Uncharted 4 and the grief of finishing a great video game

A sense of loss often follows our reaching the end of a gripping novel or TV series, but in games our interaction with the characters can make the feeling deeper

When my son was coming to the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, having avidly consumed the previous six books in the series, his progress noticeably slowed. He'd go days, weeks even, before finishing a chapter - so much so that we thought that he was going off the story altogether. But he wasn't. He was drawing it out. Like millions of other fans, he simply could not face leaving Hogwarts. Harry, Ron and Hermione had become more than characters: they were friends. He cried when he read the epilogue, "19 years later".

This is a common phenomenon with very good books, and with television series too: the characters become so habitual and beloved over time that we form relationships with them, often augmented by the way we avidly discuss each instalment with friends and in online forums. In 2014, Cristel Russell, an associate professor at the American University's Kogod School of Business, completed a study entitled When Narrative Brands End: The Impact of Narrative Closure and Consumption Sociality on Loss Accommodation, which argued that fans effectively go through a mourning process when a good show or book series comes to a close. We have to learn to let go.