The Fallacy of Repetitive Games

[Scrustle]

A criticism I hear a lot about games from people who don't like them is that they are repetitive. I've long thought that this is usually an invalid criticism and I thought I would bring it up here for discussion. When I hear people say this about games it usually comes across to me as not having much thought behind it. I've never heard anyone explain why an alleged game is repetitive or why it's such a bad thing.

But this isn't why I think it's not a valid criticism. The reason I don't think it stands up is because it can be said of almost any game that it is repetitive. If you think of what defines a game genre, or the design of any game (in the terms of gameplay), you can always boil it down to the repetition of a very simple action. For example shooters are about moving a croshair over something and pressing the fire button at the right time. RPGs are about killing stuff, getting XP and investing points in skills to kill tougher things. Racing games are about going as fast as possible. Platformers are about going right and jumping at the right time. etc, etc.

Almost all games can be reduced down to something like that. Because of this I realise that almost every game I play is repetitive, and so is almost every game you play. Yes, you. Right there. You know who I'm talking to! The real thing we need to think about is how well games implement these core gameplay practices. A game's repetitiveness is only a problem when what you are repeating is not compelling.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

A game's repetitiveness is only a problem when what you are repeating is not compelling.

Which is completely subjective. No one ever claims about repeating actions that they're enjoying. Sex can be very repetitive. But who complains about that? "God this sucks, all I'm doing is pushing up and down! Repetitive!".

Basically complaining that X is repetitive is just shorthand for "I don't find X fun".

 

[Scrustle]

Exactly. People find different things compelling. People need to realise that's is the issue, not a fault in the game itself.

 

[RJ 17]

All games are repetitive.

What do you do in shooters? Shoot some stuff, shoot some more stuff, shoot a little more stuff.
What do you do in RPGs? Use the same 3 to 4 attacks to handle every encounter.
What do you do in puzzle games? Work within the parameters of the game's primary puzzle mechanic for every puzzle.
What do you do in Koei games? Hit X until everything on the map is dead.

Starting to see a repetitive pattern here? People complaining about a game being repetitive is, as Guppy said, a translation of "I don't find this game to be fun."

 

[Kahunaburger]

I think the "repetitiveness" criticism comes from the context in which the actions are being carried out. Compare single-player Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 - in both games, I'm pointing my gun at the bad mans and holding the right trigger until they fall down. The difference between the two is that in Modern Warfare 2, I feel like I'm shooting the same three bad mans in the same brown corridor over and over, whereas in Halo 2 I get a variety of bad mans to point my gun at and interesting contexts (in terms of level design, and in terms of the dynamic situations created by enemy AI and my equipment selections) to hold down the right trigger in.

 

[Netrigan]

I think the "repetitiveness" criticism comes from the context in which the actions are being carried out. Compare single-player Halo 2 and Modern Warfare 2 - in both games, I'm pointing my gun at the bad mans and holding the right trigger until they fall down. The difference between the two is that in Modern Warfare 2, I feel like I'm shooting the same three bad mans in the same brown corridor over and over, whereas in Halo 2 I get a variety of bad mans to point my gun at and interesting contexts (in terms of level design, and in terms of the dynamic situations created by enemy AI and my equipment selections) to hold down the right trigger in.

I'm the exact opposite. I find the different set pieces in CoD to be exciting and the baddies go down quick enough that I don't care that they're identical. While in Halo I quickly get tired of emptying a clip into absolutely every enemy type.

So its a taste thing. A good game mixes it up in some way, but maybe not in the way you like. A bad game has you entering the exact same scenario over and over again.

 

[Zhukov]

Disagree.

Let's use shooters as an example.

Yes, every shooter will involve the repeated action of clicking on enemies.

However, a good shooter will provide varied enemies that react in different ways and require different actions to overcome. It will provide varied weapons so that you can click on enemies in different ways. It will provide varied level layouts. Some shooters will introduce different mechanics like platforming, turret or vehicle sections in order to break things up. This avoids repetition, or at least excessive repetition.

A bad shooter will feature weapons that have little functional difference, enemies that are essentially the same guy in different hats and levels that use the same basic layout. These are the games that people criticise for being repetitive.

 

[veloper]

A game's repetitiveness is only a problem when what you are repeating is not compelling.

Which is completely subjective. No one ever claims about repeating actions that they're enjoying. Sex can be very repetitive. But who complains about that? "God this sucks, all I'm doing is pushing up and down! Repetitive!".

Basically complaining that X is repetitive is just shorthand for "I don't find X fun".

