Sunk costs fallacy in gaming...

[McQ]

What does it take before you'll finally give up on something in a game that you've already put a lot of time into?

I've spent the last week or so playing Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, and I've done almost everything in it, been having a lovely time, and now I feel like I've fallen at the final hurdle, because, despite putting in at least about two or three (or four) hours of trying, I cannot beat Mummy-Me Maze Forever, and I can't get the bonus challenge on Chaos in the Grand Labyrinth.

I've given up for now, I think, but I keep thinking about having another go. The way I feel about it at the moment, I seriously think that these levels might be the hardest thing I've ever attempted in gaming. I also think the bonus challenge on Chaos in the Grand Labyrinth is slightly poorly designed, because I've gotten up as far as the Bullet Bills levels a few times with all my toads intact, but one momentary lapse, and they'll get caught out and cark it. It doesn't help that the levels are randomly generated, either. I've not played any Soulsborne games (yet, though I do want to give them a try soon), but I can't imagine them being harder than this!

The challenge feels way beyond, for example, Champion's Road, Luigi's Purple Coins, Long Journey's End from Odyssey, or Trial of the Sword from Breath of the Wild, all of which I managed after a fair old time of trying. I'm usually good at sticking with a task, when I feel like I'm making slow but steady headway with it, but with these ones, I just don't feel like it's 100% based in skill. Some of my failures have felt very arbitrary. Often with this kind of thing, also, a lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that you have to replay the earlier, easier stages over and over again before you get the chance to practice the bits you're struggling with.

Quite an odd way to end such a fun and easygoing game, anwyway, with these two Roguelikes of uncanny difficulty! The difficulty curve in this game is like a very shallow incline all the way along, and then it just shoots up vertically for the last two goes.

But yeah, it doesn't sit well with me that I might give up, so there's a good chance I'll go back to them. On the other hand, often times, when I bang my head against the wall with a gaming challenge, and then eventually achieve it, I feel great for about ten minutes, and then I think to myself, "Why have I done this?"

[bgmnts]

Good god the amount of hours i've pumped into a game way beyond the point of enjoyment, entering actual misery, is sickening.

[jamiefairlie]

Not starting is the only solution

[Pink Gregory]

I've historically not been top good at discarding things that I should have been done with 30 hours ago, but this would have all been when I had far too much time.

Pretty confident in saying that I didn't need Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Revelations in my life, especially considering that I played those two in anticipation of 3, which I played for a couple of hours and returned to the shop, because it were dog eggs.  But it does mean that I've saved myself a lot of time by not touching the series since.

Trying to grind out the (randomly dropped) Paz tapes from MGS Peace Walker from big repetitive boss fights was pretty grim, especially when I found out that they're all available in the menu, right away, in MGSV Ground Zeroes.

[Mister Six]

I've become rather good at just sacking off stuff if it's too hard or too laborious. The cabaret host minigame in Yakuza 3 and 4 isn't difficult so much as it's extremely boring and repetitive.

If I were younger and less aware of my mortality I might have just ground away on it despite the lack of any real reward, but now I'm older and can see Death's white horse on the horizon, I know it's better to just fuck it off and get on with the fun stuff. Like wasting my time pissing about on here instead.

I've never been that bothered about trophies, mind you, and am always slightly in awe of people who do actually platinum games, especially ones like those in the Yakuza series that are so full of content.

I'm wondering whether I'll have the patience to get all the Riddler trophies in Arkham Knight. I think I might presevere with that, just because there's an actual bit of story there and not just a trophy nobody (not even me) will care about.

[Memorex MP3]

The second it becomes a chore at all I'm gone. I think it's because I played one too many JRPGs that right at the end required a ton of grinding to beat the final boss for an underwhelming ending.

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Got way into the late stages of Hollow Knight, then realised all the shit I was going to have to do to get the good ending and thought, nah, you know what, I think I'll call it a day there. I think I'd got all the enjoyment I was going to get out of it, and didn't really want to sour the experience. I'll still play the sequel mind, when it ever comes out.

Generally my problem is giving up on games way too easily. My attention span is so poor that I find it very hard to stick to one specific game for any length of time, either that or I'll often forget I started playing something, and by the time I remember I've already moved onto something else. So my backlog of games is looking slightly ridiculous by this point.

[oggyraiding]

Marathoning the Halo series to prepare for Infinite, finally beat all the main series and get to Infinite, which I grow bored of after a few hours. Felt like I wasted 30+ hours to get invested in the world and story, only to just drop it before the end.

Both Xenoblade Chronicles, and now Xenoblade Chronicles 2, in both games I reached a boss at around the halfway point that is absolutely no fun to fight. For both of these games I then switched to Casual mode. I feel bad for some reason, but having spent 100 hours between the games in the last two months I no longer have the patience to just grind it out.

