The Game Is Not Over
by Samuel
So you’ve just completed the game you’ve been playing for the last couple of weeks; finished the single-player campaign, trounced your friends online at the multiplayer mode, unlocked all the bonuses, found all the secrets, and collected as many of the achievements and trophies as you can be bothered with. This game is officially over, done with, nothing left in it. Or is there?
Now, at this point, having seemingly nothing left, a lot of gamers would get up with a satisfied expression, congratulate themselves on a job well done and another title knocked off their to-do list, pop the disk out of the drive, and then toddle down to the games shop with it and part exchange it for the next big game. Alternately, they might sell it on eBay if they think they can get more for it directly from the second hand market than GAME or Gamestation will offer in terms of credit. And the game is promptly forgotten for the next one, which in turn will one day go the same way as its predecessor.
Now, a second hypothetical scenario. You’ve just completed watching a boxset of your favourite TV series on DVD that you’ve been ploughing your way steadily through for the last couple of weeks; finished all the main plotlines, experienced the character arcs and development, watched all the bonus material, listened to the audio commentaries. This series is officially over, done with, nothing left in it. You get up, pop the disk out of the drive and… put it back on your shelf in pride of place in your DVD collection.
I don’t understand this. I really don’t. The same people who think nothing of reselling a game they loved simply because they have completed it once or twice, don’t do that with films or TV shows they have on DVD, and fundamentally there isn’t much difference.
Now the main argument I have heard when posing this question in the past to friends is that games tend to have a sequel come out every year or every other year that are basically the same thing, but slightly improved, or altered in some way, meaning that you don’t really need to hang on the original. Graphics get better, budgets get bigger, technology moves on, and they move with the times. Not to mention, games are bloody expensive, and a large collection in your house is costly both in terms of cash and space.
A DVD collection such as this isn't exactly unheard of in a lot of typically modern households, but a gaming collection this size would be much harder to find
I don’t buy into this argument. You can say much the same about films. The Rocky films, or Alien films, or Star Wars films, are basically the same thing every time, only a few years apart, with occasional formula tweaks, better special effects, bigger budgets, and taking advantage of improvements in technology. Worse still, the stories in films tend to get lazier and worse much sooner than the stories in games. The Rocky and Star Wars films, again, are fine for the first two or three, and then suddenly nosedive into being completely crap. Loads of series do this. I saw Police Academy 7 last night by accident, and I’ve not completely recovered from the serious brain damage I received from the strain of trying to reconcile that tripe with my memories of the earlier entries. The best analogy in gaming I can think of off the top of my head, with a long-running franchise that sells in the millions, if not billions, is Final Fantasy. And arguably Final Fantasy was consistently excellent for at least the first ten games in the main franchise. But how many of you reading this have all of the Rocky films or Star Wars films on your shelf, and how many of you have all the Final Fantasy games doing the same? A friend of mine who considers himself an even bigger gamer than I am recently noticed that I have every single Final Fantasy title in mint condition in my collection, and his jaw decided it needed to be on the ground floor, so surprised was he to see such a display.
Star Wars... boy meets droid, droid conveniently forgets that it knows who Darth Vader is and that boy is Vader's kid. Spoiler alert, by the way.
Personally I don’t sell or part-exchange my old games. I cherish them in much the same way I cherish my favourite films or TV shows, displaying them proudly on my bookcases in the open, organised by system and alphabet, pulling them out to relive all my favourite characters and moments again when the feeling of nostalgia hits me. Some titles, such as UFO: Enemy Unknown, Anno 1604, Final Fantasy VIII, Command & Conquer Red Alert, Ace Combat V, Legend of Zelda Windwaker, and Fire Emblem VII, get played through in marathon sessions at least once every year, becoming traditional in the same way as Lord of the Rings, the Studio Ghibli films, Ghost in the Shell, Blackadder, Father Ted, Fawlty Towers and Red Dwarf are all guaranteed a marathon session annually in my house. In time more modern classics like Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed will join them in passing into that pantheon of legendary must-relive games.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still play the sequels that will inevitably follow in their wake, and I know only too well how hard it can be at times to find the money to pay for my continued passion. Many times I have told myself that this will be my final console generation, only to be lured back, protesting feebly, by the siren call of my favourite franchises’ latest efforts. But I’ll still always have that same excitement playing some of the older games as I had when they first arrived and I first tore off the crisp new plastic shrinkwrap and gently placed the disk on the tray or the cartridge in the slot, and nobody can ever take that away from me, or tell me that gaming is any more transient, or less a noble or artistic thing than a motion picture.
