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A long while back I wrote an essay on the drive to do everything in a game – to beat every boss, complete every challenge, earn every achievement, collect every item, and so on. In that essay I tackled the topic from the lens of exploring the drive itself. Why do people do this? Part of the point of that essay was trying to explore my own tendencies, as I had long been someone who felt this desire to get 100% of a game completed before putting it down.
But in a recent conversation with a friend I realized that there was something I had missed about the topic. As much as we often want to see the drive to complete everything as a purely internal force – a simple choice that the player makes – that view ignores the social pressures that exist to push people to do as much as possible. I had very vaguely touched upon that subject in the previous essay, but it is something that deserves further inquiry.
The idea that going for 100% completion is just a choice means that we can see that drive as something unhealthy. And as a consequence, we can look at people who behave like this in an almost compulsive manner, and say that they just need to stop. To put it another way, if someone says they’re trying to get all of the achievements in a game and we tell them they don’t need to do that, we’re pretending that there isn’t a massive system that is pushing them to get those achievements.
And perhaps part of the problem is that we take the idea of “needing to do something” in an overly literal way and give that concept too much power. None of us need to do anything with regards to video games. But we do those things anyway. Sometimes out of genuinely wanting to do those things, and sometimes because something in our minds won’t let us stop until we complete our goal.
So stepping back to think about the social context we exist in and how that context influences our choices and desires should put this into perspective. We don’t get to isolate one game or one drive or one player from that context and pretend that nothing else matters. We need to understand how all of these factors fit together.
Old Habits Die Hard
If we’re going to talk about social pressures and trying to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of a game possible, we have to go back in time.
Many people playing video games grew up playing them. It was a favorite hobby as a kid. But for those same kids, video games were an expensive hobby. Admittedly, it can still be an expensive hobby. But the fact that games cost a fair bit of money to purchase creates a whole system that impacts how people approach games.
Imagine, if you will, that you enjoy playing video games. But in turn, you only have so much money to buy new games every year. Let’s say something like three or four new games are all you can afford. If that’s what you can buy, that’s going to change how you view what games are worth purchasing.
To start, you’re probably going to be on the lookout for games that boast of long playtimes. A game that brags about having over 100 hours of content is going to be able to last longer than one that may only last ten or twenty hours. And you need this game to last for three or four months.
But even with a big game like that, you’re probably still going to end up with nothing left. 100 hours may seem like a lot of time, but if you have the time to spend on it you can get through that in a few weeks, even with the other concerns of daily or weekly life. Unless you have very little time to play games and thus the game progresses incredibly slowly, you’re going to be done with the game well before you can buy your next one.
So what do you do with this fact? Well, you find a reason to keep playing the game. You start a new playthrough and choose a different path. You play on a harder difficulty. You search for secrets. You make little challenges for yourself. Whatever you can think of to make sure that you can get everything out of the game, because the alternative is not having any game to play.
If any part of this story feels familiar, it probably reflects in some part your own childhood. Because as kids, we generally had very little money of our own but lots of free time. And if you had plenty of time to yourself, then games might have been the way you’d spend a lot of that time. Which in turn means that you’re churning through those games well before you have an opportunity to get something new.
The economics of games and the lack of options available to many gamers as kids helps push this habit to do everything possible. 100%ing a game was practically a necessity.
And this habit gets carried into our adult lives. Many gamers have been trained for years and years and years – in their most formative years, no less – to squeeze every ounce of enjoyment from a game that they could. Those neural pathways don’t just simply get broken and recreated because now we have a bit more spending money and freedom of choice. We are more likely to revert to those old habits, and it takes a great deal of new pressure and time and effort to really change those habits.
Achievement Hunting
I recall that the clearest marker for completing a game was going for achievements. These are external rewards created by developers to encourage particular challenges. The history of achievements isn’t really our concern here. They’ve become so common that they are, in some sense, a fact of gaming. All we can do is decide how we relate to them.
Achievements with their points, their little trophies, their shiny borders, all telling you whether a given achievement was something common (“almost everyone has this”) to rare (“only 1% of players have this!”) create a kind of pull. They introduce a list of objectives. They introduce a finality to play. And they introduce something to brag about.
In other words…did you really play the game if you didn’t beat it? And did you really beat it if you didn’t complete every achievement?
The answers here are absurdly easy. Of course you’ve played the game without beating it, and of course you’ve beat it without doing every single thing. But all of this coalesces to create a sense that “true” experience lies in completion. You can see a version of this in the dialogue surrounding reviews – does a reviewer need to complete a game to review it? The implication of this question is that a valid review must speak to the universe of the game’s content, and if that universe is not experienced, then a core part of the game has been overlooked.
And yet, we could just as easily place that marker of completion at 100% as we could getting to the credits. Experiencing “enough” of a game is an arbitrary concept. While many have determined that reaching the “end” of the game is sufficient to form an opinion, we could place that point anywhere we wanted.
All of this is to say that completionism as a tendency exists because the story of getting the “real” experience out of a game is powerful. That our identity or the validity of our views rests in our ability to get this “real” experience. And so if finishing the story is more real than just getting halfway through…surely playing beyond that is even more real. Surely experiencing every possible thing that the game has to offer is the most real, right?
You can see how this drive has less to do with mere boredom and more to do with a sense of pride. Each achievement is a challenge, and I must prove that I can overcome that challenge. Completing the game is proof of my status as a gamer, and I must display that status. My opinion of a game has worth through my experience, and so I must get the most experience to have the most worthy opinions.
If this thinking feels backwards, that might be a good thing.
Concluding Remarks
I wanted to revisit this topic because I started to realizing my own changing views on this topic. That as much as I often feel this impulse to seek 100%, that goal is not “natural.” It is artificial. It is something I and others have created. It is a goal which requires analysis because of how it impacts my behavior, and the behavior of those who are in a similar boat.
I also wanted to revisit it because social context has been on my mind for a while now. The ways in which our behaviors are shaped by the world around us – that what we “want” is not something that bubbles up purely from inside of us, but is a complex mixture of both our own desires, our histories, and what we observe or hear from or about others. Thinking about how all of that context influences our decisions puts those decisions into perspective. For those making the decisions, perhaps it can help them realize why they make the decisions they do and let them make different decisions if they so choose. For those observing the decisions, it helps to explain why those decisions get made.
The conclusion here is not as simple as “if you try to do all the quests or get all of the collectibles or get every achievement, you aren’t having fun and should stop.” If you find a game engaging, if you find the sidequests fun and searching for collectibles to be interesting and earning achievements to be rewarding, then you’re having fun. You’re playing the game the right way.
But reaching that conclusion means taking that step back. To ask why we engage in this behavior, and what we’re putting ourselves through. To ask if we’re enjoying the process, and if not to ask if we’re truly enjoying the result enough to overcome whatever frustrations the process may cause. It is through that introspection that we are able to more effectively choose how we engage with games and what we get out of them.
Abstracting Games 