This may be why it keeps on getting reported that most people don't finish most of the games they start playing. This should hardly be a surprise – depending on the genre, a certain title may attempt to entertain its audience for anywhere from six to sixty hours, but it will only take twenty minutes of tedium to turn some people off, and maintaining and spacing interest over such time-frames is a difficult task. Even Valve acknowledged messing things up a little with [Half Life] Episode 1, wherein data collected from Steam showed conclusive proof that a number of players had simply given up on the game after one particularly notorious difficulty spike. The beautifully paced adventure they had previously been enraptured by had come to a rude halt, and as fun dissipated into a chore, many gamers simply left Gordon to his fate (p. 2).