There are video games that take me a long time to finish.
I’m reflecting on this tonight because I’m near the end of my first play-through of Mass Effect, a game which I started over a year ago. It took me just as lengthy a time (if not longer) to finish Twilight Princess. If I ever beat Fallout 3 or Eternal Sonata, it will be in a similar timeframe.
Compare these to those shorter action games that I devour quickly: Mirror’s Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Sure, the genre of game has something to do with it. With books, it can be easy to quickly finish a pulp mystery by Harlen Coben but a hefty John Irving can take quite a while.
Still, though, it’s also the attitude the game (or related media) gives off. Certain games are heavy. They present themselves as epic. And when a game or book or movie sends out those signals, it makes it harder to consume quickly. Movies are slightly different because they’re almost always consumed in one sitting, regardless of genre or length or heaviness.
But I find the same thing: a movie with a heavy moral message or an advertised epicness (like, say, a war/holocaust movie or The Lord of the Rings) tends to sit on the shelf or coffee table longer before it gets put into the player. You really have to be in the mood to indulge your senses, to let yourself be weighed down by the media and experience it.
The end result also varies. Finishing a longer game or book, watching a heavy movie, they all have their own rewards. You feel like you really accomplished something. After slowly making progress for a year, there’s a feeling of the overall journey. Of getting somewhere.
There’s a different feeling I get when I consume something quickly, like with Batman or when I read The Prestige recently. There’s a sense of mourning. Of losing something you love so quickly, of a sadness that there’s no more game to play or no more book to read. It’s harder to capture this in movies, but with some of the shorter Pixar films or certain of my favorite films (like Moulin Rouge! or Juno), there’s the sadness of knowing that I’ll never be able to watch the movie again for the first time, never again experience the surprise and awe of seeing certain scenes or hearing certain lines that I had never seen or heard before.
Anyway, I have to get back to Mass Effect. I do actually want to beat it tonight and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.