You Don't Need To Finish Games

[Music] when i was a kid we didn't have a lot of money to buy games so we rented we didn't have a lot of money to rent games often so i'd conveniently forget to remind my parents about return dates then get chewed out about late fees a couple of days later time constraints i had as a child when it came to playing games sparked a very early obsession with finishing them before the five day period was up i had to beat that game i needed to get all the secrets i needed to make sure i could keep up with the kids at school i couldn't lose to lewis and his uncle at nintendo telling him how to unlock dragon kazooie cheating scumbag high school was different i didn't have a lot of money to buy games so i pirated them we didn't have a lot of bandwidth back then so i'd conveniently pretend not to know why the internet was acting so slow then get chewed out by my brother a few days later the resource constraints and misunderstanding of ethical pirating i had as a teenager when it came to playing games sparked an adolescent obsession with finishing them because any game would take a week to download i had to beat that game i needed to get all the secrets i needed to make sure i was in the know with my friends at school and on skype i couldn't risk getting spoiled on the new mass effect or be the one person in the call everyone had to dance around spoilers for i needed to make sure i was caught up so i could watch those videos on the games i wanted to play i wanted to be included i wanted to belong college was a super different story i had money to buy games and after an entire childhood of not being able to took a victory lap through the three game stops in my hometown i didn't really leave a lot in my bank account those days so i'd conveniently tell myself it was only another week until my next paycheck and chewed myself out when the bills came around later the buyer's remorse i had as a college kid sparked a deep-seated obsession with finishing games i bought these games and i needed to squeeze every dollar out of them because they burned a huge hole in my wallet i had to beat those games i needed to make sure i didn't spend my money for no reason i couldn't bear to look at my shelf of games and see this huge backlog of frivolous spending i couldn't stand the idea of my friends making fun of me for it i wanted to validate myself i wanted to prove my purchases had a purpose oh but doing youtube videos incredibly different situation i had money i had drive i had passion i wanted to talk about all kinds of thoughts and opinions i had on games i didn't have a lot of time on my hands so i'd conveniently forget to do my homework and ignore my regimen then mentally self-destruct later the desperate need for approval i had as an adult sparked a consuming obsession with finishing games before i could talk about it in a thoughtful powerful way i had to beat that game i needed a scour for every detail i needed to make my writing so airtight so on the mark no one was going to make fun of me i had to stay ahead of the curve to be the trendsetter i wanted to be and year after year with every failure to accomplish what i had set out to do at every stage of my life playing these games my obsession would turn to guilt because if i didn't finish the game what was the point of spending all this time on it the money the bandwidth the denial how could i run a successful youtube channel if i wasn't covering the newest game within a week of it coming out how could i call myself a fan of these serieses or talk to my friends about games if i never finished them how could i justify the thousands of dollars i'd spent on my digital library if i hadn't touched more than half of it what was the point what was my motive why can't i stop feeling this way so eventually one existential crisis after another you start learning a lot about yourself the differences between who you are naturally and external factors contributing to who you've become i've done a lot of thinking figured some of it out if you've ever experienced something like those scenarios from my own life i have something important to tell you you don't need to finish that game game completion is so obsessed about nowadays people gatekeep and invalidate each other's opinions based on how far they made it while playing them being up-to-date on a long-running series seems to be more important than caring about its trajectory its quality and the conditions it was made in people are so afraid of missing out on the real impact of a sequel they'll prevent themselves from playing it until they beat the games leading up to it we're so desperate to be a part of the wave we're insistent on buying the new thing and beating it as fast as possible so that we're riding at the very top and the truth is this is a reality we didn't necessarily force ourselves into it's not the nature of recreation it's the nature of business i get the feeling my childhood wasn't unique even if you didn't rent games i'm willing to bet your parents or whoever bought you video games weren't gung-ho about it even if they loved games themselves they were also hopefully thinking about other aspects of your development so what you had to play was what you had to play from a very young age we're taught video games need to be finished before we deserve to have another one or in the case of renting there's a finite amount of time we have with this game and our limited understanding is we may never see it again when the time is up it's probably why kids are so good at video games beating games was our job and by doing it well we'd be rewarded with more of them and school was where we could show our efforts off knowing more about a video game than someone else when you're 10 years old is like being christ reborn in the minds of other children it makes you the center of attention for a week until the rest of them catch up to you and you raise them on to mount olympus welcoming them as your fellow gods the nice lesson our parents were teaching us about valuing our possessions also reinforced this idea we were getting at school that beating games was cool like sunny d in the fridge and mcdonald's every day cool if there's one thing i know the games industry is good at it's finding ways to turn children and teens into loyal consumers in the late 90s early aughts when i was a kid and yes i am nearly 30 looks can be deceiving game companies were already capitalizing on the way i played games games