AN ENDLESS HOPE OR A HOPELESS END?

I recently had the privilege of seeing the last ever Smashing Pumpkins concert at Wembley Arena and it got me thinking about how important ends are. They provide closure, the pinnacle of an experience and are vital with regards to how we view something. Would JFK now been seen as such a great man if he had not been assassinated? Would Star Wars have been such a great film without the hugely climatic ending? Would the last SuperBowl have been so riveting with that superb culmination (Mike ‘The Tackle’ Jones, you truly are da man..).

For games especially, endings are crucial. There is nothing worse than playing through a game only to be disappointed by the end. My personal favourite worst ending is from old Acorn game Mr. Matt. If you failed to complete a level, it was restarted with the message ‘what did you do to Mr. Matt?’. If you completed the level, however, you got the incredibly rewarding ‘you saved Mr. Matt’. That was it. It didn’t even propel your little yellow character into the next level. Grrrr. This is precisely why the high score table was invented: it gave people a sense of achievement when, after playing rounds of what were essentially pointless games, they saw their name emblazoned in lights ‘Dan: 10th with 21432. JJ: 1st with 388509573283040329470242854540358362240348232942642’. I never was any good at arcade games......

Nowadays, however, people are beginning to say different things. As technology levels are reached games are beginning to be promoted in terms of length. Expansion packs are rife, motoring games boast about how many tracks they contain, shooters about how may levels you can ‘bludgeon you way through’ and RTS games claim to have ‘infinite numbers of randomly generated levels’. However, is this trend away from giving games firm conclusions a good thing? I am not too sure...

In some cases it can be. Baldur’s Gate 2, an RPG game, has as one of its main selling points the fact that you can play for more than 200 hours without reaching an end. In this case, it is excellent: the game is of such consistently high quality that delaying the climax is beneficial to a gamer. Championship Manager will essentially keep on rolling forever if you so desire. This undoubtedly enhances the challenge of the game and more accurately simulates the experience of being a football manager.

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