I’ve blogged about this topic from several angles over the years. It’s something I think about a lot. I was replaying a 10 year old game (Borderlands 2) the other day and staring at the trio of achievements I got in relatively short succession in Steam’s page for the game and couldn’t help but notice that these three things that happen one after another in the story pacing, but maybe not in the player’s experience, had a noticeable drop off rate. 49% of players (less than half and to my understanding only about a third into the story!) make it that far in the story in the first place. Of those 2% fell off from the next story achievement and another 2% fell off by the third.

On the one hand, no other medium has had these sorts of analytics so upfront and noticeable by even the “readership” or “viewership”. There’s never been a time in history where you find out that only 49% of readers in history finished that chapter of Moby Dick or viewers in history finished that episode of Star Trek.

On the other hand, I kind of wonder why there isn’t more industry-wide sense of shame (or at least a demoralizing feeling) at some of these numbers. There are beloved games with high metacritic scores whose Steam achievements show that single digit percentages of players ever concluded their story. Maybe War and Peace is still a successful and critically acclaimed novel if only 8% of people that open the book ever finish the whole thing and there’s a visible attrition rate in every chapter along the way. But how unsatisfying is that as a creator? How do you tell any sort of interesting Hero’s Journey if you know most people won’t even make it much past the “Call to Action” of your planned arc?

I’ve played Borderlands 2 on three platforms, this is about as far as I’ve ever gotten into the main story, and what I know of the story of it is mostly a bizarre jumble and I’m almost sure most of what I think I know of the story is actually just from the collection of Pre-Sequel and Tales from the Borderlands and Borderlands 3 recaps. That’s weird. I suppose it’s like the old days of TV reruns where you might only ever really know a show from the standpoint of a syndicated shuffle and have no idea what order episodes take place in, but while that sort of makes sense for 1-hour standalone things, I am sure it makes all that much sense for 60+ hour games that supposedly are telling a serialized story together.

Not that Borderlands 2 is trying to be War and Peace, and it’s mixed up storyline is part of the fun, but Borderlands is just the most recent example. There are so many examples. I’ve never completed an individual Assassin’s Creed game’s story (but tried to follow the overall plotline for years before giving up).

I’ve long missed cheat codes and “god modes” now. I’ve often wished for “I just want to get back to the story” buttons. I’ve come to loathe the way videogames interpret “the rule of three”. If I’ve done the thing once fifty times and twice a dozen more, 62 is still way more than three repetitions, I get it, I’ve learned all I care to know about the thing, just give me a button to press to move on.

Yeah, I’ll sign an affidavit at that point signifying that I’m bad at games. I’m well aware by now about that. But maybe the stories would be better in general if these books didn’t require you to be good at jumping jacks and obstacle courses to move to the next chapter or these movies didn’t require you to cook a perfect michelin star meal to get to third act while the chef shouts how useless you are?