On gaming, “100% completion” and what it means to leave things unfinished
We take a left turn and wander through my favourite games of the past two years: Diablo III, Kingdom Rush, Hoa, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Death’s Door.
Here’s the year-end extended edition of probably the most intermittent newsletter on theatre and performance that you’ve ever subscribed to—except this (massive) missive has nothing to do with theatre and performance (or perhaps it does?). It’s a particularly personal piece. I hope some of it speaks to you.
SPOILER ALERT: I go into some detail describing all the games listed above.
Prologue
I’ve never been a hardcore gamer—I never had consoles growing up, my “computer time” as a child and teen was strictly limited, and I grew up desperately envious of friends who could flip a switch and load a Nintendo game, or who had their own Game Boys. I remember sleepovers at a friend’s place where we played Sonic Adventure (1998) all weekend, except that we called it “Sonic 3D” because it was the first Sonic the Hedgehog game to feature “3D” gameplay. This was revolutionary to me, a child of the 1980s and 1990s Disney Renaissance who would, like everyone in my generation, witness the birth of Pixar and Toy Story. The magic of things gaining shape and heft and weight; things coming to life.
I watched my friends acquire, rear and then neglect Tamagotchis, Digimon, Neopets and the earliest generations of Pokémon. The idea that you could collect and own something digitally permanent as a child, that you could grow attached to a virtual presence that would live and die (sometimes arbitrarily) by your hand, was an idea both very nascent and deeply profound. The world wide web was on its first legs and we were the first generation to own usernames, email addresses and domain names as children and tweens, to tend to our virtual patches of earth. Gotta catch ‘em all! was the mantra of Saturday morning cartoons. This seeped into other parts of my life. Gotta succeed at it all! was probably my father’s mantra for his children. Gotta finish it all! was the translation that eventually trickled down into my work ethic and, much later on, my gaming—underscored by these early experiences with owning, collecting and claiming. Not finishing, in my world, was failure. I finished university, even though there was a semester I came dangerously close to flunking. I finished 10km races. I finished gruelling hikes at giddy altitudes. I also finished things I loathed. I finished all my homework, always. I finished painful and extortionate internships I was the wrong fit for. I finished a six-year employment bond at a media institution, even though I spent the last two years in burnout, hoping I would get into a freak accident so I wouldn’t have to go into work, and calculating how much I still owed for a contract I signed when I was 18.
Diablo III
When the pandemic hit, the work I’d been doing for the PhD I’m currently working on was completely upended. I spent several months completely and utterly depressed, dragging myself through the motions of teaching, half-hearted attempts at research and other underpaid postgraduate student duties. This is also when I decided I would finish Diablo III, the classic Blizzard hack-and-slash RPG I’d first downloaded in 2012 and had even built an initial character class for, but hadn’t properly started and also hadn’t touched in almost a decade.
I started out with an easy build, the Wizard, which allows you to do a lot of sweeping, scorched-earth ranged attacks from a safe distance; then I switched to the Monk, which reflects more of my current preferences for combat—a stylish melee attacker, but relying more on defensive play instead of the aggressive brute force of the Barbarian. I didn’t care a lot about the cinematics—a melodramatic patchwork of threadbare Old Testament tropes about the fight between good and evil—but I cared a lot about finishing every. single. inch. of every map at every level. I would comb through entire deserts and snowed-in fortresses to squash every last enemy. Maybe I couldn’t finish my PhD fieldwork in the way I’d hoped, but I could finish Diablo III.
By the time I was done with the “Reaper of Souls” expansion, I was playing comfortably at the mid Torment levels and getting nice Legendary armour and weapon drops—nowhere near e-sports standards, but deeply gratifying for a beginner. After burning an entire long weekend on the game, I “finished” it. The post-game euphoria took me by surprise. It reminded me of running, which I’ve done regularly since I was a teenager, pushing through from one mile marker to the next and seeing how much I could stretch my stamina. I wanted more.