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I can agree with everything your saying, alas I don’t get much money so alot of the time I resort to trading in games. And some of the games I miss the most are my precious Sonic games, particularly Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog. Really wish they hadn’t left the house. =[
There simply isn’t the same appeal to me of going and re-playing a story-driven game as there is to re-watching a good film.
I think the reasons for this are complicated.
I agree with Cuddleswick. I just (today in fact) sold my copy of Assassins Creed 2 on Play.com, I invested a good 15 hours worth of my time playing this game and I throughly enjoyed it, however now that I have experienced all it has to offer I don’t really fancy spending that time doing it all over again. I know that watching a film is the same in the respect that it is the same film no matter how many times you watch it, however it isn’t 15 hours worth of film.
Its not just the time required to fully enjoy a game there is the matter of effort involved also. Whilst playing a game your going to come across difficult sections that really need you to focus fully on what your doing. In contrast with a film, 9 times out of 10 you can just sit back, disengage the brain and watch. Its only films with really complicated plot lines where you need to actually pay attention.
Thats just two reasons that I can think of for not keeping hold of every game I own and Im sure others can think of more. I’m not trying to shoot this post down or anything I just don’t think that it is a fair comparison. There are exceptions to every rule of course, I’ve got an old copy of FFVII sitting on my shelf at home which I’ll never get rid off.
I can really see both sides of the coin. I’ve played Oblivion through three times so far, and only stopped my fourth playthrough to start another immersive game but each of my Oblivion playthroughs were more than 200 hours of me sitting in front of a screen doing very little else with my time. When I completed Fallout 3 I swore I’d never play through it again as it’s not as visually stimulating as Oblivion (ie mostly sepia) but I know now that I WILL play it through at least another once.
In contrast, however, I have shelves full of games that I’ve either never played at all or have played and not enjoyed enough to play again. The part of me that paid “good money” for the games is preventing me from trading them in because I know I’ll get a pittance for them. I recently traded in a bunch of games for the very first time, including two that were still sealed, and got a whopping £25 exchange which I used towards my Razer keyboard. After the thrill of having a shiny black keyboard with blue lights started to fade… I realised that I’d just traded in around £400 of games (ie ten x £40) for a combined total that was less than one game brand new. That’s an awful feeling, I’d honestly rather have them sit on my shelf gathering dust than get £2 trade-in value on them and actually lose £38 of my very hard earned cash.
I’m the same with DVDs though, we must have somewhere between 500 and 1000 DVDs and I guarantee that we don’t watch any more than 2-3 a year now so they’re all just sitting there doing nothing… but they’re still ours.
I think it’s a very individual thing – whether you hang on to a game or trade it in, but I work too hard to have someone offer me £2 for something that I spent £40 on a year ago, so I’ll have to hang on to what I’ve got. I may never play them again though. In fact, probably not.
I think MarkuzR is probably in the right of it, that it’s individual.
Ste, for my part, I usually go for films that require some amount of effort to watch, not always, but the simpler or stupider or broader a film is, the more chance I’m going to hate it with every fibre of my being, and I play games that mostly require effort to play as well. Presented with usually inaccurate subtitles when I started to get into foreign film, I went out and learned some new languages so I wasn’t relying on someone else’s broken interpretation. So that whole “I do this to disengage my brain” mentality flies completely over my head. In some ways I actually find it abhorrent. But then, I’ve never been able to switch off. Even sleeping is a struggle sometimes. Most of the time, if I’m honest. So I can understand that most people want something they can relax with, and being made to think by the same thing twice is anathema to them, but I also don’t understand it. I understand it to be a thing that is, I don’t understand why. Finding mental stimulation is the whole objective of my being. Finding it twice or more in the same place represents an incredible value, not something to throw away as fast and as hard as I can, and at ridiculous monetary loss.
I did swap a couple of games once. Because I had two copies of them after Christmas one year. And even then afterwards I felt bad about it, because a) I felt ripped off, and b) I couldn’t help thinking that if one copy had been accidentally damaged, I would have had a back-up.
Anyway. As ever, like the pictures you attached to this, MarkuzR. I had to look twice at the shot of the DVD collection, because that’s pretty much how mine looks. A lot of the titles are the same even, the Star Trek, Stargate, and the anime etc. For a moment I thought maybe you broke into my house and took pictures; until I noticed a major difference – those shelves have space on them still. Luxury! What I wouldn’t give for more space, I’ve started to pile DVDs in a wardrobe.
