Listeners to the podcast have probably sussed out that I enjoy digital RPGs about as much as tabletop ones, albeit in a different way. Some of the first games I ever played on a computer were the old Sierra King’s Quest games, and in particular, the third entry in that series sticks with me. In King’s Quest III: To Heir is Human, you play an older teenage boy named Gwydion as he seeks to survive and ultimately escape from his captivity to the cruel and vastly more powerful wizard Manannan. I remember many evenings of wracking my brain as Gwydion, sneaking around, trying to amass the components necessary to turn my evil master into something less threatening, and once I finally managed that task, the story felt complete to me. And that wasn’t even a proper RPG, but a text-based adventure game.
From what I understand, there’s a fair bit of game left after you turn Manannan into a cat and escape, but I never really pushed myself to see it. That has happened many more times over the years, and the fragments of unfinished stories, both interactive and non-interactive, both digital and tabletop now form something of a metaphorical trail behind me. There’s my paladin/detective in service to a neutral good death god whose tale of investigating a mysteriously-immortal noble class (and the implied sinister forces behind it) in his world will never be told. There’s my Pillars of Eternity party, stuck on a late-game dragon fight I could never get past. My poor courier in Fallout: New Vegas was stranded in a deathclaw-infested part of the Lonesome Road DLC the last time I played it. There’s a party of GURPS 3e characters in a fantasy alternate history setting that I ran that never discovered that one of their number’s arranged fiance was an ocean-spanning crime boss. My playthrough of The Witcher 3 is stopped before either of the DLC packages start. I’ve got about a third of Hyperion and about a third of Night Watch to read, and haven’t been back. I still haven’t watched the final seasons of Flash Point or The Shield. And then there’s our Shadowrun party, who were just starting to make the shift from being entirely mission-focused to a proactive force in their neighborhood when the campaign ran out of gas due to PC paralysis, GM burnout, and The New Shiny.
This trail of unfinished stories is part of why I started my backlog project and yet even that hasn’t seen any progress since May (probably not so coincidentally right around the same time I started my new job). Still, it’s something that tends to gnaw at the back of my mind, and lately I’ve been trying to get to the end of some of those stories, to finish the ones I can so that I only have the ones I can’t left.
Finally, it’s also worth noting that at least one of the most famous and well-known of Jesus’s parables ends on an unresolved cliffhanger! In the parable of the prodigal son, we never do find out whether the old brother eventually relents and joins the party. That’s not the point of the parable, of course, but that doesn’t mean the story is neatly tied off, either. I think perhaps that may even be part of the usefulness story – its sudden ending leaves those who hear it with the lasting knowledge that there’s more to tell, and invites comparison to countless unfinished personal stories.
Which ultimately means even the unfinishable stories have some merit. Our Shadowrun campaign may rise again, the opening part of King’s Quest III remains one of my favorite digital memories, and the wall I hit in Pillars of Eternity has recently inspired me to restart the game from scratch and push through in a more slow and deliberate fashion, savoring the experience as I go rather than charging through to the end. And, in a more concrete sense, I still have time to do better, to tie up my own loose ends and seek or grant forgiveness, to reconnect with people I’ve lost connection with, to find new ways of living out the commandments Jesus left us with.
And when I do finish or even just continue one of these stranded stories, there’s a feeling of satisfaction that’s not always present for ones I punch through on the first go around. Sometimes putting things down for a while just makes them that more enjoyable to pick up. Sometimes the treasure that you lost feels more precious when you find it.
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Questions for the reader:
Since this is something I’m sure I’m not alone in, I’m going to conclude this with some direct questions to you.
1. What stories do you have still sitting around in an unfinished state?
2. What use, if any, do you still get out of them?
3. Are there any stories that you’ve decided to leave technically unfinished, but complete enough for you like I did with King’s Quest III?
4. How do you look at those unfinished stories? Do they hang over you, or do you put them aside and move on?
2 thoughts on “Unfinished Stories”
Specific, directed questions! I can’t resist!
1. What stories do you have still sitting around in an unfinished state?
I have plenty – I often feel like the opposite of a completionist. Unless I become compulsive about a game (Every Civ game, WoW, a few others I put hundreds of hours into (or more)) I can walk away after it stops being fun. Dark Dungeons got to a point where it was too difficult and grind-y for me to enjoy continuing, so I haven’t seen any of the end content. Undertale is another, though I watched YouTube to get a handle on how it ends. The Stanley Chronicle was amazing for a while, and then got too nitpicky. I guess I’m also sort of lazy, and tend to play video games when I’m tired or distracted. I don’t have the time and energy left over to be truly sucked in as I was when I was a kid or younger adult.
2. What use, if any, do you still get out of them?
They’re always there to go back to now and then, and I think about them. I learn a lot from games long before I complete them – usually I have built up the skills the game demands before I get to the end, and have seen the interesting things the game will do. In terms of tabletop RPGs, especially of the White Wolf variety, I re-use unfinished PCs and NPCs all the time. I even re-use my friends’ unfinished characters when I run a game. It’s like I have this stable of a few dozen characters I can fall back on when I don’t want to populate another City of Darkness with all new personalities.
3. Are there any stories that you’ve decided to leave technically unfinished, but complete enough for you like I did with King’s Quest III?
Most stories, actually. I’d say that when I’m finished with a video game, it is usually technically about 60% complete in terms of achievements or map exploration.
4. How do you look at those unfinished stories? Do they hang over you, or do you put them aside and move on?
The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began…I mean, stories don’t really end. We just choose a point at which we have made the point we want to make, or a point at which we are comfortable no longer telling a particular story. I mean, how many genre novels end with a young adult who has just saved the world? What happens next in this person’s 50 years of life? We don’t worry about it too much, because the story has come to a point where we know we can walk away from it and feel satisfied.
Some stories, though, get suck in us, and we’re never really satisfied. When I finished The Return of the King, I continued to devour the Appendices, and then re-read The Hobbit and the trilogy, and then start in on every video game, every book I could find on Middle-Earth. I played MERP. I read the History of Middle Earth that Christopher Tolkien has published. Then I read annotated versions of all of the books, and on and on. That’s a story that I don’t ever feel finished with. There aren’t many like that, but there are definitely some.
The characters point under #2 is a good one – I’ve definitely reused discarded PCs as NPCs in later games.
I also don’t think I’ve ever 100%ed a game in my life. I consider them done when I’ve played through the story and reached the end credits.