with obtuse progression games with secret levels and new things to discover and games too big to finish in a rental period were their bread and butter these were ways to keep players renting or convince them to just buy and the mascot generation did a lot to get kids to beg their parents to buy them the new crash bandicoot or the new spyro or the next banjo-tooie and no i don't want to rent it i know i'm going to like it but what i don't think they expected was for the kids to dangle what they knew in front of each other's faces to use the fact they had games and knew a lot about them as a form of social status or maybe they did nintendo power 12 times a year six great issues plus six free strategy guides on a hot new game that's twice the power for still 15 bucks wow call now this is timmy timmy knows how to get the coolest newest video games first but now someone else is as cool as timmy you tune into the sega channel and play just released games until midnight the next day beating games wasn't just cool brand loyalty and brand consumption was cool we were either nintendo or sega kids or nintendo or playstation kids and if you're a little younger either xbox 360 or playstation 3 kids you'd think people would grow out of those childlike conceptions but teenage adolescents has a funny way of making us feel a lot smarter without doing much of anything different as we got older the words used may have changed but it was the same dynamic my teenage years were when the console wars became a monolith the advent of the internet paired with one of the most popular console generations of all time really brought it out of people well game companies learning about internet marketing really brought it out of people and whether or not you were a willing participant you were in it most of us only had one current gen console an xbox 360 or a ps3 and the wii probably if you had all three chances are you were an outlier but therein lied the social hierarchy when you're a teenager you want to be a part of everything you're learning about yourself you're trying and feeling lots of new things and if there's something people are doing you don't have access to you start to feel like you're missing out you lose the sense of belonging in your social circles when all of your friends are talking about a game you haven't played yet or when everyone's getting on xbox live to play gears 3's horde mode but you don't have it online multiplayer itself feels like this distant place where everyone else is having a new kind of fun you can't afford to maintain sometimes it was so integral to the stability of your friendships that not playing the same games as your friends meant you weren't hanging out with them anymore not on purpose just by circumstance it might not seem like this was all about beating the game per se but remember where these feelings developed from this panic you'd lose your credibility if you didn't know what happens this desire to be included in what was being talked about video games were a fad and the internet shortened the lifespan of how long those fads would be in style if you didn't beat red dead redemption in the two weeks it came out your friends were already moving on to something else your window for being included in a discussion closed it wasn't in the fairy tale high school bully kind of way but beating games had gone from making you cool to being accepted is it hard to believe the industry would capitalize on its biggest demographic's worst anxiety limited editions pre-order bonuses dlcs extending the story or in some cases providing the ending to the base game story online functions at a monthly premium season passes guaranteeing you won't miss out on future developments utilizing underhanded methods of making pre-owned copies of games impossible to use it became harder and harder to keep up with the rest of the community if you weren't buying the new release and tunneling through it for the sake of being part of it even now feeling like i'm missing out on a game my friends love convinces me to buy games without a second thought compounding into a sunk cost fallacy i've built up since high school i think there's a scientific study waiting to prove video game backlogs begin at around the same time a video game enthusiast gets their first job and maybe you want to make it up to your younger self and fulfill a desire which was never indulged maybe you're like me and bought every game you pirated as a kid to justify your own conscience or maybe like many of us you practice retail therapy and get yourself something you like when you're going through a rough time then you realize you've spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on a huge list of games you kept assuring yourself you'd definitely play and so your backlog and the sunk cost fallacy attached to it is born beating games isn't your job anymore though playing games is what you do in your free time or in between class and work in other words you can't devote an entire week to them without taking a few days off from well everything but what's the point in buying and playing games if you don't beat them right it's like losing out on an investment or something because that's totally what i'm doing a game is an investment i think because if i beat it i can move on to the next one if you ask me the presence of a backlog implies we've never grown out of our childhood habits we've found ways to add importance to something which should have never mattered in the first place our money-driven society taught us to play games we have to beat games once we start to understand how expensive our hobby is suddenly we're measuring cost versus experience and seeking to maximize our profits by milking the game for everything it's worth and if we don't well that's our fault we made a bad investment something didn't hold us long enough and now it's money wasted it's not though you paid money to play a game and you played it you enjoyed something until you were tired of it that's normal no one expects you to cash optimize how you go bowling and quite frankly i'll crack you over the head with my ball if you try to rush me and likewise there shouldn't be an expectation to beat a game just because you spent money on it yet some of us still push through a game we don't like and feel awful doing it just to knock it off the list you better believe the industry took advantage of this mindset too the last decade has been 10 years of re-releasing old games