Kingdom Rush
My partner introduced me to Kingdom Rush, a cutesy, pop-culture-laden tower defense game created by Ironhide Game Studio, an indie game outfit from Uruguay. This is when I began to realise what my fixation with “finishing” meant. I spent hours adjusting my strategy for levels I’d already completed so that I could get “three-star” finishes—which meant not a single enemy had slipped through my gates. I wasn’t a particularly competent player; when I got stuck at the tougher levels, I would search for walkthroughs on YouTube for clues about the best combination of mages, archers, barracks, and artillery towers, where they should be positioned, and when some judicious use of upgrades like a shower of meteors or extra soldiers might obliterate a particularly nasty wave of enemies. I would spend some effort puzzling through the strategy, but it wasn’t the satisfaction of solving the puzzle that reeled me in, it was the winning.
“Origins”, the third instalment of Kingdom Rush (there are four in total), is my favourite. Set in a magical Elven kingdom, it features gorgeously animated little sorcerers, forest archers, even pocket-sized runic bears you can summon to maul your equally tiny enemies. Every battleground feels like those marvellously intricate “Where’s Wally” illustrated books, stuffed with detail from start to finish. You can lay vines to slow your enemies down, or conjure up some horned druids to spear them, or maybe pop a poisonous, bright blue flower to kill them instantly as a last resort. “Origins” also had the most satisfying difficulty curve and decision trees—I found the most recent “Vengeance” almost too frustrating (lots of YouTube consults) and the original Kingdom Rush felt dated and flat because I played it in reverse, after its more contemporary sequels.
Till this point, I hadn’t invested in a console. I’d played Diablo III on my laptop and Kingdom Rush on iPad. But halfway through the pandemic, while battling my own disillusionment with the PhD, my partner and I bought a Nintendo Switch.
Hoa
The first game we downloaded was Hoa, a stunning hand-painted side-scrolling platformer developed by a small group of Vietnamese artists and programmers from the Singapore-based Skrollcat Studio in partnership with Kyx Studio in Hanoi. It draws heavily from Vietnamese folklore, and is an almost perfect tutorial for console newbies. No combat, no timed trials, and a lush score channelling Joe Hisaishi and the world of Studio Ghibli. You play the tiny fairy Hoa, whose return to the forest sparks dramatic environmental revival. But why were you sent away in the first place? All the forest creatures allude to some kind of tragedy—what is it that you’ve forgotten?
As you leap from ladybug to ladybug, bounce on plump larvae to reach higher branches in a tree, swing from delicate tendrils of ferns and tropical vines, then plunge into deep grottoes shimmering with jellyfish, you begin to see the traces of some kind of man-made ecological disaster. Your insect and aquatic friends warn you of the spider-like robots that trawl the forest: they might kick you! But you also need the robots’ spring-loaded heads to propel yourself to different parts of the map. Even those who might wound you, the game reveals, are an integral part of your quest for renewal and survival. They are intruders and bullies, but they are not disposable.
As the game meanders through various acts, you leave the safety of the verdant forest and end up in a dark, sewer-like maze of pipes, gears and levers. As you navigate the polluted space, a final frantic cutscene plunges you into the final chapter of the game, a black-and-white, topsy-turvy mirror world where you have to rely on your memory of the previous spaces to complete your journey. You have to do this while the game inverts all the console buttons and controls, which means unlearning the muscle memory and coordination that the game had so painstakingly scaffolded up to that point. This is pretty uncommon; most games rely on the player honing this muscle memory until it becomes effortless, invisible. I love that they rendered this effort visible: I eventually completed the game clutching my console with my back to the TV, the top of my head pressed into the couch and looking between my knees so that I could reorient myself to a world where left was right and up was down.
Hoa took about six hours for me to complete. An experienced gamer can complete it in half the time; most of the reviews I’ve read praise the game’s meticulous, hand-painted animation but shrug their shoulders at its brevity and simplicity. It’s a leisurely journey compared to many of the other games I’ve played since then, but it was a lovely introduction to gaming mechanics and how the button mashing we take for granted can be incorporated into a game’s storytelling as a self-reflexive tool.
