When do you stop playing?

There comes a time for every game when you hit the quit button for the last time. This article isn’t about how long you can play Fortnite for until your mom finally makes you go to bed, it’s about when you have a Loreli Gilmore moment and look at the game and say, “You and me? We’re done.” But unlike Loreli Gilmore, it’s probably unlikely (although not impossible) that a video game destroyed your relationship with the man you love. So what reasons do players have for closing out of a game for the last time?

Before we go into what those reasons are, I want to take a brief moment to discuss why I think this topic is important to analyze. As I’m sure you’ve heard a billion times (this week), we live in an attention economy. Gone are the days that games were something meant to be played through a handful of times and then left to collect dust, games today are designed to be played multiple hours a day for multiple days of the week for multiple years, or at least until the next edition comes out. Sure there are still plenty of games that have a nice ~20 hour runtime that you can play once and be fully satisfied with (Naughty Dog games are good examples of this, Doom is another), but most of the games being pushed by developers and publishers are the ones that want players to keep playing them for years and years like Overwatch, Fortnite, Fall Guys, or GTA Online. It’s important for game designers to know why players decide to stop playing a game so they can design games that retain players.

Perhaps the most acceptable reason for a player to stop playing a game from a developer’s perspective is because the player has completed the game. The time it takes for players to complete the game obviously differs from game to game, but these games make no attempt to keep players hooked on playing the game after completing the story. The Last of Us 2 is a good example of this: the game is a straightforward story that constantly pushes players forward and doesn’t have any sort of replayability beyond wanting to complete the story or the various chapters again. The only way The Last of Us 2 attempts to stretch out its playtime is by including some collectibles: Ellie collects trading cards, Abby collects state quarters, and both characters can uncover interesting but ultimately inconsequential side-stories that happened outside of the events of the game through collecting and reading letters. As far as adding collectibles to a game to stretch out its playtime, this is pretty benign, it’s completely optional and has very little impact on the game’s story and gameplay. Bioshock Infinite is another example of a game that really doesn’t incentivize players to continue playing after the story is over. Bioshock Infinite had a few collectibles as well: audio recordings that helped inform the player of story events/build the world and gear that the player could equip for stat boosts, but only the most dedicated players would play the game with the goal of acquiring all of these collectibles. Some story-driven games add even more collectibles to keep their players playing for longer, but adding these extra collectibles can often be seen by critics as a cheap way to achieve a longer playtime. Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that has historically abused this technique, littering the game with all sorts of collectibles, most of which have limited impact on the story or the gameplay if any at all. GTA V does a better job of implementing collectibles in my opinion as these collectibles often take the form of challenges such as stunt jumps or flying planes under bridges that can be fun to complete (though they also have random stuff strewn all over the map that you need to pick-up, often just for the sake of doing it).

Makes you think if getting 100% completion is really worth it, doesn't it?

Games like GTA V and Assassin’s Creed, unlike Bioshock and The Last of Us, are games that can continue to be played after the player has completed all of the missions given to them. Open world games like these give players the freedom to go pretty much anywhere within the game world and that game world is filled with opportunities for players to live out fantasies like driving a sports car down the wrong side of a highway or jumping off a clock tower and stabbing someone in the head. A game like Saints Row 3 has so many different activities for players to do from street racing to destroying property to participating in a game show that it seems impossible for its players to ever run out of things to do. And yet, they do. The thing about acting out your fantasies is that after a while they stop being fantastic and just start being the norm: at some point driving a tank through downtown at rush hour becomes as blasé as actually being stuck in downtown traffic at rush hour. Games like GTA and Saints Row try to give players as many reasons as possible to keep playing and partaking in the experiences that few other games (and certainly real life) fail to offer, but at some point, players will simply grow bored of these opportunities. I reckon that the most common reason a player stops playing a game is because they’ve become bored with the fantasies the game has to offer and they want to move on to a new fantasy.

Like you could ever get bored spraying poop on municipal buildings

Not every player stops playing a game because of satisfaction or boredom though. For some players they don’t so much stop playing a game as they burn out, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Competitive multiplayer games have been known to bring out ugliness in some people, and the people that have enough self-awareness to see how the game is negatively impacting their life may make a decision to stop playing a game for their own sanity. I’ve had friends tell me they stopped playing Overwatch because they would get exceptionally mad when they lost and only feel mild relief when they won, ultimately giving them an experience that skewed so far to the negative that they saw no reason to continue playing. I had a classmate in high school who told me that he had to quit playing Everquest because he realized he was totally addicted and that it had negatively impacted his life for years. Players of games with pay to win mechanics like Clash of Clans may sink hundreds or even thousands of dollars into a game that they ultimately stop playing after realizing that the reward does not outweigh the cost they’ve sunken into the came. On the other hand, players who don’t put a single penny into the same game may quit because they realize they’ll never be able to get close to competing with the players that spend big bucks on loot crates and upgrades. Something about these multiplayer games taps into a gamer’s natural competitiveness, and that can sometimes push people to play games in ways that stop being entertaining and start being toxic, so it’s no surprise that, if and when they recognize it, players will stop playing the games that bring out this behavior.

