I was almost done with Psychonauts last week, perhaps two levels from the end, when I almost quit the game in disgust. You see, there was a power-up (A Psi Challenge Marker, to be precise) placed on a hard-to-reach pipe that you slid right off of if you landed. Failure required a fair amount of climbing to try again.

In no way did I need that power-up. I was far enough along that I knew I’d gain almost no benefit from it. But there’s something about me that has a ‘collect ‘em all’ vibe going through me – I just have to. This is evident in other games as well. When I play Civilization, I have to clear out all the black squares. When I play Diablo, I have to clear the whole map of critters. In this case, though, I spent about an hour trying to get this one powerup, and almost quit the game in disgust from the whole ordeal. Even though sidestepping this one powerup wouldn’t have slowed down my gameplay at all.

A coworker at work told me a similar story last week. He had really been enjoying Battlefield 2, when he noticed three empty spots in his interface for three medals he had not gotten yet: knife fighting, pistols and explosives. Needless to say, he felt he had to try to get them. He spent 2 days solid trying to get them, failing each time. The explosives were the worst, since his teammates would get killed by them while driving through places no teammates had a reason to go in a fully loaded ATV. He dropped from being one of the top players in the rankings to being in the bottom 50%, and left the weekend without ANY of the medals and a resolve to quit the game. (He eventually succumbed to the siren’s call again).

Have you ever had any games destroyed by your own play patterns? At what point does it cease to be a problem of personal play patterns, and start to be a true flaw in the game’s design?