Full disclosure: I didn’t come up with this topic out of nowhere; it was inspired by seeing a recent Second Wind podcast which posed a similar question float across my YouTube feed.

I haven’t actually listened to the podcast in question as yet because I didn’t want to colour my own judgement on the topic; instead, I thought I’d just share my own personal feelings on the matter based on my own experiences and observations.

You probably already know what I’m going to say, given my track record here, but I think it might be an interesting discussion regardless. So let’s get into it!

First up, a definition for the sake of anyone unfamiliar: in simple terms, a sunk cost fallacy is where one continues with an endeavour well past the point where it is desirable or practical to continue doing so on the grounds that one has invested money, time and/or effort into it.

In gaming terms, this can be simplified to “continuing to play a game that you might not be sure you’re enjoying on the grounds that you don’t want to feel like you wasted your money and/or time on it”. The specific discussion on the Second Wind podcast linked above is whether pursuing “completion” (however you define that) of a game is, in fact, a sunk cost fallacy in some circumstances.

And that definition of “completion” can be quite important, I think. To some folks, it simply means rolling credits on the game once, having beaten its critical path, main scenario, whatever you want to call it. To others, it means having completed all the major side activities available to the player. To others still, it means having earned all the achievements or obtained a platinum trophy. And there’s a whole other group for whom “it’s done when I’m done with it” is a perfectly valid viewpoint.

My outlook on this has gone back and forth a bit over the years. In my earlier days of gaming — I’m talking back in the 8- and 16-bit eras here — I played a lot of games but rarely finished any of them. I believe the first game I ever actually beat was Super Mario World on Super NES, and in that instance I first of all rolled credits on its critical path, then subsequently went back and “100%” cleared it by finding all 96 level exits.

I think it was probably the 32-bit era — PlayStation, mainly — where I started making more of a concerted effort to actually beat games. Final Fantasy VII was a definite turning point for me, because that game compelled me to see it through to its conclusion, and its finale sequence made such a strong impact on me that I became thoroughly enamoured with the concept of “the finale” — particularly the musical aspect.

I didn’t beat every game I picked up, but I made a particular effort with any RPGs I could get my hands on. The only exception to this was a janky-ass action RPG called Blaze & Blade: Eternal Quest, which is, to date, the only game I think I outright regretted buying almost immediately after trying it for the first time. (Interestingly, I feel much more inclined to give it another chance in more recent years, but haven’t gotten around to doing so as yet.)

As time went on and console generations advanced, my motivation to see games through to their conclusion varied somewhat. In some cases, games were simply so massive that beating them just didn’t seem like an option — racing games post-Ridge Racer often fell into this category — while at other times I simply had a desire to try and stay on top of the latest releases so I could be part of the conversation around them, both online and with my “real life” friends.

There was a definite “breaking point” for me, though, and it was with the original Gears of War on Xbox 360. I was playing through the game and right from the outset, I’d felt like I wasn’t really enjoying it. I knew how critically acclaimed it was and how much my friends liked it, but I just didn’t like it at all. I didn’t like the aesthetic, I didn’t like the characters and I didn’t really like the gameplay.

The final straw for me was a sequence I got stuck on, repeatedly dying at the same point despite trying various different strategies. I got so fed up with hearing the same dialogue over and over every time the checkpoint reloaded that I just gave up. I took the game out of the console, boxed it up and, next time I went into town, traded it in. And I didn’t feel bad about that.

From thereon, I resolved to be a little more discerning in choosing the games I wanted to pick up. It would be a few years between that incident and my falling particularly deeply into the rabbit hole I still occupy to this day, but from that point on I definitely resolved to stop feeling “the hype” for anything with a particularly “big name” attached, and instead started paying attention to the things that I knew I would enjoy.

And that’s the philosophy I still take to this day. I don’t pick up a game just for the sake of picking it up, or because the reviews are good, or even if someone I know is constantly banging on about how much they like it. I do quite often buy games fully intending to not play them immediately — at least partly because some of the games I like get quite hard to find as a physical release after a while, and I am very much a physical media collector — but I always get to them eventually.

