Boss Rush Banter: Why Don’t We Finish Our Games?

As gamers, we all have a point of pride when we roll the final credits on a game and finish it. Some of us play games for entertainment, while others play just to pass the time. Gamers enjoy the hobby of playing video games in many different ways but there’s one thing practically every gamer has in common with one another — we all have games that we have not finished.

Currently, we are in the ninth generation of console gaming with ambitious beginnings tracing back to the first home consoles going all the way back to 1972. In that span of fifty-two years, you’d be hard-pressed to find a gamer that has completed or beaten every single video game they have played. Our backlog of games just keeps growing and growing with barely a sign of relenting and, if you were to go to your cabinet and look around, you’d very well find more than one game taunting you from the safety of their shelves.

For today’s Boss Rush Banter, we ask the question: “Why don’t we finish our games?”

There’s no concrete answer for why we don’t (or can’t) finish our video games. As gamers, we have the best of intentions most of the time when we purchase a game or download it from one of the major outlets that offer plays (Game Pass, PlayStation Plus, etc.), but we find ourselves in that rut where we have plenty of games in our libraries yet have the most dismal of completion records.

Speaking for myself, a major reason why I have a hard time completing games is simply the fact that gaming seems like a chore sometimes. On the one hand, games have reached this trend of where they are getting longer and longer and demanding more of your attention these days. I find myself losing a lot of steam playing the games that I truly wanted to play after putting in just enough work to get out of the tutorials.

Don’t get it confused, I personally love video games. I write for a wonderful gaming outlet here at Boss Rush, I have a weekly podcast where my friends and I talk about video games. I own two of the current consoles and have a PC that’s geared towards gaming and streaming. So, taking all of that into account, I play a lot of games. But also, I own a lot of games that, even though they fuel my need for playing games, I just can’t seem to play through to completion.

Add that to the fact that it always seems that games are always releasing at a rapid-fire pace, and suddenly, you have a bookcase filled with recently released games that you now have to allocate time to play. Here’s a quick example of what I’m working with. Currently, I am playing Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak which is currently still steadily releasing new content for its endgame, so, I’m basically grinding. There’s also Saints Row (2022) which was released this past August that I’m playing — or finding time to play, I should say. I also picked up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (thank you PC Game Pass), Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered on PC which I never beat the original PS4 game from 2018, and I picked up The Diofield Chronicle over the weekend because I need to have my tactical RPG gaming fix.

That’s a lot of games.

With the exception of The Diofield Chronicle, I’ve started playing all of those games but have already found myself lacking the drive to play any of them seriously. And, to add insult to injury, I caught myself spending a meager couple of hours just playing, and actually beating, Mega Man 3!

So, what is it? Are there simply too many games to play that it’s giving us really terrible “gaming ADHD”? Are games getting more and more time-consuming? Are the electronic fantasy worlds we find ourselves diving into getting so complex that we get buried underneath layers of brain-numbing execution? Is it FOMO?

Or are we simply getting burned out on playing video games but are trying to keep up the status quo that we “like to game”?

I don’t have a definite answer to any of those questions. All I can say for myself is that I am a gamer that can’t finish any of my games and that’s scary when you think that we have God of War Ragnarök, The Callisto Protocol, Bayonetta 3, Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope, and the Dead Space Remake all staring at me.

^{God of War Ragnarök image © 2022 courtesy of Sony Interactive Entertainment; Dead Space image © and courtesy of Electronic Arts; Bayonetta 3 © 2022 courtesy of Nintendo; The Callisto Protocol © 2022 courtesy of KRAFTON, Inc.}

Do you have an answer to this question? Why do you think we fail to finish our games? Please, share your reaction in the comments below.

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^{Featured Image: Mass Effect 3 courtesy and © 2012 Electronic Arts}