Daryl’s a good essayist and, in my opinion, this one hits a little different, probably even for people who aren’t into video games.
It explores our anxiety and how we handle reaching the end of a game, story… and other things in life.
If you have just under 24 hours minutes to spare, I think it’s worth your time.
Edit: No idea why the YouTube summary text in this post seems to be in German; it is an all-English video.
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LW is hosted in Germany, and as it proxies youtube thumbnails, youtube serve him the german version 😅. It is a known issue.
Do you mean 24 minutes instead of hours?
I don’t have a whole day to spare 🙂
I didn’t think I was going to be able to carve out a whole day to watch a YouTube video.
Then in the words of Randy Pitchford: It sounds like you’re not a true fan!
Yes, I meant 24 minutes, thanks for the catch
The video is only 23 minutes and 46 seconds for anyone wondering. Kinda sad it’s not longer, which is an interesting thought considering the premise.
Crap, thank you! What a typo. I fixed it, but also did not try to hide my shame
RPG and open-world player problems.
In linear games, we do not “have control over when the game ends” unless we decide to stop playing the game. Shmups, for example, autoscroll along a Y axis or X axis—you have no control over where your ship is headed, and typically no control over how fast you’re traveling either. Similarly, most action games are linear by design; there’s hardly anything else to do if you decide to procrastinate—if anything, these games are designed to be replayable and you’re likely excited to finish your first playthrough, unlock everything, and start another playthrough on the game’s true difficulty with all your skills/weapons unlocked.
Now, here’s a question: why do RPG players talk as if they’re playing the “definitive” version of video games? It’s not the first time I’ve clocked this behavior from an RPG essayist and it’s obnoxiously self-centered. Not once throughout the video has this dude tried to qualify the kind of games they’re talking about—just kept using the word “games”
He qualifies early on the types of games he’s discussing; anything with a story or that has meaning to us. IIRC he even mentioned the very scenario you bring up: A linear game where we still get to choose whether we finish it simply by not playing. He also mentions we can do this with other media like books.
It’s just an exploration of how we handle getting near the end of something that had meaning for us, both video games and events in our lives.