The reason this takes quite a while for me these days is that under most circumstances, I do firmly believe that playing all the way through a game (at least until you roll credits) puts you in the best possible position to be able to talk about it. As someone who enjoys writing about the experiences he’s had with gaming, I feel fundamentally somewhat dishonest if I’m offering commentary and criticism based on only a portion of the thing I’m talking about — because if I was covering any other medium, I wouldn’t stop after half the movie, less than 100 pages of the book or three tracks of the album.

Going by our earlier definitions, my definition of “complete” tends to mean “roll credits, plus having completed as much of the side activities as makes me feel like I’ve had a satisfying and worthwhile experience”. Sometimes this means 100% clearing the game and all its optional components. At others, it means leaving heavily grindy or luck-based elements undone. So long as I’ve 1) seen the ending of the game (and by that I usually mean the “true ending”, if one exists) and 2) come away feeling like I’ve had a good time, that’s a game “completed” so far as I’m concerned.

I should probably clarify that somewhat, however. I’m talking primarily about narrative-based experiences here, which make up the majority of what I play. These are the games that I’m most inclined to see through from start to finish, to want to write about after the fact, and to perhaps forgive some mechanical shortcomings along the way. I am, in short, someone for whom a compelling story will keep me entertained and occupied, even if the “game” side of things perhaps isn’t as complex, in-depth or well-polished as some other titles out there.

That’s not to say I don’t play mechanics-centric games at all. I still love a good racing game — particularly if it has an arcadey angle to it — and I adore 2D platformers, both traditionally linear and more open-structure in style. But one thing is pretty constant: when I start a new game, I like to focus on it almost exclusively as much as possible, until I’ve beaten it — and I’m most inclined to do this with narrative-centric experiences.

This doesn’t always work, however. When I did this with Final Fantasy XIV when it first launched, I ended up hardly playing anything else because I got hooked on the endgame grind, but felt inordinately guilty about this — particularly when pals were telling me about other games they were enjoying. When Xenoblade Chronicles X finally distracted me from Final Fantasy XIV, I found it quite hard to go back to the latter — and nigh-impossible to find a good balance between the two.

In extreme circumstances, this can lead me to taking an inordinately long time to beat particular games; I spent over a year on Persona 5, for example, and probably at least two years on Code Realize: Guardian of Rebirth. And the worst thing about this is the feeling of guilt. The feeling of having left something undone. Something I was enjoying, more to the point. Because I didn’t stop playing Persona 5 or Code Realize because I wasn’t enjoying them; I stopped (temporarily, I thought) because something else came along that I wanted to check out there and then.

Is that feeling of guilt a sunk cost fallacy? There’s perhaps an argument to be made that it is, because in situations like this I feel “obliged” to go back and finish something I started. But at the same time, I don’t feel that sense of “obligation” because of the money or even the time I previously spent on the game in question; I feel it because I know that I was enjoying it, and I know that I want to see how it ends, but for one reason or another I’d just kept putting it off.

This happened with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, too. I can’t deny that I like that game a lot, and yet it took three complete restarts over the course of several years for me to finally plough through and roll credits on it for the first time. I finally succeeded in that recently simply because after finishing one particular game that I’d enjoyed, I just sat myself down, gave myself a figurative slap about the face and said “right, you big lummox, you, go and finish Zelda before you even think about playing anything else.”

Am I wrong to feel that sense of “guilt”? Some would tell me that I am; they would say that if I wasn’t enjoying a game enough to make it my main focus and play it through to completion, I shouldn’t feel bad about that — and moreover, I shouldn’t feel bad if I never get back to it. And there’s definitely some validity to that statement.

But as I’ve said, it’s not that I wasn’t enjoying the games. It’s not that I “wanted to get my money’s worth” or “feel like I hadn’t wasted my time”. It’s “oh, I was enjoying that story, I would like to know how it ends”. It’s the fundamental dissatisfaction you feel of having started doing something pleasurable but not having seen it through to its conclusion. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely and utterly blueballing yourself.

