Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Danger of Completionism!

Completionism is a strange beast. It’s a boon and a curse, a driving force and a barrier every bit as effective as an arbitrary, invisible wall or a hastily erected range of unsurpassable mountains. Many’s the time I’ve found myself stalled out in a game, not because of any recognizable barrier to progress but because of a fear, mostly irrational, that whatever I do next is going to keep me from being able to backtrack, that if I push this button I won’t be able to find any super secret secrets that I’ve walked by accidentally in the game so far.

It’s not always that direct: right now my playthrough of Red Faction: Guerilla has halted completely thanks to the little ore deposits that dot the map. A less obsessive-compulsive player might just take their money and roll out into the Mohole, where the Raiders are sitting on the key to a superweapon, but I’m not willing to progress in the game until I grab the last of the minerals sitting on the world map, minerals I need to grab my thermobaric rocket upgrade. Four rockets is just too few – I want more, god damnit, and damn the expense.

So I’ve taken to the internet, the bane of every puzzle game designer and strategy guide publisher, and I’ve started to search for maps detailing the location of various ore deposits. Then I obsessively comb the landscape, searching for untouched deposits or, barring that, husks that mark that I’ve found valid ore deposit locations. It’s a painstaking, boring process that cuts into everything else I do. Even my teaching aspirations are undercut by this, the most banal of virtual tasks for an item I don’t see myself using a whole lot in the game itself for an achievement no one else will ever see. But still I persist. I grit my teeth, take my weird Raider-halberd thing and smash rocks, smiling grimly at my labors even as I grimace at the meager fruits they provide. I putter around, smashing into support struts, dropping buildings and blowing up fuel tanks whenever and wherever I can to liberate a few extra minerals so I can make tiny steps towards getting bonus missles.

There’s no rhyme or reason to this blind pursuit: I could finish Red Faction: Guerilla in a matter of hours if I just stopped trying to earn minerals, but to do so would be an act of surrender, an act of compliance with the EDF. And then I’d have lost something bigger than my time: I’d have lost the war of ideas against a vastly superior foe, a foe I somehow defeat each time we meet, regardless of the odds (curious that!).

It’s even worse in Legend of Grimrock, my other current obsession, where secrets are concealed in the very walls, tiny blocks of retro-hand-drawn art with moveable sprites concealing precious food, ammo, scrolls and better armor that I can employ in the fight against ice dinosaurs, squid-wizard-ghosts, fire people and walking mushrooms. And what’s even worse is that, after seven floors of precociously studying walls and praying that I don’t miss anything, I’ve taken to using Gamebanshee’s impressively thorough game guide, which reveals (for the worse) every hidden element with roughshod description and lovingly crafted maps. It ruins the core of Legend of Grimrock, but without it I can’t progress: I just sit there and chew at my own tongue, wondering how to get that Iron Door open, where I can find the next weapon I need to make my party the best of all possible parties.

This glut of secrets is far more oppressive to me than any collection of fiends that beset me: I can circle strafe them to death with blades and pelt them with arrows, slipping past each attack without incident. My larders are well stocked (I have every piece of bread in the game still in my inventory, in a system of lovingly arranged sacks, saved for a rainy day) and I’m never wanting for potions, or potion ingredients. At least not for long. But if I miss a secret, even a secret totally worthless to me, a weapon I don’t use, I’m stalled with apoplexy. I have to stop, sort out just what I missed, and grab it, whatever it takes, before I move on to the next floor. Even if I’m unleashing horrors that I’d much rather not deal with, I’ve just gotta get those secrets, those hidden deets.

In fact, I’m not even sure I give a shit about finishing the game at this point: I sort of just want to get all the secrets in the dungeon and see just how powerful my little party can get. They’re already pretty tough, but they’re nowhere near unstoppable (by design it seems: Legend of Grimrock is totally unconcerned with how well gauged your asshole might be, it will gauge it for you without asking or preparing you) and, let’s face it, as long as you’re still gaining experience in an RPG, there’s still fun to be had. The end screen sort of constitutes more of a failstate than the death screen in RPG lingo – death is a comma, the conclusion of the story a period.

I’m aware of people who don’t feel compelled to behave this way. Rational, normal people who just play games, beat them and move on. I’m not one of those people. Reasonably arrayed collectibles will keep me captivated a good, long while. Shit, unreasonably arrayed collectibles will too. I spent quite a while searching for those flowers in The Path, and I’m still not sure why (spare the majesty of the woods as I traversed them in search of each mysterious cluster of light). Games I don’t even like will hook me with hidden items that give me a little twinkle each time I grab one.

And yet, if you present collectibles too prominently or too elusively, it will ruin your game for me. I’ll stall out or, possibly worse, turn the game into a collectible hunting meta-game that I’ll eventually turn to some sort of Game Guide service for, just so I can nod at myself and say “Caught ‘em all.” This means that instead of engaging with your game’s design, I’m engaging with it on a meta-gaming level, which is pretty much always inferior.

And if I’m pressed to do this (sorry Grimrock and Icewind Dale) to feel like I’m paying right, your game has some problems. Maybe I’m being a bit too critical of games that are just trying to challenge players in a world where challenge has become something of a dirty word, but I think that design and pacing are key elements, and that scaffolding puzzles should work in a way that encourages players to try and fail again and again, rather than make them feel like each failure represents a tick of a clock, where the game works against them. I get that Grimrock is representing a different era in gaming, where this sort of punishing play was commendable, even laudable, but at times it does get a little bit obtuse, especially when the puzzles are laid out with unclear boundaries and the solution rely on relative perspectives and interpretations.

But I’m nitpicking – I’m still playing and enjoying Grimrock, and realistically I won’t stop any time soon. And I’m going to find every last one of those fucking mineral deposits in Red Faction: Guerilla. Just you wait and see! Really, I just wanted to write a love letter to collectibles, the most delightful elements to ever grace and then break my favorite games.