The Moments that Cause Us to Quit a Game

Here’s a situation I’m sure all gamers have been in at one point or another. You’re gaming it up, getting a ton of enjoyment out of the latest title you’ve just picked up, immersed in the gameplay. Then, things go awry. You die, and at that point, realize that you haven’t saved your game for a while, or due to the mechanics of the game, you’ve essentially been placed back an hour or more, left to redo what you’ve just completed.

When I saw an article discussing this at Ars Technica, I had a flurry of memories come back with events just like this, and not many of them I particularly wanted to remember. I tend to become overly frustrated with games easily, especially if I believe it’s the design that’s at the root of the problems, but I’m certainly not alone. When you realise that the only way to progress through the game is to completely redo any part of a game you didn’t find that enjoyable to begin with, it’s incredibly easy to just say, “screw it”, and put it back on the shelf, never to touch it again.

This is an issue game developers are well aware of, and it’s no doubt due to the fact that they are gamers themselves. There have been a few titles that have tried new techniques to not punish the player much on death, such as Prey, which warps you to another world to kill off some flying creatures, and once you’ve killed enough, you’re put back exactly where you were. I didn’t have too much to complain about with that feature, and I actually did find it to add a useful element to the gameplay.

As always, what makes a game fun is its gameplay, and if there’s a part of mechanic that causes frustration, the game’s not going to be fun, and most likely, the player will just quit and never touch it again. I personally have a few games like that on my shelf. So my question is, what game has stumped or frustrated you the point of never touching it again?

So why do we quit? What makes us walk away from a game? Developers are aware of it, and at E3 I talked to a developer from Turn 10 about why they had added a rewind feature into Forza 3, allowing you a mulligan after a bad crash. “If you’re at the end of a five-lap race, and you make one mistake, that’s when you decide to turn the game off and go to bed,” he explained. “I don’t want to lose people at that point.”