At least, that’s how I see it. And I know that there’s a portion of people out there who don’t see it that way. I recognise this every time I look at the achievements list for something I’m playing and see that less than 75% of people cleared the first chapter. I notice it every time a new game comes out and people are all over it for maybe one or two days, then never mention it ever again. And dear Lord, do I ever notice it any time someone starts banging on about fucking Game Pass.

Game Pass — and subscription services in general — have a lot to answer for in this regard, because they overwhelm you with choice and give you the constant feeling that the thing you’ve chosen to engage with might not be the optimal one. And that, in turn, leads to a feeling that you should maybe just try one of the other things before having gotten particularly deep into the first one. And then the cycle repeats over and over and over until you’ve got a mountain of games you’ve played for 30 minutes, none of which you have any particularly strong feelings for.

This isn’t a problem exclusive to subscription services, of course — there are times when I look at the games on my shelves and feel mildly overwhelmed as to what I “should” play next, for example, and I’m sure people feel similarly when browsing their Steam libraries — but subscription services have certainly exacerbated it by all but removing the “sunk cost” aspect. Because you haven’t invested anything specifically into one individual title on a subscription service, there’s none of that feeling of “guilt” or “obligation” to continue with it if it doesn’t grab you immediately.

Well, good, you might think. And I understand that perspective to a degree. But I also feel like behaving that way is more likely to cause you to skip over, misunderstand or ignore experiences that you might otherwise have had a good time with. Moreover, it will deprive you of the satisfaction of seeing a complete story from start to finish, which is something I feel we habitually underestimate the importance of in this medium.

In some respects, I think the “sunk cost” aspect is actually a good thing, because having spent some money on a specific thing makes you more inclined to actually give it a fair shot rather than expecting it to show its entire hand in half an hour or less.

Because as much as people joke about “it takes [x] hours to get good”, the fact is, some games really do reward continued engagement — whether that’s through getting to know the characters in a narrative-centric game, or mastering how to play in a more mechanics-centric experience. I don’t think it’s particularly fair or respectful to those who create video games to try something for five minutes and then write it off as “boring” or “shit” or whatever, particularly when the game in question has clearly been designed as a complete creative work intended to be experienced in its entirety.

There will always be examples of games that are just poorly made, particularly with how open services such as Steam and the Nintendo eShop are to low-effort asset flips, “hentai games” with stolen artwork and other junk these days — and the rise of “AI” garbage is only going to make that problem worse. But those are pretty easy to spot and avoid altogether in the first place, so I’m not talking about those. They just don’t enter the picture at all so far as I’m concerned.

Rather, I’m talking about games that, for one reason or another, intrigued you enough to want to buy them — whether that was for full price on launch or a deep discount in a sale. Something must have attracted you to that game in the first place, so it would seem rather odd to not give it a chance to get its hooks into you properly.

In the case of the Gears of War example I cited above, I mistakenly bought the game without that particular X-factor in place; I bought it because I thought I “should” play it, because everyone else was playing it. And you know what? I was right. Nothing attracted me to that game in the first place from a personal perspective, and thus I didn’t feel bad getting rid of it well before rolling credits on it. And from thereon, I made more careful purchasing decisions.

Is all this symptomatic of a sunk cost fallacy? Perhaps. But I can say one thing based entirely on my own experiences: I feel like I’ve had a much more satisfying gaming life since making a specific effort to complete everything I start — because I’m secure in the knowledge that everything I start is something I picked up for a reason. I don’t end up dropping games I’m not enjoying because I simply don’t buy games I know I probably won’t enjoy.

It works for me. And if you’ve got five or six things on the go right now, I’d encourage you to take the time to focus on one that you felt particularly excited for prior to purchasing it, and see it through to its conclusion. You might just be surprised how much you get out of the whole experience.

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