Opinion: When Should Games Say Goodbye?
July 22, 2008 12:00 AM | Simon Carless
[In this opinion piece, game commentator Duncan Fyfe takes a look at how and when games end - citing titles from BioShock to Portal and beyond to ask how to set expectations and deliver on them for game endings.]
In video games, the ones that tell the player a long, linear story, the ending is usually an uncertain proposition. Prose and film teach an audience to expect three-act structures and considered pacing in storytelling.
Instead, games have what Warren Spector calls the second-act problem; where act one is the intro movie, act three is the outro movie, and in between is the game.
Games are structured less like a novel and more like an anthology; an arbitrary number of assembled vignettes, thematically united in post-production. A collection of missions and quests that exist because one designer had a cool idea for a boat chase sequence and another designer had an awesome idea for a stealth mission. It's a problem of pacing, and it relates directly to the presupposed need for games to have fifteen-hour narratives.
I think this issue is compounded by another: players don't know how long a game is. You can hold a novel in your hands and feel the weight of the pages. An album has its track listing printed on the back.
A television season consists of a predetermined number of episodes with those episodes at a fixed length. A movie is somewhere between 90 and 180 minutes. No such guidelines with video games. They lack an intuitive metric: it'll fall between one and one hundred hours.

If players don't know when to expect the real ending then they'll have to guess. Maybe after this mission in GTA we'll get to the endgame. Wait, no, one more thing. One more thing after that. With these interminable games that try for an engrossing narrative, players just get tired. Will it ever actually end?
Fallout is based on the premise that the player must find this water chip. It takes a long time, it's an exhausting journey, you find it and return home victorious. And then... one more thing... and you're actually only halfway through.
Objectively, there's nothing wrong with the content. But expectations frame experience, and the game had just prepared the player to say goodbye, not to enjoy another ten hours. Having to take a game at its word, players feel betrayed and jerked around. We react to a piece of content differently if we know it's the ending.
When we watch the season finale of a TV show, we know that this time the characters are really in danger. With a video game the player has no idea. Is this thing going to go on for another hour? Or five? Or ten? Where the hell am I in this story?
I'm not sure many developers are aware that this can be a problem; like how Ken Levine has said he didn't anticipate the ugly comedown from the stratospheric highs of BioShock's Andrew Ryan scene.

Expectations are everything. The movie Gone, Baby, Gone has a fake ending at about the 70-minute mark, but the audience doesn't start leaving the theater. They know how long a movie is and they're mentally prepared for the remainder of the film. I don't think Fallout players would be as bummed out if they found the water chip at the 70-minute mark.
But no one knows how long Fallout is, like how no one knows if Return of the King's running time is three hours and two minutes or three hours and four minutes. The movie continues long past the point where anyone was interested.
One more thing. One more mission, one more quest, one more rung in a ladder carved from monotony and you have only the vaguest of assurances that the ladder ever stops. I wonder why people don't finish games.
Oblivion's core story is paced terribly, which is to say it's paced like a video game. One more thing. One more lost object to find. That's at least consistent with Oblivion's general M.O. as a treasure-hunting smorgasbord, and Mass Effect doesn't handle that dichotomy nearly so well; instead redefining 'sidequest' as a repetitive grind existing at the periphery of the story.
BioWare dumps a whole lot of extra content on the player for the purposes of making Mass Effect long enough to count as a conventional video game. It dilutes the tightly focused, very linear narrative that they're trying to showcase. It's also why games like GTA that measure game completion with a percentage stat don't really work, since it can take players five times as long to get from 76% to 77% as it can from 1% to 2%.
Subquests aside, Mass Effect is able to manage player expectations of length. After act one, you get on the spaceship and you're given a certain number of planets to visit.
Those are goalposts; checkpoints by which the player can measure their progress in the second act, and theoretically the third act should be as long as the first. See? Easy. Knights of the Old Republic did that, Monkey Island 2 did that. No unpleasant surprises and the player is never unintentionally misled through poor design.

