The games we/they didn’t finish…

It’s a tragedy, I tell you, tragedy! I really reaaaally hate having unfinished games/books/movie… and yet I do. Why? Well, two great reasons:
1) repetition / lack of content
2) frustration / difficulty

Unfinished games are bad for:
a) players: not only do you lose satisfaction, but you also may feel like you’ve partly wasted many hours of your life because you never got the payoff
b) developers: not only does the audience miss out on a part of their vision & work but they also go away frustrated customers, and less likely to get their next game

So, I think we can say they’re an all round bad thing. First let’s search the root of the problem:
For 1) : unfortunatelly games often tend to be more about engine/gameplay than what I think they should be about: content/story. Players quickly realize this and become bored. It’s obvious why things have come to be this way: it would involve a lot more work (thus investment in time/money) from the developers to make more content.
For 2): well, i think this one is just plain design usually, which i just can’t find a justification for, but also there’s a bit of cheating on the developers’ part: they create a great game, put a lot of effort into it, and then they’re afraid people won’t value it as much as them so they artificially lenghten their games with either higher difficulty (usually grinding work which keeps the player busy more for the same rewards) or content reuse.

So do I propose any solutions? Well, I won’t say unrealistic stuff like I hear players journalists usually ask for: you can’t expect the company to double their manpower, double their work and produce in the same timeframe just more content at the same price, so I only see these guidelines:

- short games are OKAY! The games industry is growing wildly. It’s best for players to go away from a game thinking it was brief but amazing rather than thinking it was long and boring. A lot of non-gamers would be drawn in by the satisfaction of just finishing a game: just like you can’t ask a person who’s never read a book that she enjoyed to invest the time in a new one you can’t expect people who’ve never had a game they enjoyed and were able to finish to crave a new one.

- because there’s more games this will mean people will consume more thus creating a bigger stream. Good thing all round…

- the big problem obviously is value for your money, but my answer is this: is it really value that you’re adding by having the player repeat mission 2 in setting 4 just that backwards and at a higher difficulty? Or is it (as i feel as a consumer) wasting precious time in a busy life? If your audience is just kids or some demographic you think has unlimited resources of time that may be okay, but if you hope to target mature people (the people who have money), people with jobs and concerns, families and maybe even hobbies I think you need to earn their time/effort and reward them with a lot of satisfaction (by content) per hour if you are to justify their stopping their money earning/career forwarding/other hobbies activities to play your game. That’s what people pay for with games: getting satisfaction.

- a game that has extra content is AWESOME! It’s an awesome thing if a game can keep you busy for MANY many hours, regardless if it is with things i love like sidequests or things I can’t relate to like higher difficulty/respawn/more enemies… all of these things are awesome in that they may give players who want to dig deeper into the game the option to do so… but they are a very real problem when they block other players from getting a pleasant experience. For example I’m a sucker for story & artwork, and for games i like I’m willing to invest tons and tons of precious time to explore side quests and stories if it’s a story I like… BUT for something not so great and if those are no longer side but forced to get to the end they become a pain and a source for frustration.

- I really quite hate the idea of "bosses". Sure, there’s a dramatic need for variation in intensity in a game, but that stops being a plus and becomes being a pain when the scale goes from normal to extremely hard isntead of easy to normal in normal gameplay VS boss scenario. Also they often come with their own completelly different rules which I think breaks another big design rule, but that’s another topic. My point here is: if a developer is either stopping a pleasant flow of gameplay with a huge boss and/or wastes your time with retries/replays/level grinding just to have a chance, I think they’re doing something wrong.

So… sure, there are people, surprisingly vocal people, who apparently want to be challenged by their games to extremes, want that "extra super hard" mode unlocked… but there’s something seriously wrong with the industry when people like myself who’ve been playing games for so many years (and may even mean a lot in their lives) find themselves unable to pass certain points in a game because of a sudden difficulty spike (2) or simply decide to stop because they’re sick of doign the same activities over and over again (1), even if it is at te huge price of losing the ending to a great story or not seeing some great visuals or hearing some brilliantly composed music.