Don’t Waste My Time, or, the Power of the DNF

It’s poor form in both video games and in books to review an item you didn’t finish. Book spaces, however, have a term for such items, books that you tried to get through and put time into but just weren’t worth the effort to finish for the sake of a review. In the book world, to put a book down for good is to DNF it (“did not finish”), and a review of a book that was not finished is a “DNF review.”

Obviously, I’m not arguing for DNF reviews in video games. There’s a place for “here’s why I’m not finishing this game,” but almost never is that alongside “here’s my experience having finished this game.” What I am arguing for, and what I wish was easier to talk about, was the concept of DNF’ing a game in general. 

I wish we could say, “Oh yeah, I tried that game, it wasn’t for me,” without expecting a knee-jerk response of, “You just have to stick with it for X hours,” from listeners who happen to like the game more than we do. I wish we could say, “Yeah, I put like 90 hours into it… I’m not going to finish it.” I wish games were as easy to DNF in game communities as books are in book communities. I wish, “This is why I DNF’ed the game,” was as easy to say as, “This is my DNF review of a book.” It’s not the same as a full review, but still a valid set of opinions–even if the person put only half an hour into the game. (Look at what you get paid in your job. How much is giving that game “a fair chance” worth to you?)

At the risk of getting a little personal, my therapist and I have had a back and forth for a few years. It goes like this:

Me: I want to finish more things and not leave them hanging.
My therapist: I think you need to get more comfortable with letting things go.
Me: Yeah but I’d really like to finish more of these games and books and projects and stuff.
My therapist: I think that focusing on finishing things is really hindering you and you need to be able to not put pressure on yourself in something that’s supposed to be a hobby.

Spoiler alert: My therapist is right.

I Don’t Have All Day

The way I see it, there are roughly three categories of reasons to DNF a video game. The first is the most obvious and the reason I named this piece what I did. There are a finite number of hours in a day and an infinite number of hours that can be put into games.

Some people, like Bitcast’s TieGuy Travis, have only one hobby, and this is it. For those people, it may be easier to put time into games; but even for them, the time they have will never match the time they could put into a given game. This is largely due to games like Minecraft, which could be played forever without a break. But it’s also due to the sheer number of games available, even ones that can be completed (eventually… hi, Elden Ring). 

If you restrict yourself to very specific genres or classes of games (Dan, also from the Bitcast, has somewhat notoriously said he’s only interested in AAA games due to his time constraints), maybe you could get through most of those games. But you still have to pick. And if you have other hobbies that can also be done forever (like reading… or writing nerdy opinion pieces for gaming enthusiast websites… nervous laughter), the requirement to choose goes way up.

And even if you could, somehow, finish all the games in a genre, there’s the glaring fact that not every game is worth your time. There are objectively terrible games out there. There are subjectively terrible games out there (Hellblade 2 being the most recent example of an incredibly divisive game, with scores ranging as high as 9 and 10 and then all the way down to 4 and 5). There are games that are just not for you. There should never be any shame in putting down a game before finishing and just saying “This isn’t worth my time,” no matter how short it is, how much time you’ve put into it, or how much other people love it.

Everything has a Time and a Place

There’s a concept I picked up from a particular BookTuber: the “soft DNF.” This means “I put it down, but I’ll pick it back up later.” In book terms, this is the book that hits too close to current real-life events, or the book that is good but you’re just not in the mood for. In game terms, this might be a very story-intensive game when you have only enough time for casual games. It might be the game that’s pulling on emotions you’re not ready to deal with. It might be the game that’s mindless fun when you have a week off and really want to sink your teeth into something meatier. (“Mood reading” is another term I wish had a gaming equivalent.) 

These aren’t bad games. They aren’t even games you don’t want to play. They’re just games that need to wait their turn. Everything has a time and a place, and this isn’t the time and place for those games, but that’s okay. “I’ll go back to it eventually” shouldn’t be such heavy words to say.

I Never Want to Leave

Games have one more reason not to finish them that books don’t have. You can choose to just… not finish the game.

I’m going to use a specific example for this one. I recently picked Ghostwire Tokyo back up after taking roughly a year off from it. And I progressed the plot approximately not at all. I did a side quest. I retrieved a lot of souls. I killed several visitors. But I barely got the next prompt for the main storyline and made no effort whatsoever to get past that. I actively avoided that. 

Part of this is because I suck at first-person games, and I’m terrified of ending up in battles I can’t win. But most of it is just that I’m having fun with how I’m playing now. Why should I push to beat the game when I can instead explore? I don’t know what the endgame looks like. I’m not even sure I want to get to the endgame. I think I’d like to just clean up as much of Tokyo as I can.

There’s a lot of games that will let you do this. Sure, there are more linear games where you can only play an area once; but plenty of games have entire playgrounds for you to explore and play in as long as you want. And some of those linear games (Journey) are meant to be played over and over, and there are people who put hundreds of hours into running through those games over and over.

The Life-Changing Magic of the DNF

I’ll end this piece with a challenge. Look at your backlog. Look at games you’ve said you’ll get to, or get back to, or finish “one day, really.” Look at what you have in progress. Look at what you have wishlisted. What games are worth your time? What games are worth going back to later? And what games are worth playing forever, but maybe you never want to see “the end”?