You never played a game then, that started out fun, but you got bored with it after a while?

Such is game is fun, you weren't imagining it then, but it simply lacks variety to keep you entertained and such variety is in the details. You're still shooting stuff, but different stuff.
(A man can get bored with the same old sex positions with the same partner btw. And I'll have to take their word for it, but this is even more so the case with women.)

 

[Scrustle]

I guess a part of it is the inability to distinguish between objectivity and subjectivity is a part of it too. That's something in the gaming community that I really think needs to be addressed. Actually no, not just in gaming, but in culture as a whole. People far to often disregard things for silly reasons and blame it on the thing itself without realising that they are not the absolute arbiter of quality in all things and that different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

Disagree.

Let's use shooters as an example.

Yes, every shooter will involve the repeated action of clicking on enemies.

However, a good shooter will provide varied enemies that react in different ways and require different actions to overcome. It will provide varied weapons so that you can click on enemies in different ways. It will provide varied level layouts. Some shooters will introduce different mechanics like platforming, turret or vehicle sections in order to break things up. This avoids repetition, or at least excessive repetition.

A bad shooter will feature weapons that have little functional difference, enemies that are essentially the same guy in different hats and levels that use the same basic layout. These are the games that people criticise for being repetitive.

Even with all that, there will be a group of people who would call you hypothetical shooter repetitive. That's the nature of this criticism. It often doesn't matter how repetitive or not a game actually is, if people don't enjoy the fundamental mechanics of a game they will call it repetitive and boring if they are made to do those things they don't enjoy over and over.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I guess a part of it is the inability to distinguish between objectivity and subjectivity is a part of it too. That's something in the gaming community that I really think needs to be addressed. Actually no, not just in gaming, but in culture as a whole. People far to often disregard things for silly reasons and blame it on the thing itself without realising that they are not the absolute arbiter of quality in all things and that different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

Disagree.

Let's use shooters as an example.

Yes, every shooter will involve the repeated action of clicking on enemies.

However, a good shooter will provide varied enemies that react in different ways and require different actions to overcome. It will provide varied weapons so that you can click on enemies in different ways. It will provide varied level layouts. Some shooters will introduce different mechanics like platforming, turret or vehicle sections in order to break things up. This avoids repetition, or at least excessive repetition.

A bad shooter will feature weapons that have little functional difference, enemies that are essentially the same guy in different hats and levels that use the same basic layout. These are the games that people criticise for being repetitive.

Even with all that, there will be a group of people who would call you hypothetical shooter repetitive. That's the nature of this criticism. It often doesn't matter how repetitive or not a game actually is, if people don't enjoy the fundamental mechanics of a game they will call it repetitive and boring if they are made to do those things they don't enjoy over and over.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I see repetitiveness and fun as occurring on entirely different axes. Take Recettear: that's an amazingly repetitive (but also very fun) game. I love the repetitive shop management, and don't love the repetitive dungeon crawling. Or Mass Effect 2 as a Vanguard - all you have is a hammer (charge -> shotgun -> melee) and you live in a world full of nails. I still find it far and away the most entertaining way to play that game.

 

[MindFragged]

A game's repetitiveness is only a problem when what you are repeating is not compelling.

Which is completely subjective. No one ever claims about repeating actions that they're enjoying. Sex can be very repetitive. But who complains about that? "God this sucks, all I'm doing is pushing up and down! Repetitive!".

Try doing just the missionary for the rest of your life. It'll get repetitive.

My point is that you can have variety of gameplay within an FPS, say, just like you can enjoy vaginal intercourse (I guess in this metaphor MMORPGs would count as group sex?) but in a number of ways.

Any good game takes the mechanics and, through its duration, builds upon them and explores their possibilities. Portal is a good example, as it's short and neat. The principle of 'shoot portal 1, shoot portal 2, go through either and see what happens' never changes, but through the introduction of cubes, lasers, sentries, and exploration of the physics engine the game keeps it from becoming repetitive. It also showcases a near-perfect difficulty curve through this steady increase of complexity. Thus it is not repetitive.

I realise you could counter this by saying: 'it still boils down to pointing your cross-hair at the right places, shooting, and navigating correctly, like every other FPS and so it's repetitive'. By the same logic you can argue all games are repetitive because you're always having to push a sequence of buttons in the right order.

EDIT: admittedly, some people DO find repetitive games fun (I'm looking at you, grind monkeys), but that doesn't mean those games aren't more repetitive than others.

 

[evilneko]

"Some people use this criticism wrongly, therefore this criticism is fallacious" is not a valid argument.

