14 DAY TRIAL // Jason VandenBerghe, a creative director at Ubisoft, says that endings are not a necessity for video games and that one of the strengths of the medium is to create experiences that players are never forced to finish.
He writes on Gamasutra that, “The ability for players to stop playing whenever they feel like it is inherent in the form. This is not a bad thing; this is a good thing.”
The Far Cry 3 developer goes on to talk about how players can always choose to stop playing as long as they believe they have extracted sufficient value from the experience.
Jason VandenBerghe mentions The Sims, MMOs and arcade titles as games that lack a clear ending and compares them favorably to real-world activities like poker, chess and football.
Research from developers has shown that a minority of players actually finish games, but communities still ask for complex, detailed endings to all single-player experiences.