11 thoughts on “Deep in the Human Unconscious”

  1. Very, very deep…
    Rarely emerges.

    “Humans aren’t a rational species; they are a rationalizing one. ”

    Robert Anson Heinlein.

  2. Just stumbled on this interview that relates.

    Amy Hennig Explains Industry’s Problem With Players Never Finishing Stories – IGN Unfiltered
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZLROqARRXo

    This is about video games, and how the individual games have become so long that people are not able to finish the full story arc. People want a five – ten hour game that clearly lands the story.

    I think of the Myst series that I keep buying as they release the games to run on newer systems. I want to be able to have a beginning-middle-end on a story that matters.

    • Sometimes the journey is the reward. (Or the gameplay.)
      Also, most games have predictable and trite endings anyway.

      The Mass Effect 1’s of the industry are few in far between.

      Like, I’ve never bothered to finish FALLOUT 4 because the settlement building appeals more to me than finding the missing baby. Especially since it doesn’t take a cat to figure out what happened.

      And that’s a WRPGs, where story is a key component.

      • And then you have the Mass Effect 3’s, where the ending is not trite and predictable because the writing staff had no idea where to go and made it terrible.

        • Absolutely.
          Although more accurately, they had three ideas and lacked the courage to pick one. So they punted.

          Any of the four options floated would’ve worked. They chose the fifth, the one that didn’t. Bioware has gone downhill since.

          Bethesda seems to be following.

          Obsidian might be the last survivor.
          Where is Schilling when we need him?

    • I didn’t know this was a thing. I almost always finish games. But then, until recently, I mostly bought Bioware games. And their spin-off, Obsidian. I think the only Blizzard game I played was Diablo — Gog.com has just released a re-mastered version if you’re feeling nostalgic.

      I tend to think of video games the way I think of novels vs. short stories: I want to settle in and get immersed. I’ve always liked being able to take a few months to play a game, then play the expansion + DLCs. You could spend $60 for a year’s worth of entertainment, especially if a game had high replay value. I didn’t even miss not having a TV back when I was playing Mass Effect & Dragon Age. If a game is only five to 10 hours, then it’s suitable for a rainy afternoon … but I wouldn’t pay $60 for it. More like the cost of a paperback.

      Amy Henning didn’t say why people aren’t completing games, though. That would be the thing to explore: are the games unfinished because few people want to play even fun games (Mass Effect) for 40+ hours? Or are they unfinished because the game is boring? Someone in the comments section of that video mentioned fetch quests. Those, and a few others I can think of, would sour me on a game if that was the bulk of the game play.

      Edited to add: I just realized, I never finished Diablo II. I had gone away to college, and I never tried to copy it onto my computer. I left it at home since my brother was playing it. I do recall writing a demon-killing tutorial based on DII for a class assignment, though.

      Well, hopefully Gog.com will get it eventually, and I’ll see if I missed anything. But it’s rare for me to not finish games when there aren’t game-stopping bugs. I’m guessing I’m an outlier here.

        • Ah! That seems a little different, though. I got the impression Henning was disappointed people weren’t finishing games, and I thought was she was talking about Mass Effect types. I’ve mostly seen people moan about how excruciating Dark Souls is to play. It just sounded irritating, so I never picked it up to begin with.

          With that in mind, the article needs to also make it clearer if Dark Souls-types or Mass Effect-types are the games that new players are rejecting. I’d be disappointed if it turns out it’s the latter.

          But for the type of games I like, Obsidian does appear to be the last hope. Ironically, I haven’t finished their Pillars of Eternity, but that’s for unrelated reasons 🙂

          • These days there’s different kinds of story games ranging from classic wrpgs like Mass Effect and Outer Worlds to shooters with a narrative, like the Halos and Borderlands.

            The shooters are the ones they refer to as having 10 hours of story (in campaign mode) because the bulk of the game’s value to players is in the online multiplayer modes. There really is a lot of money in that space and it is the pursuit of that money that has led both BioWare and Bethesda astray.

            Most of the cheering for Outer Worlds is precisely because it has no online multiplayer. They are the last hope for pure single player RPGS on console.

            • I somehow did not hear about OuterWorlds. It’s been ages since I’ve looked at the Escapist or other game sites, so that’s likely why I missed it. Now I’ve seen the trailer and it looks like fun. It’s going on my radar now. This is the kind of game I want to keep getting made, so the Henning interview was jarring.

              Agreed about the online-player modes leading BioWare astray. There’s something to be said for specializing, rather than trying to be all things to all people. And they were the heavyweight champions in the single player RPG arena.

              • If you hadn’t heard about Outer Worlds (and yes, it looks to be loads of goofy fun) you may not have heard that OBSIDIAN is getting out of the work-for-hire business.

                They now have Microsoft’s deep pockets behind them so their next games will be all theirs. They’ll probably be staffing up a bit as they’ll no longer have to beg for publisher support to do the games they want to do.

                (Anybody curious about the game in question:
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4tiIhZnVqs)

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