I’ve also been thinking about the preoccupations of the narratives we consume during this time, with the swell in postapocalyptic zombie-virus-planetary disaster tropes, the colonizing and terraforming of other planets and the abandonment of our own, the locked-room crumbling-marriage dramas, the afterburn of regret in the wake of ecological despair. We’re finished, we moan, so let’s get out of here. Or, there’s so much we didn’t do, and there’s nothing we can do now. Hoa escapes, but she also returns. When she enters the mirror world, that purgatorial space of the subconscious, the rules that govern her identity and existence have unravelled, and to move her around the screen is to overwrite your instincts—I see something to move towards and my thumb edges left, but I have to pause, shred the thought, and compel my thumb to move right. I think about the effort it takes for me to shed the habits that have worn desire paths in my mind, and what it would take to even get to that blip of a pause.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The next game I load in the Switch is the literal opposite of Hoa. If Hoa was a haiku, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BOTW) feels like the entirety of Journey to the West with some warring Three Kingdoms thrown in. I’ve sank at least 315 hours into BOTW, the Nintendo action-adventure masterpiece made for the Switch. You play Link, a member of the elf-like Hylian race who was the titular Princess Zelda’s personal swordsman, but has lost all of his memories after being wounded in a terrible man-machine war, and after 100 years in a rehabilitating cryogenic sleep.
So much has been written about this mammoth of a game, a game that has spawned a host of money-grubbing copycats (*cough* Genshin Impact *cough*), a game that has changed the shape of what is possible on a platform that is basically a glorified smartphone with a console extension. BOTW is a completely open-world environment, which means you can spend your time completing various main and side quests, or ignore it all and just go exploring until you fall off the face of the map. You can kill every enemy in sight, or you can wear a corresponding mask and feed them apples and meat and dance around bonfires with them. You can complete every dungeon in the suggested order, collecting hearts and stamina to boost your chances of survival, or skip straight to the final castle and try to kill the main villain while shirtless and with only a pot lid and soup ladle as protection.
I didn’t know this when I began, so I spent my time panicking and creeping around in hedges and behind trees, half expecting bokoblins to club me over the head at any moment. I was terrified of combat, and spent most of my time furtively rolling bombs into enemy camps and detonating them remotely. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the tutorial, where the game gently teaches you that there are always multiple ways to problem-solve. The game has a stable logic around weather and elemental patterns—if it rains, it’s almost impossible to climb vertical surfaces; if you’re in a lightning storm, you’ll get electrocuted if you’ve equipped metal weapons or armour. At the start, you’re required to enter a very cold area to access a key waypoint. You can load up on food and keep stuffing your face as your life gets whittled away by the freezing temperatures, or you can cook a spicy meal to keep yourself warm for several minutes, or you can bribe an NPC to give you a warm piece of clothing by cooking him a special meal. All are equally acceptable possibilities, and the same goes for any decision you make throughout the remainder of the game. The strategic manoeuvring is endless.
The freedom to explore an expansive world was still new to me at this point. I spent three days in a Zelda-induced daze, stumbling and tripping and shivering my way through, before I realised this wasn’t a game you could complete in a weekend. I’d muddled through other genres of games that didn’t require you to linger for very long in dynamic environments, and where the pre-determined goal was obvious: survive several waves of enemies, get from point A to point B, defeat a series of mini-bosses before the final big boss. BOTW was what gave me a vocabulary for my obsessive drive to finish—what gamers call “100% Completion”:
A way of extending gameplay by setting completed tasks (such as collecting a certain number of items and doing optional sidequests) as a percentage, sometimes given explicitly. This feeds into the obsessive nature of the player.
