This is a topic I have some feelings for. I often don't finish games. I'm such a hypercritic and stickler for understandable and useful elements of play in something so deliberately concieived as a video game, that I "protest" games where I feel they have fallen short in some manner. It's not something I talk about publicly very much. The beginning of HL2 leaps immediately to mind as an example, until Ravenholm the game is boring as hell. Super straightforward and literally disinteresting, I had to force myself to play. Which I simply view as a philosophical mistake, bordering on idiocy. It took me months of real time to reach Ravenholm I was so bored with it. There are gameplay elements that have gone stale, and really need to be abandoned. In Bioshock, (Which I still haven't finished) going back through to find some little participle of gameplay after some blockade arose was such an old motif that I was unwilling to boot the game for a long time.
I've come to a kind of peace with these things, I've swung left and right and back left again. One of the things of real importance to consider is that a gamemaker, (Which is not just one person I might add) may be trying to tell a story that has more depth than this medium can convey. Some difficult parts of a story may seem poetic to the writer, but play like they are simply toil to many. I presume these elements at times and places. At others I attribute it simply to bad design. Also there is the consideration that things in life are not necessarily smooth going or intuitive, that in life things arise that seem trivial, yet must be surmounted...I think this may be a real consideration for a small number of intelligent game designers, that the game in ways should resemble real life. Which is important for art in order for it to gain credibility as humanistic...anyway, that's a whole other topic. But the point of this comment overall is that a poetic and "realistic" treatment of matters may not yield a perfect gameplay experience... Or something like that. This brings up issues as to what is important to games, but I think developers wrestle with how to get their work viewed as art. Maybe I give them too much credit, but I think in some circumstances, elements like this exist.
Video games are at a bit of a crossroads, There are limits to the control schemes that can be concocted, which eliminates some gameplay elements that may have been desired or would, on an intuitive level, seemed important to play, but are excluded for reasons of keeping controls assailable. Some elements are dead and done, They just don't know it yet. And also, given controls, gameplay considerations, story, and the kinds of activity that make for a viable game, games tend to function in a very narrow bandwidth, things get dumped and juryrigged in order to make the game workable at all.
I feel like you have to allow for some failures and see people attempts and laud them, be diligent when appropriate, discard when appropriate. It's a very relative thing, it's dependent upon both the player and gamemaker, but I think by being diligent about it, the community could make more intelligent and meaningful criticisms and also allow for gamemakers to make a mistake or experiment without their name being dragged through the mud too far. And also give games the potential for a status as art.
This isn't whole or complete, but it sort of gets the point across.
