There's no shame in not finishing a video game (2024)

Welcome toNo Shame November! This week we're diving into the pop culture we love that society tells us we shouldn't.

It’s OK to leave a video game unfinished.

Even if you like it, even if you really want to finish it, it’s OK that you haven’t. It doesn’t make you a failure.

Video games are meant to be entertainment. If a game doesn’t suit your mood, drop it and try again another time. If a game is too difficult, give it a rest for a week, a month, or even a year. If a game bores you, drop it forever.

If you finish one, great! If you get halfway through, or even 90 percent of the way there and stop, also great! Chance are you paid for it, and it’s your choice to do whatever you want with it.

Too often we shame ourselves for the things we haven’t done or have yet to do. Too often we put ourselves down for failing to meet some inane standard that we make up in our own minds.

I used to get down on myself for all the games I left incomplete, piling up in my backlog like an ever-expanding mountain of shame. But video games don’t deserve to make us feel like failures, and they certainly don’t deserve that much negative space in our heads.

Sonic the Hedgehog can tap his foot as long as he wants.

Excuses, excuses

Video games are often long, challenging endeavors that test players’ skills, concentration, and problem-solving abilities. Perhaps above all else, they test our commitment.

The Witcher 3 is a fantastic game, one of the best of the last decade, and has sold over 40 million copies. It takes dozens of hours to finish the story; it's more like hundreds if you really want to explore the world and complete every side quest. On Steam, only 27.2 percent of people who own the game earned the achievement “Passed the Trial,” which you get when you complete the main story on any difficulty.

I am part of the 72.8 percent. I played The Witcher 3 for about nine hours back in 2015 when it launched. I just wasn’t in the mood for such an undertaking at the time, so it fell to the wayside.

I am a big fan of The Witcher 2, which I completed just a couple years before its sequel came out. I was really looking forward to The Witcher 3’s release and planned on sinking days of time into it, exploring the vast open world and hunting down all kinds of beasts.

It just didn’t happen.

Years passed. When the coronavirus lockdown occurred, I thought The Witcher 3 would be a fun one to get lost in. I picked it up again on Xbox in April this year and played it for about 10 hours. Then it fell to the wayside again.

Other games came up. I drifted toward perennial favorites like Rocket League and Counter-Strike, played games like Fall Guys and Among Us with friends, sunk time into new releases like Hades, and spent dozens of hours reviewing games like Paper Mario: The Origami King and Watch Dogs: Legion.

There’s always something new that will sap my attention, making me drop another game into my backlog. Most recently, I planned on playing through Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and then going back and finishing Yakuza 0, a game I got roughly halfway through in 2019 and then dropped. But there’s a new World of Warcraft expansion this November so … yeah.

Unfinished games used to weigh on me a lot. They were like little neglected ghosts following me around, occasionally tugging at the back of my brain. I’ve had a collection of them since childhood, beginning with Paper Mario for Nintendo 64 and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on GameCube. They were favorites, but I never completed them, and I thought about them all too frequently for more than a decade.

But even though I never finished them, I still fondly looked back on my memories of playing them. The same goes for a lot of the games I love: Dark Souls, Grand Theft Auto IV, Hollow Knight, Mario + Rabbids: Battle Kingdom. The list goes on and on. You don't have to finish a game to love it.

I’ve accepted that some of these games may never leave this list, and the list will inevitably grow longer.

Acceptance

To stop the shame of not finishing games, we need to stop equating unfinished games with failure.

Leaving something unfinished is normal. We do it all the time, with plenty of valid reasons: Other stuff comes up; we get bored of it; it stops clicking; we forget about it.

That’s just a part of life.

It happens outside of video games, too. Maybe you haven’t gotten food from a restaurant that you love in a while because you’re cooking more or trying other spots. Do you beat yourself up about it? No. Maybe you watched the first couple seasons of American Idol and then fell off the wagon. Does that bother you? I hope not. You just move on.

Maybe someday you’ll jump back into one of your unfinished games. Maybe you won’t. Either decision is perfectly valid, but you can’t let one choice negatively impact your sense of self.

There are enough things to actually worry about in life.

At the end of the day, they’re just video games. If you really want to, you can just look up the endings on YouTube or something.

Related Video: These are the best beginner-friendly video games for your coronavirus lockdown