's not a segment I generally watch, as it doesn't play well on my phone where I'd usually watch such things, but this one grabbed my attention. It's a response to a recent CNN article, Why most people don't finish video games, which cites Raptr in saying that 90% of gamers don't finish a game's single player campaign.
This got me to thinking about not just games, but all media in general, and my own completion habits.
I am a completionist by nature. Twice before, I've written about games I've quit or gotten stuck on. I've found that as I've gotten older and my spare time has become more valuable to me, I've been more likely to withdraw from an experience that I'm not enjoying.
This happened most recently with the latest book in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance with Dragons. During the latest two tomes in this epic fantasy series, Mr. Martin has developed the same problems that Robert Jordan did during The Path of Daggers, Crossroads of Twilight, and Knife of Dreams. They included far too many characters in whom the readers had little to no interest, very little of note occurred in the book, and the book wasn't nearly as good as previous books in the same series. But whereas Brandon Sanderson pulled the Wheel of Time series out of the fire, there doesn't seem to be any such impending salvation for Song of Ice and Fire, which is very sad. Before I'd reached page 400, I stopped reading A Dance with Dragons. If the next book comes out and people tell me that it's amazing, I might begrudgingly pick up the boredom-infused tree pulp cocktail that is A Dance with Dragons and give it another go.
As I was midway through writing that last sentence, Frank made a Google+ post stating that the payoff at the end of the book isn't worth all that reading. I feel justified in my decision.
So what other things have I recently quit without having finished? Let's see. I quit playing Fallout: New Vegas earlier this year. It was kind of monotonous, and I wasn't having much fun with it. I also quit Osmos, which was a fantastic game, but far too difficult once you pass a certain point. I quit Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles too. Although the source material (Resident Evil 2) is fantastic, the on-rails gameplay doesn't do it justice.
I quit playing Metal Gear Solid 4 because the story seemed boring. I quit playing Sacred 2 because I hated the mechanics behind the hack-n-slash co-op gameplay. And I quit Dead Nation because although the game is a lot of fun, it just gets too damn hard after a certain point.
Despite tweeted assurances that the game's ending makes it all worthwhile, I quit Metro 2033 in the Library, which is something like chapter 24 out of 35. You can't say that I didn't give the game a chance. I think I rage uninstalled that one.
I also quit playing the classic GameCube title Metroid Prime during the battle against Flaagrah the crazy plant-thing. Could I have done it if I consulted walkthroughs and tried really hard? Yeah. But I wasn't having fun, so I didn't. The controls in that game were terrible.
Lastly, a television show. I used to love Leverage. Great characters. But during the most recent couple seasons, the writing has gotten so so bad. There are huge loopholes, characters act in ways that don't make sense, and everyone overlooks things that are obvious. I blame the show's writers, who I can only imagine have changed since the show's outset.