Giving Up On Games
Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Mass Effect 3. I tried to play them – I really did – but slowly with both I have succumbed to distraction and boredom, and laid them aside. For the foreseeable future at least. Neither motivated me to play for more than one mission at a time, even doing that required effort. But I bought them, so there they sat, both with slow to non existent progress. I didn’t want to start anything new until I’d finished them so I just didn’t play much at all. Except Spelunky: game after game of Spelunky. It’s stupid really, but this actually worried me quite a bit. I wondered if I was going off games. Not liking something is one thing, but not playing it is really surprising for me.
I know why I didn’t play them, though. Because they’re not very good, or at least I didn’t get on with them. Mass Effect 3, for a game supposedly so epic, feels remarkably tame and small most of the time. The combat is functional, but does little for me and hardly connotes a war on a galactic scale. The chore of trundling around the ship and the citadel, seeing Shepard’s stupid jog cycle while going to check everything bored me to tears. So much of playing Mass Effect 3 was about negative reinforcement: checking everywhere, tinkering in the menus, talking to everyone to get rid of the anxiety of missing anything, rather than finding that stuff rewarding for its own sake. ME and ME2 were similarly bloated and awkward, but I loved them. The narratives around all of those quests were interesting, so such fastidiousness came naturally. ME3 on the other hand, while, from what I’ve experienced is well written, is all wrapped up in the end of the world, a story games have seen so many times. It felt dull, especially when paired with the sub-Gears of War combat. I just found it a slog.
Splinter Cell on the other hand is compromised. Conviction was a misguided reinvention, which I nevertheless enjoyed in a throwaway way, but it didn’t feel remotely like a Splinter Cell. Blacklist was meant to be a return to the series’ original tenets. Except it isn’t. It is still, at its core, Conviction but with Sam’s old goggles on. The fast movement speed, unsatisfying controls, and animation which snaps you places you didn’t want to go, are all clearly designed around a player who flies from cover to cover, Mark and Executing their way through. While the ‘Ghost’ play method is a welcome addition for series veterans, this is clearly not the type of play for which the controls and engine are best equipped to do; or more importantly, to do in a fun way that makes the player feel involved.
Conviction is caught between wanting to be like old Splinter Cells, but trying to reward every play-style, which AAA stealth games apparently need to do to sell nowadays. In MGS and the old Splinter Cells you could shoot everyone and be aggressive but you were never rewarded for it, because that wasn’t the point: the mechanics heavily encouraged and rewarded you for playing the game stealthily, such that doing so felt like an achievement. But in Blacklist, by framing your decision to either shoot your way through, use Mark and Execute, or be a ‘ghost’ as all equally viable play styles, it strips out some of the inherent satisfaction of being stealthy as it’s not necessary. Consequently, the only way to give stealthy play value is to give you more money for playing that way. The core mechanics don’t present stealth as the best, ideal option, so they have to artificially assign it more value with an unnecessary currency for unnecessary unlocks; superfluous mechanics there only to mask the unbalanced gameplay. They didn’t need to hold back objects in the original Splinter Cells, because the gameplay was a reward unto itself. That said once you commit to a play style it is still polished and fun. It is a muddled game, which didn’t engage me anywhere near as much as the old Splinter Cells, nor even Conviction, which was at least consistent in how it wanted you to play.
Yet, despite how easily I could identify my problems with these games, it took months to finally put each of these down. Trying in vain to play these games, even when I wasn’t enjoying them, is surely the antithesis of what games are about. Some of it is down to my own perceived requirements of what it is necessary to be a gamer, or game enthusiast, or whatever term one deems most appropriate. There are probably people who had Ulysses lying there intimidatingly on their bedside table for months, who experienced a similar desire to force themselves through something they weren’t enjoying. For whatever reason I’d assigned these games as significant, so felt I had to complete them. Consequently, stopping playing was tinged with shame.
This – from what I’ve heard on podcasts – is quite common. I imagine more than a few people had similar feelings regarding Dark Souls; being sat stony faced after seeing ‘YOU DIED’ for the 10th time in 30 minutes, wondering what makes this medieval action RPG so special that it warrants 70 hours of your life and repeated trips to a wiki. Or maybe it was Persona, or Shadow of the Colossus, or Braid, or Monkey Island, or Ocarina of Time, the list is almost endless. Not liking, or not playing, one of these key games can leave you feeling trapped. The consensus has spoken so you should play it (that is, if you want to prove you’re not one of those uncultured Neanderthals who only play CoD). Gaming has reached the status of art, in that it has acquired all the snobbery, and flaunting of cultural capital of every other art-form. Gaming now has its flâneurs and their boulevards are Twitter.
