Gotta know the progress. The weirdest habits of gamers
- The Weirdest Habits of Gamers
- Pushing gamma settings
- Squirreling first-aid kits and grenades away
- Only tens and even numbers
- Gotta know the progress
- One save is not enough
- Always choose the longest path
- Bothering random people
- Coming up with your own plot
- Buying games we can’t afford
Gotta know the progress
Experienced players and gaming veterans don't use any walkthroughs. And even if they do, then it's an exception or unique situation, when checking every wall has failed and interaction with all items didn't bring the expected results. Or... You can do that when you're curious how many chapters or levels have left until the game's finale. In such case feel free to do it.
So in nine out of ten cases, when I decide to use online game guides, I do it only to estimate how many stages I have left to play by checking the chapter list or some other characteristic indicators. I'm not doing this because I'm bored and I want to know if there's any point in continuing the gameplay. Or because the title I'm currently playing is so great that I'd like to make sure whether the fun won't end too soon. Actually, it's just a stupid, curiosity-based habit, somehow stronger than the fear of spoilers which we often try to avoid at all costs.
From the research I have conducted, it appears that I am not alone in such an approach and quite a lot of people treat game guides not as walkthroughs but as a preview of how much levels of the game they still have to complete. Some people extract this information, as far as possible, from the list of achievements/trophies (although it is even easier to find a spoiler in trophy guides than in standard game guides). Other players are pure mathematicians and prefer to check the average time required to complete a particular video game. After that, they compare this information with the number of their gameplay hours.
It's an interesting topic. When we go to a movie theater, we usually know that the screening time will last from one and a half up to three hours (but the latter option is rather rare). We can easily estimate whether we are in the middle or at the very end. The same goes for books, we hold them in our hands and are able to check how many pages we have left (Kindle even has a page counter). It looks quite different in the case of video games, because there are 2-hours long titles and RPGs which can provide more than 200 hours of fun. Sometimes it seems like the fun is over, but in reality there's still a lot more to do. That's another unusual thing that makes video games unique.
Martin Strzyzewski
