Game Stop

In video games, there’s this concept called the “rage quit.” That’s when a player ends the game early in a fit of anger. Often, it’s referring to an online game, where a player quits in a moment of emotion, and is seen as bad sportsmanship. But it can also refer to quitting a single-player game in a fit of frustration, often to never return.

I think “rage quit” is a very useful phrase, because it’s a phenomenon we’ve all experienced, even if we’ve never played video games. I hope it gets broadened to use in all facets of life. Plenty of people rage quit jobs, but you can also use it in less-dramatic circumstances. You can talk about how you tried to learn piano, but rage quit while practicing the B-minor scale.

But back to gaming. Sometimes, I would rage quit online StarCraft games back in my university days (“Damnit, we agreed, no grunt rushes!”) And more recently, single-player games that mistook frustration for challenge (hello, Mirror’s Edge.) But it seems to me that there’s another type of game-quitting that needs a name. This would be something like “Apathy Quit.” You aren't angry, you've just run out of enthusiasm. maybe you don't even make a conscious choice to stop playing; you just don’t come back to a game. Actually, “apathy” isn’t the right word, because it implies that you don’t care about the game. Sometimes I don’t come back to a game that I do care about. I’ve just kind of, had enough.

For instance, I “had-enough quit” Hollow Knight. That might be a surprise, since it’s a widely-beloved indie game. And indeed, I loved playing it, and have no regrets about buying it. But, having explored pretty much everything in the game, the only thing left was to defeat the last few bosses, but that would mean hours of bashing my head against the wall, failing again and again, and I just didn’t have the enthusiasm for it. So I just stopped playing.

Another game I didn’t come back to was Mass Effect: Andromeda. I mentioned being a fan of the Mass Effect series before, And I’m enough of a fan that I was willing to slog through the much-unloved fourth instalment in the series. Indeed, it has all the flaws people have complained about: terrible animation, an awkward user interface, and a general whiff of budget cuts. But I found it had enough of what made the original trilogy successful that it was still enjoyable despite its flaws. So I played most of the way through it, and then…stopped.

That was particularly odd, because it was right around the start of the Covid lockdowns, when escape into another world would be a welcome thing. But I had — once again — had enough. Another complaint about Andromeda was that its length was padded-out by repetitiveness rather than genuinely new story, and I think that added to the feeling of apathy.

So, why this walk down Gaming Apathy Boulevard? Well, I don’t have a big hard drive, and I have these unfinished games just sitting there, taking up space, so I decided to go back and try to finish them. Hollow Knight looks like it will be a tough task to beat the last bosses, so I may leave it unfinished. But Andromeda is close enough to the shooter template that I feel like I can finish up the last few side-quests, then bumble through the final battle with the Kett or the Revenant or Angora or whoever the bad guys were.

What have I learned from the experience?

• This is the closest I'm going to come to the trope of the thief/detective/superhero coming out of retirement for one last job. Everything around me seems familiar, but I'm still a step slow, and feeling unprepared, and just generally feeling “too old for this shit.”
• Games are complicated. You don’t realize while playing them normally, because they’ve purposely dropped new concepts on you one-at-a-time, slowly adding to your knowledge of the various systems and tools available to you. But coming back and playing mostly-complete games is tough because you’ve already reached maximum complexity, and now there’s nothing here to remind you how it all works.
• It’s weird that no time has passed in the game. Other characters are referring to things that just happened within the game, but I don’t remember them, because they were four years ago. Maybe in the future, games will be so sophisticated that they’ll notice when you’ve been away for a while and update you appropriately, reintroducing you to characters and reminding you what’s been going on. But until then, I’m a reverse Rip Van Winkle.
• It’s sort of like riding a bicycle. I didn’t go straight back to feeling completely comfortable, but it didn’t take long. Of course, it helps that these games are just variations on popular themes, so using the controls is just a matter of remembering which buttons do what. 
• Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I rode a bicycle, so I could test that old saying too.