[Jerzy Bondov]

With Mummy Me Maze Forever I found it easiest to play in handheld mode and use the touchscreen to freeze tricky enemies.

You're on your own with getting all the Toads through the Grand Labyrinth, I will never be able to do that and I've accepted it.

[AzureSky]

4 hours doesn't sound long to me? I dread to think how long both Champion's Road and the final Odyssey level took me, I think hundreds of attempts at CR? Defo more than a hundred, the disappearing blocks had me thinking "I will never do this". In the end I did it with all 5 characters. Sounds like Mystery House Marathon on 3D world, having to replay everything? That also took me many, many hours. Go on, give it another go, you can do it! Sounds like I might have a look at that game, cheers.

I'm currently trying to 100% all 3D Mario and Zelda games. Getting a bit bored with Master Quest Ocarina and have Wind Waker to revisit, otherwise Hero mode on Skyward Sword might be all I have left, I think. Done all the 3D Mario's, not counting the 3DS version of 64 which I cannot control at all, so it can fuck off.

[McQ]

It may well have been more than four hours, when I wrote that. It's definitely more than that now as I've been going back for "just one more try" more times than I wished I really had over the last few days, but I have just managed to complete the bonus challenge on Grand Labyrinth! (My good feeling didn't even last ten minutes, this time, mind. Shame. There's nothing like a good feeling.)

I found it a bit tricky playing in handheld mode and interfering with the enemies that way, because my hand was in the way of the screen a lot, so I developed an awkward technique of playing in two player mode, but by myself, playing with a Joy-Con in each hand, one to control the trajectory of my Toad Bridgade, and the other one to interfere with the enemies via motion control. Wasn't exactly easy, but it offset some of the slightly more irritating aspects of the one player experience. Phew! So, I think I'm going to have to try and persevere with Mummy-Me Maze Forever using this technique now.

I really admire everyone in the thread who is able to quit when the going is good, though. I think it's an excellent skill to have. I think I'm just too deep in hock to sunk costs fallacy thinking!

I've definitely spent more than four hours (or however long this one actually took me) on some of these types of levels, though. The final challenge on Odyssey, and Champion's Road, and the Trial of the Sword, etc, some of those may have run as far as pretty much an entire day's worth of attempts before I got it.

Or those Traversal challenges in the Spide-R'Men games, I must have put in more than a full day trying to get some of those right and achieve the Ultimate level on them. I remember on one in particular, I was able to consistently get to within about one second of the time that was needed to complete the challenge, and I couldn't figure out how I was ever going to improve my time, and I ended up just bashing my head against the screen (metaphorically, like) over and over again until I managed it, shaving of milliseconds here and there. I hope I don't come to regret any of this at the end of my life, when I look back! If only I could apply this kind of stick-to-it-iveness to literally anything else in my life, it could come in quite useful. I never used to be bothered about 100%-ing games, and I don't always do it, but when you get that close to it, and it seems achievable, I can't help myself. (I had an idle thought the other day, wondering whether it'd be worth my while to try and get all the Korok seeds on BotW, to tide me over until the sequel, and I sincerely hope I don't act on it.)

Think the reason I nearly quit on this one was that I really wasn't having any fun at all with it after a certain point, so I'm not sure what kept me coming back, and I should maybe examine that impulse!

Anyway, I'm off to try again at Mummy-Me Maze Forever. I love this game, highly recommend, and I'm really looking forward to never playing it again.

[McQ]

P.S. Just remembered another agonising experience that I persevered with way beyond the point of sense, recently... the extra hard mode on the Tilt-and-Roll mini game on Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Fucking heck, HAL Laboratory.

[Beagle 2]

I spent all week trying to beat that camel boss cunt on Breath of the Wild, way past any point of enjoyment. To the detriment of my child's development as he loves watching me play it and we basically spent most of our time together repeatedly failing to beat a camel boss cunt for a week.

Anyway, I've done it now and I resolved to  immediately take on Calamity Ganon and the  throw the game in the sea because I cannot stop playing it. I've reached that point with many games before. I'm just not sure I can go through with it with Zelda though. It feels like it's on some sort of other spiritual level or something. I mean, I've barely scratched the surface with it really, I know that. But I can't just play that all the time for months in my scarce free time can I? What a waste of time. A lovely lovely waste of time.

[AzureSky]

BOTW is the endlessly playable, I've done everything, including the 900 koroks, and I still play it. My 6 year old is obsessed with it now also and will tell me stuff I don't know or haven't seen before. I think this is a great thing to share. Now I'm trying a 'straight to Ganon' run with 3 hearts, but I cannot get past Thunderblight stage 2.