Gamer opinion regarding this mechanic is roughly divided between those who feel that it should be easy for all players to obtain this and those who believe it must be difficult enough for only a few players to reach it during the game’s lifetime. A common middle-ground is that anyone should be able to beat the final boss, but only the dedicated can achieve 100%. […]
One usually doesn’t need 100% to beat the game, but often will be rewarded with things like proper endings, extended story sequences, or “the making of” videos. Any powerful gameplay reward you might receive, such as infinite lives or an ultra powerful weapon, is inherently going to be Awesome, but Impractical, as you've already overcome all of the game’s challenges […]. Other times, you receive nothing but the satisfaction of putting so much time into completing everything in the game. Or some spiffy new outfits. Or a very weird picture congratulating you. Or just some message telling you to get a life. — TV Tropes Wiki
One of the most daunting “completionist” challenges in BOTW isn’t figuring out the various puzzle dungeons that unlock powerful new abilities for you, or even defeating the most vicious enemy in the game, a terrifying centaur-type creature called a Lynel. It’s finding all 900 chubby woodland critters called Koroks hidden all across the land of Hyrule. You initially need their gifts of seeds to upgrade your weapons stashes, but you really only need about 450 of them. The rest are trophies testament to the 100-percenters’ dedication. BOTW fans have come up with interactive maps of where to find these Koroks that would put experienced dataviz professionals to shame.
This is the game that made me love gaming. I found myself on Zelda subreddits and Discord communities poring through both lore and strategy, and cracking up over inside-joke fails and glitches only hardcore BOTW gamers would understand. Players will research a dozen ways to complete a simple fight, and put into place maddeningly intricate Rube Goldberg strategies to practice these executions for the sheer joy of watching them unfold.
So much of my working life prior to the PhD required me to produce immediate results for immediate reward. As a journalist, I would get a story assignment in the morning, call 5-10 people over the course of an afternoon, write up the article in an hour, and it would be published by dinnertime. When I entered the timescale of the PhD, my mental muscle memory could not comprehend a piece of writing that required several years to “100% complete”. This felt a little like the transition from all the previous games I’d completed to the sprawl of BOTW. Several weeks after I began, I found myself stuck at a combat side quest I wasn’t equipped for. I tamed a horse, rode it to another region, and spent several in-game days fishing, rafting, diving off waterfalls and watching the sun set over a tropical coast.
But the PhD isn’t quite designed with the latitude of endless exploration. You can fail endlessly in BOTW, and you’ll end up a few seconds before your death, fully restored, with all the materials you had before, ready to go again. Life isn’t quite so kind. I’ve had so many conversations with peers about what it means to fail or withdraw from a PhD programme after investing years of our lives into this genre of work. I’ve delighted in the decolonial, abolitionist, queer, feminist, postcritical methodologies and tools the doctoral process has offered me, but it feels like there’s a glitch in the game when it comes to the Singaporean context: when fighting the final boss, you’re told not to use any of the strategies you’ve been given. There’s only a narrow allowance for problem-solving. The tutorial gives you five ways to complete a task, but four years later you realise the game has betrayed you, and there’s really only one way the academy will accept you. You start out with obsessive, committed players who will devour all the literature on the one niche topic they love, and who are raring to test out ways of finishing that stretch the boundaries of what is possible… and you end up with exhausted gamers produced in the image of a very specific metric of success. You can finish—but at what cost? I’m still finding out.
I recently watched the play Session Zero, written by an incandescent Jo Tan who also stars in the show, and presented by Checkpoint Theatre. It’s a locked-room crumbling-marriage drama with a gaming twist: an interracial Singaporean couple tries to make sense of their intimate history through the chance and decision-making of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. They’ve both made terrible choices in their marriage. The speculative world of the campaign reveals the faultlines in their relationship, the miscommunication and the spite and the resentment. But it also reveals great tenderness, and eventually the possibility of choosing another path, of imagining a scenario in which both of them might begin again. You can finish a game, but to commit to the durational contract of a marriage is something else. The achievement of a relationship isn’t completion but maintenance.