creating monthly subscriptions for instant access to your very own backlog and massive sales to drive up purchases it's seen games as a service become a popular way of keeping players invested and begrudgingly getting through bad content to get to new content it's seen digital storefronts compete with launch window discounts and the growth of the sketchy gray market where people can make haphazard additions to their libraries it's seen game design philosophy change to cater to a completionist mindset and focus on keeping players busy long enough to void refund periods it's required the redefinition of a refund to protect consumers in however small a way it does the pride the need for acceptance and now a misplaced urge to be responsible we've attached so many odd values to an insignificant part of playing games the industry has with every breath reinforced and ingrained into the culture of gaming god i hate that i just said that itself but playing games isn't about increasing our net worth literally or figuratively playing games is supposed to be a relaxing or invigorating experience for however long it remains so if a 200 hour rpg doesn't keep me invested for its entire length that's fine maybe it says something about how i feel towards the game itself but not me it doesn't make me that kind of person finishing a game isn't even important to understanding it most of us walk away from playing a video game saying more about how we felt playing it than about the ending itself and sometimes games we play don't make us feel anything they don't have to there's no guarantee they will and finishing them won't change that now that we're older does it really matter if you know every secret or cool fact about a game or is acting like an eight-year-old and correcting someone on some anecdotal piece of trivia not the most annoying thing to do in the world isn't it easy to have a conversation with our friends about games despite the disparity in our play times haven't you wanted to suck someone in the mouth for invalidating you based on how much time you've put into something aren't we fully aware we'll never be able to play every game in existence and lead healthy functional lives at the same time so why do we still give so much reverence to such a small part of our hobby which has bred such awful rhetoric why do we let unethical industry practice and child focused marketing push us to treat every purchase as a lifelong commitment why do we stress it let it go play until you're satisfied and don't feel bad about not finishing it it served its purpose we've forgotten the primary purpose of playing games is to play them it's not to subscribe to a fictional world for the rest of our lives it doesn't come with the price tag of needing to interact with every piece of media it's related to another industry practice great for quantity of content related to something you like but built entirely on strategies to drive invested players towards being guaranteed buyers we're cautious of spoilers for games we picked up once months ago played for two hours and keep telling ourselves we'll go back to someday as if we owe it to ourselves to avoid being part of the community around those games until we know enough about it and in the same breath we stress how important it is not to gatekeep each other no matter how comprehensively we know a specific piece of media listen to how silly we sound we can't talk about something or look at anything about it because we played it a couple times and really want to try it again someday and even though we're super interested but don't have the time or really the desire to go back to it at the moment we won't let ourselves indulge in said thing in other ways we want to right now what kind of weird self-inflicted punishment have we invented for ourselves what exactly are we afraid of being someone who talks and thinks a lot about this stuff for the sake of making videos you'd assume i'm acting like i've liberated myself from the clutches of nefarious marketing strategies and toxic gaming culture not true my need to beat games is the worst it's ever been can you imagine making a two-hour story analysis of a game and not getting to the end or if someone in your comments wanted to have a discussion with you and you had to clarify you never finished whatever it was you were talking about the stigma exists whether or not you adhere to it and i know plenty of people who won't start on a video until they get to the end of the subject matter the way i play games for videos is the same way i play them for fun i'd be having this conversation with myself or a friend if youtube didn't exist actually in the process of making this specific video i have talked about it with a friend or two that's actually how i got started a friend of mine told me i should just write down how i feel about games and then put it online it's a ton of fun but it's different now that my visibility is approaching a considerable milestone imposter syndrome is kicking it alive i don't want to be off base with my analysis or miss something in my retrospectives i don't want to end up with the worst take on the internet and get laughed at behind closed doors or in my own face huh i guess it isn't so different after all i guess the problem's been here since the beginning what if the thing i'm thinking about right now about a specific game if i vocalize it what if there's something i missed what if i end up looking silly for saying it what if i don't belong here and it gives me away to avoid that everything needs to be perfect i can't join the discussion if i'm not done yet i'm not valid until i finish it i'm not afraid of getting a factoid incorrect or mistaking what showed up in which game i'm scared of being wrong about how i feel i think to an extent we're all scared of being wrong about how we feel and i don't think we should be [Music] you

Channel: GC Vazquez

Views: 325,315

Keywords: GC Positive, You Don't Need To Finish Games | GC Positive, You Don't Need To Finish Games, Finishing Games, Completing Games, you don't have to beat games, video game completionist, never finishing games, beating video games, finishing video games, completing video games, console wars, game completion, game industry practices, gaming culture, Lore-Building Isn't World-Building, Representing Latines and Hispanics In Games, completionist, gaming backlog

Id: wYXPybDP6K8

Length: 19min 2sec (1142 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021