Have you ever gotten to the end of a game (or some other point) and thought, "This is a complete waste of time?" If so, what do you think causes that feeling? Is it pacing? Subject matter? Story? Disorganized mechanics? I've been trying out a lot of indie games of late to try and familiarize myself with the competition. For me the biggest common factor seems to be not the production values, but that a lot of the games lack a sense of satisfying completion. It seems to be that the roles offered aren't very interesting, and so when you fulfill them it's "I won, yeah, but so what?" I realize this may be wildly different for each of us, and it's still quite nebulous for me. I'm not sure if I'm expecting far more than is possible, but it seems personally that I'm looking not just to win or beat the game, but for some sort of context that unifies all the game's themes and ties them into an appropriate ending. (It's sort of the same when you get to the end of a movie, but I'm having trouble describing it). Anyway, what is it like for you? Is a game just a game, meaning that it's not supposed "go somewhere." Or have you experienced "pointlessness" and thought about what it's made of?

Cpt & Nypyren, you both gave me a clue: I wonder if part of it is setting up expectations in advance. If you have a game that's a big movie production that ends with less than a stellar bang, I think you'll let people down. On the other hand, if it's a retro-style title with very simple visuals and mechanics, your expectations have appropriately been set.

Maybe that's one aspect.

Quote:Original post by Trapper Zoid
Are you talking specifically about a satisfying resolution in indie games?

Either, but like you I'm especially interested in indie titles.

I've even been thinking about this for games with high production values. Years behind the curve (and on the cheap :>) I've finished Half-Life 2 awhile back, and I thought about how appropriate the ending was given all that had come before, even Half-Life 1. (It was as ambiguous as I expected, given Gordon's lot, and had a giant machine puzzle at the very end.)

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I'm guessing that you're trialling a specific genre of games: many indie games don't really have much plot, especially the puzzle games.

I'm trying lots of strategy and RPG games at the moment. I take your point about the plot (funny how many casual indie puzzler's have one!). A friend suggested that only games with a plot can have a thematic closure that's similar to what we find so satisfying in other media, but I'm not sure I agree.

It feels more like a promise is made about your role and in our heads it comes with the background baggage of inherent expectations. If you're given the role of Godzilla, for instance, but not allowed to smash the city, maybe you feel ripped off?

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In general, when I feel a game is a waste of time it's more a matter of pacing. If nothing much has happened in an hour of game play, I'll start to strongly feel whether the payoff of playing the game is worth it. This doesn't happen in games that keep throwing challenges at me.

Pacing's a good one. Out of curiosity, did you just find it too easy or did you have a series of expectations based on the premise of the game?

Computer games pretty much by definition need to be scorable in some way that both the software and the player can understand, which usually means defining some overall goal and subgoals which contribute to the overall one. If you're talking about a story-based game, stories structurally need to have endings and the purpose of the ending includes pronouncing some sort or moral judgment or extracting a philosophical moral from the story, as well as releasing the suspenseful and emotional tension that has kept the audience following the story until the end. MMOs are not designed to have satisfying endings because when they player feels satisfied, they stop playing, and MMOs want players to keep playing forever. But if you look at non-procedurally generated single-player games from Mario to Final Fantasy to Zelda to Myst, they generally have dramatic endings which show the player's long effort as having been of acceptable or impressive quality and having finally accomplished some important overall goal - saving the world, defeating the biggest baddest villain, rescuing the mistreated children or damsel in distress, going from rags to riches, personal transformation into something beyond human, establishing an enduring state of safety, understanding a long-bothersome mystery, finally exacting revenge, overcoming a personal trauma, etc.

The things that interfere with this sort of satisfaction and feeling of meaningfulness can be structural problems such as not having an ending, disagreement of the player with the moral presented, the player's judgment that the story as a whole is something they have seen more than enough times already or irrelevant to the player's internal concerns.