I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing.
In the context of work and school, it translates to effort and dedication, but more often than not, it also slows me down. Sure, it helped me impress my art teacher in high school when most of the other students couldn't give less of a damn, and it earned me some nice grades elsewhere because I wasn't content to turn in half-assed work. Unfortunately, I think, it seems to have gotten a lot worse over the years. By the time I was (briefly) studying physics in graduate school, I found myself wasting precious time writing long solutions to complex problem sets neatly instead of getting them done quickly. As a result, I slept too little and stressed too much.
In the context of video games, my perfectionist tendencies make me a so-called completionist. If I care at all about the game I'm playing, I have a burning desire to collect every item, unlock every achievement, kill every enemy, find every secret, complete every side-quest, or get the highest possible rating on every level.
The Dangers of Completionism
When I played Metroid Prime — a fantastic game, by the way — I couldn't resist picking up every single missile expansion and energy tank. Maybe I wouldn't have cared if not for the way the game kept track of these things and displayed them as a completion percentage, taunting the mildly obsessive among us. Getting to the end of the game and seeing anything less than 100% felt to me like a minor failure. Of course, missile expansions and energy tanks are pretty useful, so the satisfaction of truly "finishing" the game wasn't the only motivation for finding them. I have no reasonable excuse, however, for scanning every creature, every item, and every bit of Pirate Data and Chozo Lore to fill up the in-game logbook. My only reward for doing so, in the end, was access to a couple of unlockable art galleries. But it wasn't about concept art; it was about not leaving things unfinished.
Only afterwards did I realize that I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I didn't fixate on finding every little secret. I can't even go back to the game now, because I made myself sick of it.
Games like Metroid Prime are a nightmare for completionists, but we play them anyway because we're all masochists. The really terrible part is that setting aside the carefree enjoyment of the game for the sake of a cruel meta-game in which you pick up a hundred hidden items really isn't as bad as it gets. (With the help of a good walkthrough, if you're not too proud to use it, you can complete even the most tedious item-hunting quest with relative ease.) Being a completionist becomes a real problem when the additional challenges we choose (or need) to undertake are so difficult that untold hours are swallowed up by dozens of consecutive, futile attempts with no discernible progress. In the time I wasted getting gold medals on every level of Rogue Leader and its sequel Rebel Strike, I could have played all the way through several other games. I guess the benefit here is that being a perfectionist saved me some money; I got more time out of these games than anyone ever should.
The Need to Achieve
And what of achievements? I'm no fan, and it's not just because of my wacky theory that they're partly responsible for the decline of cheat codes in single-player games. I think achievements cheapen the sense of accomplishment we're supposed to feel when we do well in a game. A lot of developers have fallen into the habit of giving the player an achievement for every little task, like finishing the first level, or killing ten bad guys, or essentially — in rare and truly embarrassing cases — starting the game. (Only sometimes is this actually meant to be amusing.)In my opinion, anything that necessarily happens during the course of a normal play-through should never be worth an achievement, but developers so often disagree. In Portal 2, fourteen of the achievements (pictured right) are unlocked simply by playing the single-player campaign. Obviously, there are other achievements in the game, but the player shouldn't need to be periodically congratulated for making regular progress.
Achievements, when done correctly, present extra challenges to the player. But even then, achievements teach players that nothing is worth doing unless there's a prize. We're not encouraged to make our own fun and set our own goals; we're encouraged to complete an arbitrary set of tasks, which may or may not include completing the game itself, attempting the harder difficulty settings, or doing anything genuinely entertaining.
But despite my philosophical objections to the idea of achievement hunting, I can't resist, especially if I only have a few achievements left after I beat the game. Unfortunately, those last few achievements tend to be the hard ones. But hey, you can't just leave the game 99% complete. You can't just leave one achievement locked. Right? Seriously, I can't be the only person who finds this absolutely intolerable.
After beating Trine, I spent far too long attempting a flawless run through the last level on the hardest difficulty to get a surprisingly difficult achievement. (I thought this game was casual!) When I played Alan Wake, I never would have bothered collecting a hundred (useless) coffee thermoses scattered throughout the game if there weren't an achievement for doing so. I even carried that damned garden gnome all the way through Half-Life 2: Episode Two. (Please kill me.)
Too Much of a Bad Thing
But even I have limits; a few of the achievements in Torchlight, for example, are just too hard or too much of a grind. They're far from impossible to get, but the game will stop being fun long before you get them, and if you play for the achievements, you'll become suicidal in no time. (Big fans of the game might disagree; most of the achievements will be unlocked naturally if you're okay with playing the game for 150+ hours, but catching 1000 fish just isn't worth anyone's time.)
