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.

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.