Don’t leave things unfinished, my mum used to tell me. And then, when she would realise that I wasn’t really listening because my sense of smell, sight and touch were in the fridge, she would take the ice cream from my hands and tell me that I shouldn’t leave for tomorrow what I could do today.

“That’s why I’m taking the ice cream today,” I would complain.

Lesson learnt. Nowadays, I try to not leave things on one side of the road: I take their hand and cross to completion.

I’m currently playing a game called Dominations on my tablet. The clue is in the title: you build a civilisation and progress from stone age to gunpowder age and beyond, while thieving, robbing and destroying other nations. It’s repetitive but engrossing. It’s freemium but I calculate that I’ve already spent €20 on upgrades and rare items or simply to bypass waiting times.

Now we all know the evils of freemium games. There’s a South Park episode called Freemium Isn’t Free in which the Canadian devil, Beelzaboot, helps the Canadian government finance huge projects through a freemium game. There is, as is usual with Cartman and the gang, a darker interpretation: freemium games are linked to other addictions such as alcohol and gambling. The end moral is that freemium games are neither free nor fair. In fact, after a couple of hours playing Dominations, I realised that my gold coins and crowns kept disappearing from one five-minute bout to the next. So I fired off an e-mail to the developers.

“Your coins are disappearing because other players are attacking you while you’re not playing,” they replied.

“So should I be playing all the time,” I asked. No reply was forthcoming.

Despite the fact that all the odds are stacked against me, I try to convince myself that the money I’m spending on upgrades is an investment. Except that it is not. And I will never finish the game. But that’s normal with modern games. Gone are the days when we would complete all the stages of Assassin’s Creed, sit back and wait for the next instalment. Nowadays, games are left unfinished. For instance, according to gaming service Steam, only 6.4 per cent of players who have bought the role playing game Pillars of Eternity have completed it while just 15 per cent of players managed to complete Alien Isolation.

There are various elements that explain this unfinished business. First of all, games have become so expansive. Every dialogue leads to a battle and every character opens up new possibilities. Pillars of Eternity has more than 100 hours of content. That’s more than four days of non-stop gaming. Who can afford to waste that amount of time on something which, to be honest, gives you no returns?

Then there’s the repetitiveness of it all. In Dominations, you are stuck in a continuous cycle of war and peace. The only change is that from onebattle to the next, you wear flashier armour and use new weapons. The end result is the same.

Now don’t get me wrong. Games are fun. But fun is fuelled by curiosity. You wouldn’t leave a good book half finished because you want to know what happens in the last chapter. But when a game becomes a repetitive cycle of micro-payments and no end is in sight, it’s game over for our curiosity and we just lose interest.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com