Spoiler alert: Game endings are harder than you think

[Administrator]

Fallen London's an oddity. More than a million and a half words of sort-of-multiplayer online interactive fiction, free-to-play but polite about it, kinda grindy but absolutely crammed with story: a videogame with no moving pictures at all[1]. I originally built it, and I founded Failbetter Games, who still run FL. Yesterday I left Failbetter, so I can finally use Fallen London to illustrate a point without feeling like I'm plugging it. I don't want to talk about Fallen London, exactly: I want to talk about endings.
For years (FL has been running for seven) people asked: how the hell is it going to end? It's a story-based game, and one of the defining qualities of stories is that they have an end as well as a beginning and a middle. There are exceptions, but one of the defining qualities of a horse is that there's a leg at each corner, even though some horses have three legs. Stories, basically, end.
How do you do that with a free-to-play game where players want to keep going forever? If a player can still play, their story isn't over; if they can't still play, they're upset (and, candidly, they won't make a free-to-play game any more money). This is a problem that (eg) MMOs face, too, but the story in MMOs is generally an afterthought. Fallen London, notoriously, has almost no gameplay. It's all story.
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