It’s hard to shrug off a video game simply because it has a lot of useless filler. We have a desire to complete games, sometimes regardless of how stupid or contrite some of the content is. What is it really that we want to do when we pick up a video game? Learn the controls, get the story, see the ending? The truth is that most of us simply want to have fun, and that’s only possible in the throes of boredom.
I say this because there’s been some pushback on “open world” games. Some see it as six hours of content spaced out into an 80-hour game. Some believe that these games are artificially extended to give the illusion of more content. This can be the case if your interests are purely story based, but larger worlds often provide great opportunities. What seems to lengthen the game and make it more difficult actually makes the game more fun to play.
Anything that’s stretched out for more than a couple of hours may be deliberately wasting your time. It’s filled with un-fun parts that seemingly exist purely to impede you. Why would we ever bother to complete a game like “Final Fantasy VII” when we know it’s going to have tons of filler content with little to no change in actual gameplay?
It seems a great deal of content is getting in the way of experiencing the actual game. Some critics identify this as a problem with pacing. This conclusion results from a comparison of video games to movies. The narrative structure of a video game is tricky. It’s hard to mesh gameplay with story and what typically happens is that the story is spaced out into non-playable cutscenes, while gameplay exists in its own sphere. In fact, it’s not uncommon to call the separated bits the “movie” and everything else the game.
The reality behind gaming is that boredom leads to excitement. You can put a player through some incredibly awful experiences, but so long as the player knows that there’s a potential for excitement, that experience becomes worth it. It’s the reason why an awful game can be incredibly enjoyable, because there’s that element of randomness, that unique and perhaps unintended experience that we remember. Granted, a game can be disappointing, playing on our expectations and providing no memorable experience. But “fun” is a complicated thing. I think about how fun it was playing “007 Golden Eye” with my friend, even when the reality was we were often terrified by high-difficulty computers, fearful of every corner or dead end. It’s the experience that the player brought to the game that we held so dear. So long as that experience exists, it makes the game worth playing to completion.
A game that isn’t fun for the first hour is probably not a good game for you to play. But a game that gives you everything right at the start wouldn’t be fun either. A game shouldn’t start with the fun part of the game either. In some way, you have to earn your fun. That’s what games have always been. A good game doesn’t need a story to tell you to beat the next level. So long as there’s that opportunity of excitement, it’s worth playing until there’s nothing left. We have the capacity to create, which is what makes games so fun. The term “end game” exists to create more content in a game. It’s a conversation about what there is to do when you’re brushing the edges of possibility, because there’s always more to do in a game.