Practice

These essays make claims about how games end, and a reader is entitled to know the conditions under which those claims were formed. What follows describes how games are played here, how notes are kept, what counts as an ending, and where the limits of the method lie.

Playthrough conditions

Games are bought at retail and played on ordinary consumer hardware. Default difficulty is used unless a game's ending is explicitly gated behind another setting, in which case the setting is named in the essay. No console commands, no debug facilities and no fast travel that the game itself does not offer.

A playthrough is completed before writing begins. Where a game has multiple endings, the essay addresses the one my playthrough reached and says so; where a second ending is discussed, a second playthrough was made or an earlier save was replayed from the last branching point.

Note-taking

Notes are written by hand during play, timestamped against playtime rather than clock time, and never composed afterwards from memory. This matters because the subject is the effect of accumulated hours, and a recollection assembled at the end is exactly the sort of evidence this journal exists to avoid relying on.

Where an essay states that a technique recurred sixty-one times or that a spike arrived without warning, that figure or observation comes from a note made at the moment it happened.

What counts as an ending

Three things, treated separately. The final hour of intended play, meaning the last sequence the game expects a player to complete. The credits themselves, including anything presented during or after them. And the state the game returns you to afterwards, if it returns you at all.

How games are chosen

By whether their endings raise a question worth several thousand words, which is not the same as whether they are good. Two of the games discussed most closely here have endings I consider unsuccessful, and they earn the attention because the specific way they fail is instructive.

Release date is irrelevant. A game from six years ago is as useful to an argument as one from last month, and this journal has no interest in coinciding with a marketing cycle.

Why several games per essay

A single ending can be described but not explained. A pattern across six games, on the other hand, points at a cause, and the causes are what interest me: production scheduling, testing conditions, the economics of assets that only a minority of players will see.

Essays therefore compare rather than assess, and where I count something, I say how many games were counted and what the count measured.

Limits of the method

This is one person's reading of a small number of games, based on notes rather than instrumentation. The samples are small enough that a figure like three of seven should be read as a description of my notes and not as a claim about the medium.

I also cannot know why a particular ending turned out as it did. Arguments about production conditions are inferences from the finished work and from what is publicly known about how such work is made, not accounts of anything I have been told.

Corrections

Errors of fact about what happens in a game are corrected in place, with a note recording what changed. Arguments are not revised because a reader disagreed. Where a patch alters an ending materially, the original essay stands and a new note describes the change, because the earlier text remains an accurate record of what the game once did.

Spoilers

There is no way to write about endings without describing them, so every essay here does. This is stated plainly on the about page and repeated at the head of the essay list, and no further warnings are given within the text.