There’s a staggering amount of toxicity, misogyny, addiction and exploitative labour around gaming culture, so I appreciated a play that allowed for what a joyful relationship with gaming can do. Single-player gaming has saved my life this year, the year of a never-ending pandemic, a horrific military coup, and a personal crisis around PhD work. It has offered me some control over an environment I could complete, but it has also taught me how to let go. I never did 100% complete BOTW, but I revisit it sometimes for the quiet thrill.
Death’s Door
I dabbled in other flagship games post-BOTW, including the Switch ports for Diablo II: Resurrected and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but didn’t enjoy any of them. Until I downloaded Death’s Door, an extraordinary and fiendishly difficult game created by a skeleton team of developers and artists mostly from the UK. You play a wee grim reaper Crow sent out into the world to collect souls. You’ve never questioned the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the black-and-white Reaping Commission Headquarters where you work, or why the powers that be make certain decisions around the doors that connect the world of the living and the world of the dead. As you peel back each chapter of the game—the Urn Witch’s estate and her basement laboratory in the Ceramic Manor; the Overgrown Ruins ruled by a pretentious Frog King in his Flooded Fortress; Castle Lockstone and the Old Watchtowers as a gateway to the ragey Betty the yeti—you begin to realise that your boss has struck a lopsided bargain with Death that strikes you and your other crow friends and family from the equation.
Death’s Door is a gorgeous isometric action-adventure with a punishing Dark Souls undertow. There are major consequences for dying: you have to start the level over, and your health bar is a very short one. I would tackle the same enemy circuit 20 or 30 times, until I could pre-empt long series of enemy moves and dodges, then get gutted in a series of timed trials from a single misstep. I’m playing the Switch port, which also means decreased accuracy with my bow and other ranged attacks, because you don’t get the aiming assist your mouse cursor would give you on PC. I’ve had to eyeball basically all of my ranged attacks, whew.
People who have watched me attempt the various enemy obstacle courses in this game have drawn comparisons with the grim relentlessness of Tom Cruise in his alien Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow. I die, I start over. Live, die, repeat. I run the same circuit over and over, until I get the next platform or gate unlocked, and nudge another 0.1% of the game completion meter. The game and its haunting, melancholy soundscape is so beautiful I sometimes pause, in-between fights, to marvel at each mise-en-scene. At 6 hours and 12 minutes in (played over the course of a week), I’ve completed 73.3% of the game. HowLongToBeat estimates 14½ hours for gamers going for 100% completion, so I’m not doing too badly, although I’ve seen streamers do this at double the speed. I’m stuck at one of the final chapters at the moment, and have had to take a break. I have a long runway for patience when it comes to throwing myself at enemies, but this is the first time I’ve had to step away for a bit.
I’ve also had to step away from writing for the past two years. Writing for the PhD is a strange thing. I’d always considered myself a writer—in fact, it was always a taken-for-granted part of my core identity. But writing for the PhD hasn’t been the transcendent unlearning process of Hoa’s finale, even though the theories and praxes I’ve been exposed to have been invigorating, transformative, and have rewritten my convictions and desires as a person. This second-guessing of the way I write, and how the academy doubts and distrusts the way I write, has seeped into other aspects of my existence. Over the past two years, I’ve started essays, posts and reviews that I’ve never finished. Some of my drafts on this website have a title, then nothing. Some, a handful of sentences. 0% completion. It’s difficult to stomach.