I personally have a reason that stands out to me for why I stop playing games, and it’s when I recognize that the game has a nihilistic core gameplay loop. That may be an esoteric way of explaining a phenomenon I’m sure you can relate to, so let me give a more concrete example: I cannot abide the core mechanic of looter shooter games for more than a week or so before I am completely turned off by them. My interpretation of looter shooters such as The Division or Destiny is that you play a level to get better weapons and power-ups that will allow you to complete harder levels, but after a while you beat all the levels and the only thing left to do is to replay those levels at higher difficulties so you can get better loot that will enable you to beat those levels at higher difficulties, and this loop just continues until you reach the maximum difficulty at which point there’s nothing to do but continue the loop. Some of these games include PvP gameplay to allow players to test their skills/loot against each other, but often the motivation for doing PvP is to, you guessed it, get better loot. For me, once I realize that I’m stuck in that loop, I hit the eject button to get myself out of it and shelf that game. I’ve never played a looter shooter with gameplay that was so much fun that it was able to overcome the nihilistic, cynical nature of its core gameplay mechanic, but perhaps it’s out there just waiting to be discovered.

The last reason to stop playing that I want to discuss is the natural death. Video games are constantly evolving, and while there are a few evergreen titles that will probably be played by gamers until the Earth explodes, most games just crumble into the sands of time after their moment in the sun. How many people are still playing Mortal Kombat 1 in 2022? How many people are playing GoldenEye? How many people are playing the original Myst? All of these games were not just groundbreaking, but earth shattering when they came out, but as technology improved and players’ appetites grew, these games stopped being played and just became pages in a history book. Why play Mortal Kombat 1 when you can enjoy the sharper combat and much more intense gore available in Mortal Kombat 11? Why play GoldenEye when you could play Call of Duty Warzone with all the advancements made in first person shooters over the decades? Why play a point and click adventure like Myst when you could immerse yourself into a realistic depiction of 9th Century England in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla? You may think it’s unfair to compare games across decades like this, but it happens in a shorter window than you’d think: sports games release new versions every year that make the previous versions practically obsolete.

So what can game designers do to keep their players engaged for longer? I think Witcher 3 answers a lot of those questions by providing well over 100 hours of gameplay without resorting to tactics like collect-a-thons or loot-looping. Instead, Witcher 3 packs the game with tons of side-quests and monster hunts that reward the player with an interesting story, fun gameplay, and often a nice prize at the end. If players start to tired of the life of an adventurer, they can always find a shopkeeper that wants to play a round of Gwent, a totally optional but surprisingly addicting mini-game played throughout Witcher 3. Witcher 3 also packs their map full of mysteries that are waiting to be discovered, and while sometimes they are merely a treasure chest full of junk you don’t need, more often they’re a new challenge waiting for the player like a monster’s nest, a new side quest, or a special piece of equipment that isn’t available anywhere else in the game.

Even helping Ol' Gran find her pan can be fun in Witcher 3

Hearthstone is another example of a game that has managed to stay popular for almost a decade now, thriving in a market that has proven difficult to succeed in: free to play strategy card games. Hearthstone has succeeded in maintaining a player base and attracting new ones because it’s constantly growing: adding new cards and nerfing old cards deemed too powerful, adding new game modes, and giving players new rewards to strive for. A constantly changing meta means constantly changing challenges for players to adapt to, and this is the exact type of challenge that attracts players to strategy games in the first place.

Not every game is able to have the financial backing of CDPR or Blizzard of course, but there are plenty of games that don’t come from major studios and still manage to stand the test of time. I started playing Binding of Isaac: Rebirth since it was the PS+ free game about 100 years ago (I think it was 2014), and it has been steadily in my rotation ever since. Binding of Isaac is a roguelike from Nicalis, a small indie studio, and achieves its longevity with a depth of unlockable content within the game, new content being released every few years, and most importantly, excellent procedural level generation. No two rounds of Binding of Isaac are ever the same, and the game achieves a level of variability unmatched by other roguelikes that use procedural generation. Hades, for example, uses procedural level generation but you still fight through the same bosses every playthrough and will fight through the same rooms (albeit in a different order). And it’s still a great game! But the variability of a round of Binding of Isaac puts the variability of Hades to shame. Every time you start a round of Binding of Isaac you have no idea what bosses you’re going to face for 6 of the 10(+) levels you must pass to beat the game, and you have no idea what types of rooms you’ll have to pass through to get there. With over 500 power-ups that varry every single playthrough, you truly have no idea what kind of character build you’ll work with each time the round starts. Because every game presents a new challenge, Binding of Isaac keeps players coming back over and over again to get a surprising new challenge every time they hit the new game button.

An incomplete list of all Binding of Isaac pick-ups (I believe this is only the vanilla version)

To me, that’s how you keep players playing your game: lots of challenges that reward players with something that creates more challenges. Whether that’s new quests, new cards, or new power-ups, games that give players reasons to try something new are the ones that will have players playing them for years, or maybe even decades.

What’s the most recent game you stopped playing and why? And what’s a game that you are still playing years after it came out?