Mass Effect is one of these landmark video games. Despite some bile about its ending, its high quality is assumed and discussed in such a matter of fact way that I assumed me not liking it was down to me and not the game. I kept wanting to play it so I could join in, be a part of that conversation, about the ending, about the characters, about my Shepherd. But every time I find myself at the computer with time to play a game, I go to Spelunky or something else, feeling annoyed that I can’t motivate myself to play through this game that everyone says is important and brilliant.
This isn’t wholly about ‘gamer cred’, however. I played System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Ocarina of Time and many others years after they came out for that reason. I’ve liked some of the important games I’ve made a point of playing, some I’ve found more of a slog and given up on and felt no shame for doing so. I know that I don’t need to play all of ME3 to have an opinion on it and that stopping playing it doesn’t really mean anything other than that this game didn’t click with me. More significant than any outside influence in my feelings of unease around not playing these games and my reluctance to put them down, was the internal pressure from myself.
I’d personally assigned these games as important; Mass Effect because I think narrative in games is hugely interesting (and Mass Effect is an incredibly significant game in terms of how it approaches this). Splinter Cell is a stealth game, a genre which I like think I am well versed in and always curious about. Giving up on either felt like admitting defeat, that I wasn’t actually nearly as interested in those things, or committed enough to those interests – stopping them felt like it reflected on my tastes. Part of my identity as a games enthusiast is that I feel like I’m open to many games, even those I don’t find inherently compelling. It’s why I play things like Heavy Rain, because even when it ends up being embarrassingly awful, it’s interesting to see the results. So when I found myself finding it hard to play ME3 and Splinter Cell, which are demonstrably good games, I felt like it reflected poorly on my tastes and attitude as a gamer.
It could be argued that this is just an internalised version of the external pressure. These games are seen as important, and enthusiast gamer that I am think I ought to play them because they’re ‘interesting’, when really I just want to be part of that nebulous, but nevertheless very real crowd, that’s all about games as art. It’s probably a little of both.
But I didn’t finish them. It took a while but I didn’t entirely succumb to either external or internal pressure; and I’m so glad for it. What I experienced with Mass Effect and Splinter Cell was a tension between their design and the way I wanted to play them. The way I was trying to play was perfectly acceptable according to the games’ mechanics – encouraged actually – but not conducive to smooth, enjoyable play. I wanted to be a complete ghost in Splinter Cell, but in pushing the mechanics that way I saw how confused they were. I wanted to see everything in Mass Effect 3, and it wanted me to as well, but the structure made doing that tiresome. Had I shifted my play-styles in both I may have had more fun. Should I have?
I’d argue no, because games encourage us with their mechanics to play how we want; within the scope of their design, they invite this variety of approaches. An effect of this though is that not all of the options a game gives necessarily reap equal rewards. But where does one draw the line between blaming the game or the player for their bad experience? I’d argue that games are usually clear about how they want us to play, so unless someone is bullishly playing in a bizarre way, it’s usually down to the game. Splinter Cell positively encouraged, albeit cheaply, my Ghost play-style. Mass Effect 3 wanted me to be flitting around collecting side quests despite how tiresome it was and how much it undercut the apparent desperation in the narrative. If I had changed my play-style I may have ‘got through’ these games, maybe even had slightly more fun, but it would have been an implicit acceptance that the way I was playing it was wrong, which it wasn’t. In this case, changing my play-style just so I could get to the end would be just as much ‘giving up’ as stopping playing.
My decision to stop Mass Effect 3 and Splinter Cell: Blacklist was perfectly valid and usually it is a decision that’s not hard to make. However, the context of these games, particularly Mass Effect, made it a hard decision, as superficially, it made my opinion less valid, or just plain ‘wrong’. Before now, I’d always been someone who adhered to the idea that you only really have a valid opinion of something if you finish it. It’s clear that this is too simple a stance considering the scope of and variety of experiences associated with video games, though. The way we play, as much as what we play, reveals not only our personal tastes, but the strengths and weaknesses in a game’s design. Consequently, ‘giving up’ isn’t confined to flinging a controller down in defeat; it’s in the way we stop doing side quests two thirds the way through, or putting it down to easy, or spamming an exploit, or using a walkthrough when usually we wouldn’t. And sometimes, it’s finishing a game we don’t want to.