I don’t have a background in economics, so this year was the first time I learnt about the sunk cost fallacy. Economist Steven Levitt explains this beautifully on the Ologies podcast with Alie Ward:
A lot of times people fall prey to what we call the ‘sunk cost fallacy’. So, let’s say that I’ve decided that I want to paint the outside of my house. And I get all the paint, and the ladders, and stuff. And I start painting the first side of the house, and whoa! It is a lot worse than I thought it was. It’s a lot hotter, the paint quality’s a lot worse, I’m really terrible at it. The right answer is probably to say, “Oh my god, I completely misjudged. Even though I’ve already wasted a lot of money on paint and all this time, I’m going to go hire a professional painter to do it.” But a lot of people say, “Well, I can’t stop now. I already did this one-fourth of it. I’ve got to keep on going.” And it’s really not relevant. What I’ve already done is really never relevant to my decision. The right perspective from an economist is: I look at exactly this moment. I identify what my choices are; I can either keep on painting the house or I can stop painting the house and I can hire a painter. And it doesn’t matter that I’ve already done other things that are already in the past. That’s done now. I can’t undo that. […]
I shouldn’t get stuck on a path simply because I’m a long way on that path. Parents would be really upset if they knew I do this, but to the students who are in college, my students are in college who might be in their third year of college, but they’re miserable and they hate it, or especially my PhD students who are in their fourth year and really foundering. I say, “Look, you should decide today. Maybe you should just drop out. Who cares if you’ve spent three years? What you have to think about is this next year, is the cost of the next year worth the benefits – having a college degree?” And from all the whining and unhappiness and tears I’m seeing, I’m not sure that’s true. And it’s really hard, in our society it’s very hard for people to quit. One thing that I’ve realized, even done research on it, is that people get stuck on a path and we really have demonized quitting. And so we don’t quit nearly enough. That we as individuals, and I think society as a whole, would be much better off if people quit more.
I’m guilty of wearing misery as a badge of honour for work done. And as I’ve tried to reorient myself away from valorizing overwork and despair, I’ve started to think about what quitting a PhD might mean. Not only for myself, but for the thousands of bright-eyed postgraduate students who are funnelled into this revoltingly elitist, exclusionary, competitive and broken system, who then come up against the same institutional betrayal, and are expected to make a life from the ruins. What are the other ways in which we can find pleasure in gathering, disseminating and producing knowledge? What might it feel like to be motivated by pleasure to complete something, instead of guilt, fear and shame?
There are so many phrases for this in the languages we know. Memeluk, melepas in Bahasa Indonesia: you can hug something close, but also let it go. 拿得起，放得下 (na de qi, fang de xia) in Mandarin Chinese: if you can pick something up, you can also put it down. It’s so hard to put down the writing and research we strap to our backs. There’s an intimacy and proximity to this kind of work that feels particularly painful to disentangle ourselves from. If I had a full-time office job for four years, the same amount of time I’ve spent on the PhD, and if I spent those four years working on a big corporate project with significant public impact, and developing a specific set of skills, then decided to leave the company for other career transitions and opportunities and growth, no one would begrudge my departure. Why should PhD work be any different? What if the PhD wasn’t a single-player game, but could be done co-op style? What might an open-world, sandbox PhD feel like? What if the dissertation wasn’t the only measure of “100% completion”?
We don’t have to play the game. Like what Session Zero says: we can make our own.
Postscript
Thank you for reading this PhD review masquerading as a game review!
In the meantime, here are some games I’m really excited about:
Unnamed BOTW sequel—I actually cried watching this trailer. I CRIED. Looks like they’ll be using the same world but massively expanding the game mechanics and map vertically. Also a Bokoblin camp on a Talus, what.
Horizon Forbidden West—This looks exquisite so far, but I think I might want to play Horizon Zero Dawn first? That also means investing in a PS4/5, both of which are retailing at extortionate prices because of the demand for consoles throttling the supply right now. So this might have to wait.
Black Myth: Wukong—oh my GOD you guys. Here’s a gameplay trailer from August 2020 that gives you a really terrific sense of the Chinese literary folklore built into the game, including Wukong’s 72 transformations (72变), and really teases the identity of the protagonist you’re playing with a brief glimpse of Wukong as 鬥戰勝佛 (dou zhan sheng fo, or Buddha Victorious in Strife). And this is a more recent trailer from August 2021 that shows off the true extent of the gameplay in Unreal 5. There’s an excellent video breakdown of the game’s iconography and symbolism here.
Do you want me to write more faux game reviews? Let me know.