Repetitiveness is a criticism of the game design. Since, as you point out, everything can be reduced to a set of repeated actions, the meaning has to do with how well a game breaks up its inherent monotony. That's a valid criticism. Or is Fallout 3 just as repetitive as Desert Bus?

 

[hermes]

Games are build around repetitiveness. You repeat an action over and over until you became good at it and eventually its second-nature.

The real issue with repetitiveness is the context. Given the proper context, repeating something is not a problem.

Case in point: DMC 2 vs DMC 3

 

[Woodsey]

Just sounds like you take criticisms too literally and are rather obtuse when it comes to extracting the obvious meaning behind them.

Mountains out of fuck-all, as they say.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Variations of the context for the repetition are what give games meaning; using the same mechanics to overcome different scenarios.

Once the player has beaten a segment of the game, it's sensible to give the player the freedom to repeat it or to move on. Or to at least change the context of the next encounter.

For games where every scenario or problem starts at a common "neutral point" (most modern shooters; or other games with unlimited resources), the differences must lie in execution.

When they fail to provide a new context, the result is busywork and padding. Taking that a step further, when busywork itself becomes the means to an end, it becomes "grind".

"Busywork" and "grind" are NEVER justifiable gameplay features. They're just wasting the player's time. (don't bother replying with "Games are meant to be a waste of time". It's a stupid, useless cop-out argument.)

 

[Scrustle]

I think I should point out as a general thing that I'm not saying that all games that are called repetitive don't deserve to be called that, but just that it's far too often used as a lazy excuse when someone can't think of a real criticism, or can't rationalise that something just isn't to their taste. I've heard almost every game called repetitive by someone. And a lot of the time I find myself agreeing, not because they are right, but because it could be seen that way from a certain perspective. But there are still some games out there which are very repetitive and deserve that criticism when viewed in comparison to other games, like the first Assassin's Creed game when compared to its sequels for example.

"Some people use this criticism wrongly, therefore this criticism is fallacious" is not a valid argument.

Repetitiveness is a criticism of the game design. Since, as you point out, everything can be reduced to a set of repeated actions, the meaning has to do with how well a game breaks up its inherent monotony. That's a valid criticism. Or is Fallout 3 just as repetitive as Desert Bus?

Okay I guess "fallacy" was the wrong word to use. To be honest, I only said it because of that other thread recently about the "fallacy" of dumbed down games. I thought that since this was in kind of the same tone it would make sense, but I realise I was using the word wrongly. My bad.

 

[EmptyOptimist]

But this isn't why I think it's not a valid criticism. The reason I don't think it stands up is because it can be said of almost any game that it is repetitive. If you think of what defines a game genre, or the design of any game (in the terms of gameplay), you can always boil it down to the repetition of a very simple action. For example shooters are about moving a croshair over something and pressing the fire button at the right time. RPGs are about killing stuff, getting XP and investing points in skills to kill tougher things. Racing games are about going as fast as possible. Platformers are about going right and jumping at the right time. etc, etc.

The biggest flaw in your argument here is that you've boiled all of the liquid out of your argument. Based on your logic, everything in life is repetitive - eating is put food on a fork/spoon, lift to mouth, chew, swallow, repeat. Walking is place foot, shift weight, lift foot, repeat. Repetition is not the issue as everything is repetitive. The argument behind repetitiveness is the package in which the repetition is wrapped.

Assassin's Creed was repetitive because the only thing that differentiated the missions was the city in which they were located (which all actually looked the same). There was too much reliance on these missions and not enough development of the story during these missions that made it repetitive. A game like Call of Duty, on the other hand had repetitive missions, but either had those missions lead to progressing the story immediately, or varied the mission enough to lend a new tilt - timed missions, escort missions, stealth missions, etc.

Exactly. People find different things compelling. People need to realise that's is the issue, not a fault in the game itself.

Of course it's subjective. Criticism by definition is subjective. If there was a means of criticizing something objectively, then the variety that exists in any form of media would be substantially less than it is currently. For example - I did not like any of the Transformers movies; I found the story to be weak, and almost forgotten throughout the series of movies; I found the acting to be subpar; and I found the visual effects to be difficult to even follow what was going on. But that is my subjective view. Obviously there were people with different opinions, or they wouldn't have made (and continue to make) sequels.

The same holds true for food (I love fish, my wife hates it), TV (the love/hate relationship regarding the Lost finale), and life in general (I love my job, but my best friend is baffled at why).

If we didn't have criticism, there would be a lot of people looking for work.