Braid

Heavy Rain

Red Dead Redemption

Metal Gear Solid 4

Spec Ops: The Line

The mania surrounding presumptive spoilers has never been higher than it is now. We care less about what games might mean to different people and more about their capacity to work on people in the purest and most superficial terms. It means we prefer to think of games as puzzle boxes whose quality is embodied in their ability to trick us for the longest time possible. Belief in the idea of spoilers presumes that learning what happened in a made-up story is sufficient, that players come into imaginary spaces not to think about themselves but to receive the answer to a mystery that they couldn't have possibly discovered on their own.Learning in advance who the real bad guy was, or where the mysterious ooze came from, robs you of a few seconds of surprise (assuming you're not already aware of how rote and predictable all fictional explanations are), but leaving these sorts of crucial details off to the very end robs you of the ability to think for yourself about what it all means while actually playing. Games don't need to keep secrets from players. And be honest, who else could it have been that kidnapped the princess? How many variations on the traitor/corrupt organization/secret family history are there? You've seen them all, by now, I promise, even the names are different.What follows is a brief review of games that reserved major secrets--spoilers!--for their final moments, which I think would have been greatly improved had the last revelation been made at the very beginning. Let it not go without saying, "spoilers" will be plentiful from here on out. Hopefully that won't stop you, though. You might surprise yourself and realize there was nothing to be afraid of losing in the first place.You're the bad guy. The princess you're trying to save was actually running away from you because you're a depressive alcoholic with commitment issues and a possible violent streak. In concept this is an extraordinary idea to put in an idyllic pastoral platformer--the world is so beautiful and peaceful and no one in it loves me. The key to understanding why Jonathan Blow's time rewinding mechanic works in the game is not mystery but remorse, but players don't know what there is to be remorseful about until they've almost finished playing. Completing levels turns into a speculative exercise about what exactly Tim feels bad about, but the more interesting question is why he should feel so bad about what he's done. Were the game's ending played out at the beginning, the entire experience would be different.The hesitating affects of self-pity and destroyed self-esteem wouldn't be mysteries but bizarre indulgences that jumpy little Tim keeps stumbling over. It would invite players to not just empathize with his confused sadness, but to question whether he is not actually indulging the most infantilized aspects of his own self, which cannot process feeling, cannot accept other people's rights to make independent choices. Making the game a place to wonder about these questions would, to me, have made it a coherent emotional work instead of a thought experiment that forces cold logic puzzles into a melodrama about a man's inability to confront himself.You play as a serial killer who kidnaps children and watches their parents agonize over the cryptic riddles meant to lead them back to their children. Even more disturbing, the game lets you play the roles of victim as well as killer, suffering through the awful torture chambers you've set up, and then carry on in the aftermath, struggling to connect the trail of evidence back to the villain. The game could have been all of this, but it reserved for its grand reveal the fact that Scott, the oafish and worn out police detective, had been the killer all along. Without this crucial piece of information, the game often feels like a mundane domestic drama of opening cupboards and trying to match clues. Had this admission been made from the outset, all those scenes would have been tinged with a predatory fascination.Players would see them through two points of view simultaneously--a character looking for answers and a villain watching that character's search to find new weak spots that could later be exploited. This earlier admission would also have made the final explanation of Scott's villainy--caused from the childhood trauma of seeing his own brother die--even more untenable. A case that shows big reveals are often covers for weakly thought-out story points that can only work as surprises but have no durability over time.After an overlong campaign of killing outlaws for the government while hoping to finally track down a former partner who betrayed him, the final surprise in this macho soap opera comes when, after thinking he's finished his work for them, a posse of government agents ambush Marston at his home and kill him. The last mission transfers the burden of redemption to Marston's teenage son Jack, who goes on a quest to kill the man who killed his father. The twist is an ideal example of how reserving good ideas for an ending winds up sapping a work of any sense of purpose or originality. Marston's 30 hour revenge quest is a perfect cliché, an overblown romanticization of male suffering between the gears of modernity. After a few hours of killing to order and delivering women to be raped by the Mexican army, Marston's character collapses in an immoral disaster.The most interesting part of his story is not revenge, but in following the awful trail of consequences that come from one man's violent action. A much more interesting and tragic game could have been wrought from killing off Marston in the first third and spending the remainder following his young and incompetent son around the wastes trying to live up to his father's evil and violent legacy, an innocent struggling with the uncomfortable fit of his violent new role. Instead, the game is just another self-pity simulator making up lachrymose excuses for the psychopath driving the action.Talking about spoilers in Metal Gear Solid is ridiculous. It is a series where everything is in such perpetual flux that nothing is finally true. Everyone is a good guy and a bad guy simultaneously, everyone is double crossing everyone else, and after a few hours of play, it's near impossible to know what crisis you're actually trying to stop. In attempting to wrap up the plot logic of the entire series, the ending of Metal Gear Solid 4 magically re-explains the major events of the series in a way that turns Solid Snake from hero into an ignorant dummy who was perpetually getting in the way of the real heroes who'd been waging a secret war for the fate of the new world order. We can see a pattern for spoilers emerge here. In many cases spoilers conceal the fact that the hero may actually be a villain, or at the very least a sucker, yet developers strive to avoid confronting this fact until the very end. After three awkwardly leaden installments in the series, opening 4 with an acknowledgement of what Solid Snake had really been all these years would have been a far more interesting beginning than "War Has Changed." The story of a manipulated puppet trying to redeem the mistakes he wasn't aware of having made would have been a much more interesting premise than an old hero trying to save the world one more time.It is impossible not to see the ending of Spec Ops: The Line coming. There just aren't that many options for how the game's story could turn out, and, in keeping with spoiler tradition, the last reserved plot point reveals that Colonel John Konrad has been dead almost all the way through. You were really playing as a soldier in the midst of a prolonged psychotic break, turning increasingly violent because of imaginary conversations he thought he was having in his ear piece. The game builds itself on the tension of following a heroic quest that entails increasingly villainous behavior, and eventually the tension turns into an open rupture. As with other spoiler-bound stories, it ends with what should have been its starting point.All of the hard questions appear right when we realize the good guy's actually a degraded lunatic. How would you make an 8 hour shooting game about a degraded lunatic leading around a reluctant pair of soldiers after a natural disaster in a city that offers nothing but fuel for xenophobia and ethnic stereotypes? That hole goes to much deeper and darker places than the "you're a bad guy" shocker at the end, and Spec Ops would have been a braver and even more disturbing game if it hadn't kept its most uncomfortable truth at arm's length until the end.

And what about you? Do you buy these arguments? Disagree? Have some other examples you think shed light on the subject one way or the other? Let us know in the comments below!Mike Thomsen is a video game freelance writer living in New York. You can follow him on Twitter.