One Gamer’s End is Another Gamer’s Beginning

What does it mean to complete a video game? 

Sure, it can be reaching the end, unlocking the full story, and watching the credits roll. But that’s not what drives me to sink hours and hours into a game. That’s not what always pulls me back in.

The developers do. Or, more specifically, the additional secrets and events the developers fold into a game. My favorite example of this comes from the breakout star of my time in quarantine, and the game that got me through finals last semester: Sorcery! 3.

If you have never heard of the Sorcery! games, they are essentially magical choose your own adventures. Similar to Braid, you are able to rewind the game at any time and test out new choices. In Sorcery 3! you have now wandered beyond the city walls into a desolate wasteland, which you must traverse to challenge a great sorcerer who has destroyed this once fertile land. The sorcerer has seven deadly serpents who inform him of your motions.

You therefore have two goals: to get to the sorcerer as fast as possible to beat his informants and to defeat the serpents. To aid you in these goals you even encounter these strange beacons that seem to take the land back in time…

The trailer for Sorcery 3!, which highlights both the story and the important game mechanics

Ok, simple. You complete the game by getting across the land and killing some snakes. Yet that wasn’t what completing the game meant to me.

The developers always put out challenges for odd experiences you can find in playing each game, but for Sorcery 3! they put out the ultimate challenge: the No Beacons All Serpents run. When they announced it, they didn’t even know if it could be done since the beacons are almost 100% necessary to making it over the mountains. 

But it can be. I’ve done it. It took hours, often replaying small sections of the game over and over for the optimal situation. And when all my hard work paid off, that’s when I felt I had completed the game. 

Another game I got sucked into during quarantine was Slay the Spire, a game that tricks you about what it means to complete it. Slay the Spire is a turn-based card game where you can play as one of three heroes, each of which has their own game mechanics. You fight your way through three acts, and once you complete them all you can unlock a fourth character.

An example of a fight using the Ironclad character

But wait! What’s this? You complete the acts on all three original characters and you find a new, mysterious fourth act… 

And from there, the developers got wild. They created 20 different ascensions, which are run throughs that become progressively harder as you climb harder, culminating in Ascension 20. 

I haven’t quite gotten to that point (I’m still battling my way through the first three acts), but I am incredibly excited to try my hand at completing the different ascensions. At first glance, it seems like completing act three is completing the game, but I love how the developers secretly use that as a another starting point. Just when you think you’re done with the game, you’re sucked right back in.

Of course, we could branch off into discussions about MMORPGs that give you other things to complete, such as crafting or raising pets, as well as games like Gone Home that offer hidden achievements that you don’t unlock until you actually do them.

Screenshot of the Steam achievement list for Gone Home

So what does it mean to complete a video game? That definitely depends. But I love having opportunities, created and teased by the developers, to go beyond just the credit roll. I love having challenges and hidden secrets to continue to work towards, continually bringing me back into the worlds of my favorite games. 

Challenge Runs: Getting More Playtime Out of Your Favorites

Usually when you start a game, you are given the option to set the difficulty of the gameplay, from easy to hard, or the game already has an inherent difficulty built into it. Most players are then satisfied with then playing the game at their preferred difficulty following the game’s rules.

The difficulty select screen from Persona 4 Golden, giving the player a range of options to pick before starting their journey.

However, for some players, this is not “difficult” enough, requiring the addition of external restrictions. Here is where the self-imposed challenge or challenge run come into play.

A self-imposed challenge or Challenge run is defined as a game playthrough where the player sets external rules not required or acknowledged by the game in order to increase the difficulty, immersion level, and replay value¹. These types of challenges range from speed running the original Super Mario Bros., to beating Bloodborne using a Rock Band guitar as a controller.

Part of the very impressive run of Bloodborne done by gbbearzly using a Rock Band Guitar controller.

These challenges have been introduced for virtually any genre of game and unique opportunities for gamers to show off their creativity and strategies, having to take the rules set by the game and bending them in order to accomplish the challenge’s goal without breaking the external rules, which usually involves finding exploits, glitches, and other similar bugs already present in the game or simply putting your skills to the ultimate test.

One of the many glitches used in challenge runs of Super Mario 64, the backwards long jump.

Originally, I was introduced to this style of playing games through a speedrun of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. When I first got this game, I put in over 145 hours into completing the Divine Beasts, roaming around Hyrule looking for Korok seeds, and gathering enough equipment in order to tackle Hyrule Castle and defeat Calamity Ganon, the game’s only goal, only to see that someone had done it in under thirty minutes. 

A screenshot from Breath of the Wild showing off only part of the expansive world of Hyrule.

Since the game is essentially an open world where you could theoretically challenge Calamity Ganon after being allowed to leave the tutorial area, beating the game in a short amount of time is possible, however I was still amazed since completing this challenge would require a a great amount of skill and strategies. After this I was inspired to attempt to complete a challenge run in Breath of the Wild of my own, which I am still working on to this day, adding hours of playtime to a game I thought I had already done everything in.

A video showing the sub-30 minutes Breath of the Wild speedrun which I would recommend watching.

This is just one of the many examples that exist out on the internet when it comes to challenge runs and I would highly recommend picking up your favorite title, coming up with some rules (such as no healing, minimal leveling, or using an unconventional controller) that fit with the game or looking up challenge run rules that other people have created and have at it. It might be the most challenging thing you’ve ever done, but if you manage to complete it (and maybe record it for others to see), then you will be met with a great feeling of satisfaction while continuing to enjoy your favorite titles for years to come.

Reference

1. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfImposedChallenge

Video Games? I Thought This Class Was Digital Media…

Those were my exact thoughts the first time I read the syllabus. About three months later, I have never been happier to have taken this class. When my friends and family found out that I indeed was taking this class they were all perplexed. I had never been interested in video games, but I discovered this class was about way more than that. 

I have learned considerably more in this class than I could ever imagine. Because of this class I pushed the limit of what I thought constituted school work. Playing a video game for homework? Some of my friends were jealous, but for me it was just as rigorous as some of the work I am assigned in my other more traditional classes. I had to learn video game jargon, how to move my fingers swiftly, and the method of thinking that develops over time after playing video games. I love to be challenged and this class has challenged me academically.

Never before had I contemplated the stories of video games. The main theme of our class has been remediation. I realized that every mode of media was intertwined and often drew upon each other for story lines and inspiration. The majority of our class focused on The Lord of the Rings. I was exposed to a whole culture based on a work of literature that I had never experienced. From the die hard fans who have learned the elfish language to the father and son that play LOTRO on the weekends I discovered that there is more to Lord of the Rings than funny character names and weird looking creatures, but rather it has the power to bring people from all over the world together over a common ground. It only makes sense in our globalized and technological world that literature should adopt to new forms. 

So what have I learned this semester, Dad? More than you could ever imagine – watch me kill this wolf. Just wait until you see the video game I helped create.

 

Molly S.