[McQ]

I FUCKING DONE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!ELEVEN!!!!!!!!1111!!!!

After a week of obsessively and compulsively trying and retrying to complete Mummy-Me Maze Forever (almost against my will, as I kept wanting to swear it off, but something kept drawing me back in, Godfather III-style), I finally did it. And in the end, after what amounted to probably a whole third of my total playtime in the game, the final run-through didn't feel as difficult as all that. I maintain, with these super hard final Nintendo levels that they always do, that there's nothing individually in any of them that is overly challenging in and of itself, it's just the fact that you've got to do everything perfectly in a sequence with no margin for error, and also, the business of having to start again from the start, so that in order to practice the actually difficult bits at the end, you've got wade through the earlier, easier bits over and over again, which really tests your patience and makes you extra nervy towards the end, mainly because you don't want to screw up and have to invest yet more time into the game to get back to where you left off.

And also, I now think that the sunk costs fallacy is to be ignored, and you should always plow through to the end, even, and maybe especially, when you're not enjoying it at all anymore. The sunk costs fallacy is the true fallacy! The fallacy... that is the sunk costs fallacy fallacy.

Think I might start Hades next, after all of that.

P.S. Please ignore the timestamp on this post.

[Bently Sheds]

I really enjoyed The Outer Wilds up to the point when the "Fucking Hell! Amazing!" moments stopped happening and it became a "repeatedly dying horribly" simulator. It feels like a magic eye picture I just can't unravel - the solution is there right under my nose but I don't have the capacity see it. I will go back to it at some point.

[Blue Jam]

Think I'm done with Amnesia: The Dark Descent now. Been waiting for it to stop being a load of boring fetch quests and actually get scary, but I've abandoned hope of either of these things happening.

Are Justine or A Machine For Pigs any better? I stupidly bought The Collection.

FWIW I am writing all of this as someone who absolutely loves SOMA.

[Pink Gregory]

Think I'm done with Amnesia: The Dark Descent now. Been waiting for it to stop being a load of boring fetch quests and actually get scary, but I've abandoned hope of either of these things happening.

Are Justine or A Machine For Pigs any better? I stupidly bought The Collection.

FWIW I am writing all of this as someone who absolutely loves SOMA.

People seemed to hate a Machine for Pigs, but I think it was mainly GAMER (tm) backlash because it was  shorter and more linear; which frankly in hindsight can only be a good thing.  Still think Penumbra Overture is a better game than Amnesia.

[bgmnts]

Glad these Amnesia games are shit after I bought them on sale! I also bought Soma though so swings and roundabouts!

[Ron Maels Moustache]

Think I'm done with Amnesia: The Dark Descent now. Been waiting for it to stop being a load of boring fetch quests and actually get scary, but I've abandoned hope of either of these things happening.

I always felt like I was alone in my opinion that Amnesia was a bit overrated, so that's a relief. I found it frustrating rather than scary, and the constant WOO THIS IS SPOOKY ISN'T IT ambience does nothing for me - it would be much more atmospheric if they let you turn the background music off. One thing I did appreciate was that after you've died in the same place a few times, creatures just despawn and don't reappear at all, but this did feel like a tacit admission from the developers that they knew those encounters are irritating as fuck if you have to keep replaying them over and over again

[Mister Six]

I think I won't finish Arkham Knight after all. I have to find another 150+ Riddler trophies and do another two or three Azrael fights where you lose if you get hit and I just can't be arsed. Apparently you have to finish all the side missions to get the "proper" ending, so I suppose I'll just watch it on YouTube.

Hooray for knowing when to quit!

[thugler]

Playing football manager out of habit rather than enjoyment. Not really as entertainment, just to  kill hours and dissociate from the world while pretty depressed.

Otherwise i largely have the opposite problem lately, not enough time to commit to new games and not much motivation either.

Wouldn't dream of doing all these collectable bonus things

[madhair60]

I think I won't finish Arkham Knight after all. I have to find another 150+ Riddler trophies and do another two or three Azrael fights where you lose if you get hit and I just can't be arsed. Apparently you have to finish all the side missions to get the "proper" ending, so I suppose I'll just watch it on YouTube.

Hooray for knowing when to quit!

I enormously enjoyed getting 100% in Arkham Knight, yet any time anyone says "I gave up and watched the endings on Youtube" I'm like, yep, wise move.

[Mister Six]

Aye, that's it. Turned down the difficulty to wrap up the Azrael storyline, but I'm definitely not going to piss about picking 140+ Riddler trophies just to watch the "proper" ending. Bollocks to that. I'll pop it on the YouTubes and be done with it.