'Just A Little Further'

It's a concept most Gamers are familiar with, even if they don't think about it in those terms. It's all too easy when you're playing something compelling just to keep going a little bit further "just to the next save point" then "ok, ok, the next save point" then "ok, right, honestly, just to the end of this chapter/level/section" and on and on til it's three in the morning and your vision has gone fuzzy and your fingers are cramped...

 

<.<

 

>.>

 

Last night it happened to me (again), I was playing the latest Fallout 3 DLC, Mothership Zeta. Your character gets abducted by Aliens, the nasty probing kind, of course it isn't long before you escape your cell and get the opportunity to frolic through the Alien spacecraft wreaking havoc left right and center, and with some brand new shiny alien doohickeys to boot.

 

It's a rather linear affair in truth, you start at a, got to b, kill stuff, then you can do c, d and e in whatever order you'd like before proceeding to f, but that's the sort of gameplay that lends itself to that 'just a little further' behaviour. There's a goal to reach, then another, then another, and you're either enjoying yourself so much or desperate to see what happens or what's at the end of the goal that you keep going and going until rationality or tiredness kick in and gets the better of you, well, one of those or you reach the ultimate end...

 

I didn't reach the end of Mothership Zeta last night, it really was getting late, though admittedly I do have to thank my girlfriend, who needed a chat, if she hadn't been texting me there's a good chance I would have powered through heedless of how late it was getting and ended up sleeping in, as it was her regular messages distracted me from the game and kept me aware of the time. Just another reason to treasure her

 

I think the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) case of 'Just a little further' I've ever experienced came in the form of Valve's Portal, a portal based first person puzzle game. Portal shipped in a compendium of valve developed games called The Orange Box (chances are if you don't know that then you're not a gamer, thus probably stopped reading before the end of the first sentence and the elaboration is pretty much wasted...). My main interest in the box was HL2: Episode 2, the continuation of the misadventures of heroic physicist Gordon Freeman in his (practically) single handed effort to resist the enslavement of mankind by otherworldly beings known as "The Combine". I was late to the party with The Orange Box, I was rather skint when it came out, and couldn't really justify the cost of a five title boxset of which I already owned two of the titles and had next to no interest in a third (TF2), so I was aware of the Portal hype, but had yet to experience it. I played Ep2 for a couple of hours until I decided it was probably bedtime, but before I hit the hay I thought I'd give Portal a go. Roughly four hours later some time after 3am I had completed the game.

 

Portal is unique, Portal is intriguing, and Portal is challenging. Three factors that will keep you going further and further until the unexpected end. First there's the story element, you're some sort of prisoner, or patient, or test subject who wakes up in a glass box, is given an experimental device that creates portals and is run through a number of challenge rooms to test the device, and, apparently, yourself. Your only contact throughout the event is with a computer with a bit of a personality disorder and a penchant for lying about cake-based rewards (debatable). The "Who, where, what, why?" aspect keeps you progressing forward because no back story is given and the only way to get answers is to go forward. Going forward involves solving the challenges, which start of light and get increasingly demanding of your observational skills and creativity - they're also really fucking fun. So everything about the game draws you forward.

 

The thing that really caught me though was the fact that the challenges only make up maybe half to two thirds of the game, so when I escaped the challenge rooms and started roaming around behind the scenes I understandably assumed the end was nigh and not that there was another hour and a half or so of game ahead of me. So I just kept going until I reached the end. And I had a damned good time doing it.

 

Some months later during a piss-up at a friends house me and a mate played through the game (while completely pished) on xbox360. We took turns each on the pad and finished it by a respectable 4am, although no one remembers when we started

 

I love gaming, but sometimes I hate how it can grip me.

 

freedoms_stain, no doubt spending this evening completing Mothership Zeta, out.