One thing that I have often pondered is this: Why is it that so many games - we should say Video Games here - are absurd at the endgame?

Let me clarify. I mean, why does a carefully crafted virtual universe begin to lose its quality of believability as it draws to its conclusion? Why do some games insist that a rat can destroy a man in full armor with perhaps its tail - to name simply one type of the problem?

Another is the paradox of powers, (anyone who has watched a significant amount of Dragonball Z can attest to how bizarre this can become) which is to say, with this or that absurd power, can't you sort of end things completely? Now, certainly they can't - we can imagine a constraint - as perhaps the creator did - but we are rarely convinced of it.

I think the problem is telelogical (which I suppose is redundant in a way.) By this I mean, there is not a proper concept for the end of things. What is the end of man? The end of an epic? What is the point of a story? In some cases, sadly, I think the point has a level of narcissism; the point is to create a world of challenge and power around the player, regardless of absurdities and impossibilities generated by this.

But games with a constraint on this - i.e. massively multiplayer games - are positively no better and not an example to emulate, since they are literally endless. They don't really deal with telelogy directly, except in a material sense of having attained all that is attainable within a context. But in reality, as in stories, we move on.

Some games flaunt this. Take Earthbound, which does not attempt a realistic account of the strengths or powers of anything really - and the way the final enemy is dispatched is entirely consistent with this approach. (Search 'defeating Giygas in Earthbound'. It is both amusing and profound.)

I think, and perhaps this is the key - that creating difficulty for a player is itself a difficult thing. A simple solution is to handle it numerically; as the players 'numbers' move up, so do the opponents. It creates a sense of challenge but alas, a false one. Even within the context of this not being automatic (as it was in say, Oblivion) it still cloys. In Final Fantasy 12, why should an average imperial be three times as strong the next time you fight them? Obviously, to provide a challenge; but in some ways it is providing it in a way that verges on the absurd. When you have fought the 40th 'Malboro Overking' you begin to suspect that something is amiss given that such an ostensibly ancient and dangerous creature is so common...! Explanations which mitigate this puzzlement abound, but at some point they cease to satisfy.

I would like to do this, to do a little bit of study on what games pull off the endgame without resorting to tentative or obvious absurdities. I mean this in the sense of, does it make sense within its own context? Why am I facing progressively more difficult foes? etc.

I don't think such a thing is a trivial study, even -- the telelogy that players (read, mostly young people) experience there will effect the way they think about the world. What if it is mostly of the narcissistic variety? Does that not say something?