Some games telegraph their length with exceptional results. Right up front, Portal tells you: 19 rooms. Indeed there are, and so the player never thinks that room 15 might actually be a plot-critical gameplay escalation instead of a puzzle chamber.
Portal continues after 19, of course, but here it works. It capitalizes on the players' perception that the game is over; the "epilogue" comes as an intentional surprise more of the same. When you anticipate player psychology as Valve clearly does, then you can work with it.
You know how everyone in the world is able to pinpoint the exact moment that A.I. should have ended? Spielberg kept telling the viewer "one more thing", and the more times he said it, the worse the movie got.
Unless you're Portal, unless you know what you're doing, when players think a game is ending, they should be right. If a game prompts players to say goodbye, then, one way or another, they will.
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10 Comments
Very interesting observation that players don't know the length of the game from the outset as opposed to the number of pages in a book or tracks on a cd. Very interesting indeed.
I would have liked to see the positive example of Portal explored more. I was a great fan of the twist in Portal where the 19th floor wasn't, in fact, the ending. But I fail to see how this is any different from obtaining the water chip not being the end of Fallout, but they may simply be because I haven't played Fallout.
If a universal unit to measure game length could be invented and stuck on the back of game cases like duration is stuck on the back of movies, then game endings could be better off for it. I think its defining such a unit that is going to be difficult.
Brendan | July 22, 2008 1:56 AM
It also largely changes from game to game. Pokemon has not got an exciting narrative but I remember being 13 and completing Silver only to find I then got to go back to the island from the first game and keep playing. It was great! I wanted more. But in GTA4...the fake ending (or what felt like it should have been the ending) kept rearing its ugly head time and time again.
Some films I go in knowing how long they are, but there are plenty I don't. the difference between a 90 minute flick and a 180 flick is huge! Its a smaller scale but I think sometimes films can suffer from the same "when will this end?" feeling. Generally going into a game you have a rough idea how long it will take, based on the genre anyway.
However I largely agree with you... ha
Keep it up :)
Glenn
Glenn | July 22, 2008 3:54 AM
I agree this is a problem and honestly I'll often check message boards or FAQs to get a game's estimated length before I start playing it just so I'll have some idea if I'm really at the end or not.
From a narrative point of view I also object to the sudden difficulty spike at the end of many games. If the narrative is good and I'm enjoying it, and I'm clearly at the climax of the story, I hate running into a boss battle that takes me 3 frustrating nights of playing to get past after I've been clearing several levels/missions per night before the sudden almost-impossible finishing boss. That can ruin a whole game for me.
As an aside: Not only does game length impact narrative but the overall decision of whether I want to play through a game. If I get a new title and its interesting but some aspect of the gameplay annoys me, I might just deal with it for a 10 hour game, but if its a 50 hour game I'll shelve it.
Pete S | July 22, 2008 4:45 AM
i like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. i don't finish most games [i play way to many] but the games i do beat tell me how many levels there are. now sure, there could be a surprise at the end [Portal] or a cliffhanger, but that's bonus for me.
and i understand some game designers don't want you to know how far in you are. they want you to experience the game as if your living it [which is fine]. but they need to drop some clues. like during a loading screen, or call the last level "The Final Battle"... something that would give the gamer a clue on how far they are [but not taking the gamer out of the game's atmosphere].
heavyness | July 22, 2008 10:08 AM
Game length isn't terribly important to me compared to the actual pacing. It doesn't matter if the game is 8 hours or 40 hours, if it's comprised of enough material for a game a third the length and then stretched out with repetitive gameplay and recycled bits of story then I'm going to be less inclined to enjoy it than a game consisting of varied scenarios and evolving gameplay.
I recently suffered through Assassin's Creed, which would have made an awesome 3 hour game but was stretched out to about three+ times that length by having you repeat the same basic mission over and over and over again for those little scraps of story that didn't actually come together until the end. Initially it was a lot of fun, but once you realize that the gameplay never really changes and the combat never really gets any deeper (counter, counter, counter, counter, counter), it all goes sharply downhill. The ending couldn't come soon enough because, let's face it, after the first three chapters I'd already done all there was to do in the game anyway.
RoushiMSX | July 22, 2008 3:36 PM
Damn. That was a good read.
Brent | July 22, 2008 10:11 PM
Great article.
Silent Hill 4: The Room is my favorite example of this -- finishing all the missions and then being ordered back through every single one. Granted, this is hardly ever a good design decision, but since I believed I was actually reaching the climax about halfway through the game, a brick wall came down in my head.
Never before, and never since, have I lost interest in a video game so quickly.
But I feel you on Bioshock as well. This begs the question, which is worse? A game that you don't finish because you didn't want "one more thing," or a game whose indulgences you followed to the end but were soured on as a result?
Jared | July 22, 2008 10:15 PM
I'm with you on this, my main argument is that games are made and marketed on an "amazing" and "new" device to grab you (say, a new controller device, or a new form of physics, or an engine trick), but don't deliver the goods past the novelty (the 15% mark).
I hate to say it, but I got tired of Half-life 2 by the half-way mark, and although it's an excellent game, it just can't carry itself on a single premise. The same goes for most of the "next-generation" games.
The last time I played agame which paced itself correctly was Monkey Island, it got inside your head, and laid the path in front of you, it even gave cutscenes and a small view of QTEs.
Can we PLEASE get some people in who realise these gaes ARE GAMES - not just someone who's making a script and a game for their own thrills?
Chris | July 23, 2008 11:16 AM
Final Fantasy Tactics A2 does this via a book on the top screen that slowly fills up with fake text (lines), with the PC being told that he gets to go home when the book is full.
Ian | July 24, 2008 1:06 PM
Very good article.
However, interestingly enough Portal annoyed the hell out of me by going on for ages after finishing the first 19 levels. What probably didn't help is that the rest of the game was alot less interesting (until the end fight).
Quantum | July 28, 2008 1:02 PM