Similarly, I have no interest in finding every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every feather in Assassin's Creed II, and I don't know why anyone ever would. Even as a hopeless completionist, I can usually tell when attaining 100% completion in a game will lead to more frustration than satisfaction. There's already so much (repetitive) stuff to do in the Assassin's Creed games that I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to throw in a few hundred useless collectibles as well.
Just to bother me, I'm sure.
Collectible items and other tertiary objectives can be good for replay value, but when they extend the playtime beyond the point where the game loses all appeal and becomes a chore — when even a completionist such as myself doesn't want to try — it's just bad game design.
Self-Imposed Perfection
Being a perfectionist doesn't just mean being a completionist. My first play-through of Deus Ex took twice as long as it should have taken, but only because I developed a terrible habit of loading quicksaves constantly, not to avoid dying but to avoid wasting lockpicks, multitools, medkits, and ammo. If I missed a few times while trying to shoot a guy in the face, I couldn't just roll with it and keep going. I went back and tried again. If I picked open a lock and there was nothing useful behind that door, I loaded my save. (And of course, at the end of the game, my inventory was full of stuff I never got to use, but item hoarding is another issue entirely.)
My tendency to needlessly replay sections of a game is probably worst when friendly NPCs can be killed by the enemies. Even if their survival doesn't affect me in the slightest, I often feel the need to keep them alive, and I'm more than willing to reload a save if even a single one of them die. (This used to happen a lot when I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, but eventually I learned that it's sometimes best to save my ammo, let my fellow stalkers die, and scavenge their bodies afterwards. Such is life in the Zone.)
Reloading a save when you haven't lost might seem strange, depending on your play style, but some games encourage this type of behavior with optional objectives that are easily botched. Take the Hitman series, for example. You could choose to walk into nearly any mission with a big gun and simply shoot up the place, but the highest ratings are reserved for players who never get seen, fire no unnecessary shots, and kill no one but the primary targets.
This usually isn't easy, because save scumming isn't an option. The first Hitman game doesn't allow saves in mid-level, and the sequels only allow a certain number of saves per mission, depending on difficulty level. This makes perfecting a mission even more painful, and in my opinion, it's another example of bad game design. While I can see why they would want to prevent players from abusing the save system (thereby adding some real difficulty and making the game more "hardcore"), this is kind of a cruel thing to do with such a slow-paced game that involves so much trial-and-error. If you don't save often enough, you might end up repeating several minutes of sneaking at a snail's pace to get back to where you were.
Somehow, I did manage to master every mission in the second and third games, but I don't recommend it. Having to kill a guy and dispose of his body on the fly because he saw you picking a lock is fun, but in the interest of earning the highest rating, I always had to start over instead. When you try to play Hitman perfectly, it's tedious and time-consuming, and essentially requires you to memorize each map. No fun allowed.
Fixing Bad Habits
As a result of all this, my extensive backlog of unfinished games is only slightly longer than the list of games I've been meaning to replay without hitting the quickload button and without going off-course to satisfy my obsessive completion disorder. (The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are near the top of that list, but I'd also like to replay those when I get a better computer, which isn't happening any time soon.) Games are more fun when they're played at a natural pace, and I wish it weren't so hard for me to ignore the little distractions along the way.
The best advice I can give to fellow perfectionists, after some soul searching of my own, is the following:
1) Get a screwdriver and pry the quickload button off of your keyboard. Alternatively, I suppose, you could simply go to the control settings and unmap the quickload function. If you can't unmap it, just remap it to a key on the far side of the keyboard, and then promptly forget which key that is. Quicksaving constantly is fine — I won't judge you — but you shouldn't be reloading a save unless you die.
2) Play through the game as quickly as you can; do only the bare minimum. This is normally something I'd discourage, because I believe that games should be enjoyed, not rushed. But if you're getting bored with games before you finish them because you're spending so much time trying to do every side-quest or collect all the items, stop it. Start over. Enjoy the game at its intended pace before you ruin it by attempting a frustrating scavenger hunt. These things are there for your second play-through, and if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the optional stuff isn't worth your time.
3) Don't read the list of achievements before you play the game. If you read them, you'll try to get them. Achievement hunting is for replay value, and if it's your first priority, you need to rethink your entire outlook on life. Again, if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the achievements aren't worth your time.
