I still remember the first time I felt it. The jungle was steaming and fetid; sweat poured from my brow. It had been days since I'd seen civilization. I had evaded snarling, snapping fauna and woven carefully through a labyrinth of discarded explosives, remnants of some territorial conflict long past. I was tired and injured, all that remained of my mission--my comrades had all fallen to razor-fanged beasts. or enemy soldiers--but I couldn't stop now, not when the target was so close... to say nothing of the treasure. All that gleaming gold, stolen from the island's inhabitants, just moldering in his coffers. Soon, I thought, it would be moldering in mine. Another explosion dragged me from my reverie back into the real world. The target, right in front of me! The training kicked in, and I attacked. I'll never forget the look on his face.
Racist and inaccurate. A dangerous combination.
Obviously, I was victorious. But as I said, this was when I first felt it. Boss beaten, fruit collected, and that's me winning, but... that percentage on the save file screen. That's not 100%. I won, right? So... where are all my percents?
And there it was: The Pull. Where are all my percents? Where indeed. I suppose I'd better go find them.
The Pull is a powerful force, and it really warped my World of Goo experience. Let me pose a question: What is the difference between...
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and |  | ? |
| A | | B | |
You might have answered "an adorable little flag". Well, aren't you clever? Clever and WRONG, that is.
Okay, well, obviously there's a little flag in one picture and not in the other. So not wrong, really, as much as incomplete. But that's similar. Whatever, you're still an asshole.
Probably.
ANYWAY, the point is that the flag represents more than just the flag. It also represents anywhere between five and a thousand minutes of my time. How so? Well, in World of Goo you earn the little flag for completing a level with some exceptional distinction, such as an exceedingly low clear time or an extraordinary number of sentient goo balls rescued rather than gruesomely smelted into scaffolding material. It's a fun little bit of additional difficulty, the sort of thing that you ought to be congratulated for achieving. So what does the game call it?
"Obsessive" again? Why is everyone always calling me that?
Alright, I'm being openly mocked, but whatever. There's a thing to do here, so clearly I'm going to do it. But why?
The Pull
What drives gamers to chase that hundredth percent, that last green question mark, or that final well-hidden coin of some ridiculous color? It could be a sense of accomplishment. It could be a desire for some kind of positive reinforcement, a class of weirdos and misanthropes grasping desperately for any kind of approval. (Gamers are inherently bad people, right? We're still doing that, aren't we?) The point is that I spent three entire days trying to sketch out a compelling bit about why I felt driven to spend hours doing just a little bit better in these levels instead of simply completing the game, and I came up with precisely nothing. I don't understand it at all. Maybe the deep secrets that drive compulsive behavior in human beings are slightly beyond the scope of my stupid blog about my inability to stop buying video games.
Of course, when I put it that way, it suddenly becomes clear that those secrets are precisely the point of the whole endeavor.
