Stuck in Limbo: Exit Loops

"Are you sure you want to exit? Any unsaved progress may be lost."

This point of being dissuaded to exit the current game being played was raised at one of my tutorials on Thursday a few weeks ago and thought it very odd that I hadn't thought about it before. The World of Warcraft Service or Space reading also reminded me with the quote from game producers Blizzard to heavily immersed/problematically using patrons stating "they could always walk away".

But game developers of the coming age will make this simple choice of "walking away" as difficult and as tedious as possible, with the addition of game space exits, lobby exits, chat exits, and main menu exits. A personal example of this multiple feature quitting is the MMO League of Legends. After winning or losing a game, one must click to exit the physical game into a post-game lobby, where the members of either team can thank, troll, or criticise one another with statistical evidence about the game being present. Once the player has finished this, they are faced with two ways of exiting the lobby - to 'play again', or exit. And by selecting the exit option, the client takes you to your homepage, where it is just as easy to click the largest and most central play button again, and even easier to chat to your online friends on the chat bar bottom left (acts like facebook). Finally, pressing the small x on the top right of the homepage will prompt "are you sure you want to log out?", and after selecting yes you are free from the shackles that is one of the most addicting games I've ever played.

Another slight variant of this entrapment into the game is making game saves excruciatingly time consuming, with the likes of the Grand Theft Auto series save points. As you progress through the storyline, the main character generally has missions further away from his apartment as to allude to his reputation increasing. In order for you to exit the game with your new progress saved, you must return to the apartment on the other side of town just to save, and follow a similar routine as to LoL above exiting to main menu before you can actually exit the application.

All in all, this creates a vulgar procedural rhetoric, where the system rules of the application takes the user for a painstaking ride to get off, and in personal experience usually leads to a relapse where another of your online friends catch you out of game and invites you to another. In a sense, this makes the games persuasive, however we don't hold the physical game accountable. Why is this? Because it is our (well mine at least) self-control leading us back to playing more of the video-game, not the game itself, although it provides us with the desire to do so. Being asked about save games also produces this rhetoric where the player has probably saved their progress, although returns to the game space just to check, having that chance of delving into another mission just because its 'on the way home' (GTA). Upon researching deeper into this, I struggled to find any content along these lines, which I also found intriguing - maybe no one else has thought about this critically? It disheartened me that such a lack of agency in terms of quitting games has gone reasonably unnoticed due to the sheer saturation of this procedural rhetoric that motivates players to stay in games. Or maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.. But either way, gamers should reserve the right to exit a game on the spot whenever it is convenient for them, not be stuck in this never ending loop of exit prompts and questions of save-games that only returns them back to the environment theyre trying to escape. I suppose that these rhetorical questions initially derived from common courtesy for exiting games as developers were genuinely being mindful of players losing their progress, but now it seems that this feature is just being exploited to keep them trapped in the text.