I've been writing about games for ages but only started blogging about them with this very post. And I can think of no better way to start than with one of my obsessions: how video games end. As rare as it is to find people who can really talk about games with authority, it's rarer still to find anyone who knows what it's like to reach the end of one of these things. Thankfully other people have a similar obsession. So I wrote about them. 

If you want to know what makes ending-crazed people at sites like Video Game Museum tick, consider what that site's endings archivist told me for the piece about his finish-four-games-a-day childhood habit: "I didn't really care if it was a long ending or if it just said 'congratulations,' I just wanted to have it on my list."

Reaching the final frontiers of games is a lonely and fascinating experience. When you get there you know you're hitting a spot that most people who played the game never saw. How odd it is to see "Grand Theft Auto"'s Los Santos burn in a riot, when you know most gamers will never see it crumble. How strange to play a boss-battle gameshow at the end of "Banjo Kazooie" and discover that 20 hours with a platformer can burn so many sights and sounds into your brain that you can be asked to identify a magnified texture or a split-second sound sample and be able to identify which level or enemy its from. Never was there such a celebration of a player's relationship with a game than that great setpiece at the end of Banjo.

A lot of gaming experts -- developers, pundits, and the like -- actually don't know how many begin. As I reported a couple of months back (see the last item here) Steven Johnson, one of gaming's most public defenders, told the Games For Change conference that he could barely get passed the tutorial of "Civilization IV" and that's a game series he talked up as one of the medium's most valuable during his Colbert Report appearance earlier this year.

So let's hear it for endings. And for beginnings to. And with that the blogging begins...