Down the replay rabbit hole

[Administrator]

Ken Levine wants to chase a dragon, and whatever the (inevitably more complicated) truth behind the shuttering of Irrational in order to do it turns out to be, let's take that recently restated goal at face value. "To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable." Huge challenge. Noble sounding goal. Bad idea, looking as seductive on paper as a treasure map promising great riches and fortune, but ultimately leading right down the same kind of rabbit hole that Balance of Power creator Chris Crawford has now been spelunking for over 30 years.
The core of the problem is really in his own comment, "I spend five years working on a game and 12 hours later the player is done with it, and that is heartbreaking." It's understandable. More than understandable, it really sucks. I'll spend less time writing this article than he slaved away scripting dialogue for a single scene of BioShock Infinite, with the possible exception of the one where Elizabeth completely arses up the point of Les Miserables, and it'll still be depressing to see it vanish from the front page by Tuesday. And that's BioShock Infinite, which got no shortage of ink and talk. Most games disappear far faster, and are lucky to make so much as a ripple to mark the sweat that went into them.
However, the hopes of a writer aren't necessarily the demand of a reader, viewer or gamer. Before trying to 'fix' anything, we need to be clear on what the problem actually is, and Levine's isn't that most players are draining narrative games dry with only a quick pause for dinner. Near the end of 2012 for instance, BioWare revealed completion stats for all its recent games, and Mass Effect 2 came top... with 56 per cent. Dragon Age: Origins? 36 per cent. Now, in fairness, those are long, complex, hardcore games. The numbers don't seem to change much for others though, as a look at Steam's Global Achievements will attest. These aren't perfect numbers, admittedly, with factors like offline mode and people who own the game but never actually play it meaning that not even a 'Loaded The Game' achievement would get the full 100 per cent.
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