Our DVD collection annoys a lot of other collectors. Since moving here, it’s never been alphabetised… not even close. To make matters worse, every row of DVDs is two deep and the shelves are around 6-8ft high so you can’t even see into the back row of the first shelf. The rest are ok and, thanks to my big hands, I can just select a bunch of 10 movies at a time, slide them to the front of the shelf so I can look behind and see what movies are hiding in the shadows. It’s very impractical, but I’ve had that particular set of shelving for maybe 15 years now and can’t afford to replace it. Actually, when I got the gaming room carpetted (that’s where the majority of the DVDs are) I asked them to carpet AROUND the shelves because I can’t even move them an inch anymore. They are THAT buggered. When we next have to move, they’ll simply disintegrate! Thankfully, we have several guest rooms so we’ve started to fill up the bookcases in the guest rooms to save us from having them lying around the place. Our lounge has a third of the rarer box sets, there’s a large bookcase outside the downstairs guest room with another third of the box sets and Lorna’s office has the rest laid out along the top of her library wall.
When we moved here, we picked out something like 120 movies and gave them to a charity boot sale just to make it easier to move. I think we’ll end up doing the same when it comes to moving from here… there are just too many for it to be practical anymore. Sometimes I hate being a collector. Then I look at the collection and I change my mind
I would probably be able to spend days just looking at the covers and backs of all those DVDs. I’d be there, sorting out the ones I simply must see now, the ones I must see soon, the ones I must see, the ones I must see again and so on and so forth.
Back to the feeling a compulsion to re-watch movies rather than re-play games:
I think part of it, for me, is that the “mental stimulation” just isn’t there with most games the second time through. Be it through having to play large sections of gameplay I’ve played before (like Ste alluded to I think) to get to the intelligent or thought-provoking bits, or through just the lessened artistic impact a game would generally have next to a great movie, to me. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
For example, yes, I could go through and re-play Bioshock to the point of the big twist, just to experience it again. But I have to play for 6 or so hours of stuff I’ve already seen twice before, just for 2 minutes of pay-off (that I could probably watch on youtube).
Or I could stick Pulp Fiction in, and be “mentally stimulated” for over two hours solidly, with each and every scene holding worth and relevance and engaging me fully despite the fact I’ve seen the movie at least 10 times before.
I think there is a clear difference between playing through a story-driven game again and watching a movie again. I’m not saying one is more worthy than the other. I’m saying that I think there are valid and logical reasons why many people don’t go back and re-play their old games and yet they do re-watch their old films.
Your collection actually trumps mine, MarkuzR. Damn. I just have four massive bookcases in my bedroom, and a cabinet in the living room. And the increasingly large pile in the bottom of my wardrobe. The cabinet in the living room is three rows deep, but my mother bought it, it wasn’t my idea. Like you, I can pick out about 8 or 10 DVDs at a time with my meat shovels, but it starts to look like a hobbit robbing a DVD shop when I want one that’s right at the back and I have to pull out 2 rows of DVDs, stacked up on the living room floor around me haphazardly, just to get at it.
Of course, my games collection is just as large as my DVD one, and my books are legion; I make the local public library seem small. That’s probably what it is. I waste all my money in three different directions equally, not just one, heh.
You know, the three of us are probably supporting a lot of people’s jobs by collecting all this stuff.
It IS such a shame that we can never experience that “first time feeling” again isn’t it? All those little things that once provoked the reaction of “ooooh” or “wow” become suddenly all too pedestrian when they’re nothing more than just part of the game. I remember the first time I managed to capture a live Sectoid in UFO: Enemy Unknown and the exhiliration of knowing that my alien containment facility would actually be put to good use. I remember the first time I picked a lock in Oblivion, being excited about the fact anyone could come along and catch me doing it. The first time I wandered into Super Duper Mart in Fallout 3 when I had such mediocre weaponry, only to discover a legion of perhaps 12-15 Raiders holding vigil… wow.
If only we could forget in order to remember.
Yes, so true. I’d love to go back and see The Sixth Sense again for the first time, for example.
Good post. I agree it is an odd thing when folk will rush out to trade in games so willingly compared to films, but I suppose they have their reasons. Like Mark, I recently traded in a stack of games to get a pittance off of a copy of Saboteur and I felt like shit. I wished I had just hung onto the games and paid full whack…the trade in prices are appalling. Lately I’ve been selling off a few games here and there on Ebay and it is a horrible thing…like pulling teeth. I may not use them or will ever use them, but they hurt!
I think with games it is tricky because there is more to them than simply staring at the screen. You have to relearn the controls, kick the old muscle memory back into gear and make an effort. Those fiddly, jumpy, annoying bits will still be fiddly, jumpy, and annoying and chances are you won’t remember where the hell this or that thing was…it takes more effort and finger wear. However, regular games that people chew through and trade I can understand more, but if you really loved a game, i don’t understand how you could ever let it go. Some games I will never, ever get rid of, whether it is down to the game itself, or simply the nostalgia attached to it of easier, or perhaps happier times.