Completionism in Video Games

One of my most vivid memories from my childhood was of the YMCA. It’s where I learned to swim, play basketball, and went to hang out after school. I remember going there and descending into the basement area where they had set up rooms for the kids to hang out in, complete with pool tables, foosball tables, ping-pong, and a SNES. I would play Super Mario World, Dr. Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

This was an introduction to a great new world for me. Unfortunately I didn’t have a gaming system of my own for a long time. It wasn’t until many years later that my parents relented and got my little brother and I our first gaming system, a N64. Super Mario 64 was a given to go along with that, but the other game we got was one that became an instant classic and favorite: The Legend of Zelda- The Ocarina of Time.

I played that game for hours upon hours, exploring every nook and cranny of that game, trying to get all the Golden Skulltulas, Empty Bottles, Weapons, Upgrades, Magic Bean Locations, Heart Pieces, and of course trying to find if the Tri-Force was hidden anywhere (it’s not...least not that I could find). I had to find everything though. Even though I’d beaten the game I still wanted those bragging rights and the knowledge that I’d done it.

Zelda wasn’t the only game I did this with. I tried to get every Star in Mario, and every Jinjo and Note in Banjo-Kazooie. I tried every route in Star Fox 64, and tried to get every unlockable mode in GoldenEye 007. 

In these games though it only took a few hours to do all those extra things. Now we have games like Fallout 3/New Vegas, Fable 2/3, Mass Effect 1/2, and Borderlands, where you’re given a huge world to explore, and probably more side quests and collectable items than you’ll ever be able to find. For the modern completionist, this poses a problem. 

The completionist wants to go through and find everything, but they may not have the time to do so. You also have the tendency to wonder “Did I really look everywhere in that cave?” or “Which room had the box I couldn’t access because my inventory was full?”. You could spend multiple hours going over one region of a game, just to make sure that you’d gotten every little thing you could find.

That’s not to say though that the game still isn’t fun. I think that as games evolve, so do the gamers. You still have that casual gamer who goes through, plays the basic missions with some side quests involved, and beats the game with a completely satisfied feeling and experience. You also have the completionist who tries their best to really find everything out there, but now doesn’t flip out if they can’t find that one box in the corner that they think should be there.

I get just as much joy now playing games like Mass Effect 2 as I did playing Ocarina of Time when I was younger. I’m also sure that I’m having as much fun now as those who played Pong did back when that was the modern game, though I’m not sure how the completionist would achieve that goal with that game.

“Oh I beat the computer...that’s it huh?”