Culture Clash

(August 2003)

Never Ending the Story

Is it time for new rules about replayability?

“If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless...”
-- Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

The games we respect and admire the most – that is, those which have entered the cultural lexicon as ideal games, or even those which have defined their own genres – are not lauded simply because they are “great” games, but because playing them is so evocative that gamers seek them out again and again. Because of this, the need for recidivist gaming has long been a development issue, and even excellent games are occasionally penalized if they lack “replayability” potential: that is, the likelihood that a gamer who has completed the title will revisit it in the future. Are there rules which, if followed, guarantee that this evanescent quality will be baked into every game? And even if such rules exist, is a high replayability always necessary or even desirable?

Fifty bucks for fifty hours of fun ($50:50) is a frankly remarkable cost-to-enjoyment ratio, especially when compared to $8:2 (movie), $150:3 (Red Wings vs. Stars), or $65:1 (Dinner for two). Save model airplanes and good books, few entertainments match a video game’s sheer value, yet games are dinged in reviews time and again for “lacking replayability.” Fair? Probably not, especially when one stops to consider the reason that some games are replayed and some are not.

There are a handful of games that I revisit consistently: Sacrifice, Dungeon Keeper 2, X-Com, Thief. I play through these games because they are great fun and a suitable follow-up was never produced, or because I am so passionate about their narrative that even though I know how it comes out, I want to experience it again. Many gamers can’t get enough of Tetris or Civilization, games which lack a specific narrative but remain highly enjoyable from the perspective of sheer mediated interactivity. The massively multiplayer revolution is driven partly by the fact that multiplayer games do not have replayability issues. In them, players create new experiences for one another.

But most games do not have high replayability, especially narrative-driven games like RPGs and adventures. As Ernest Adams points out, “...once you know the story, it doesn’t provide much motivation to play the game again.” Adams argues that superior narratives will increase replayability in narrative games, as superior narrative in film and fiction increase recidivism to good examples of those media. Additionally, however, the reason these genres lack the raw replayability of a Caesar 3 or an Unreal Tournament is that though some of the narratives may be worth re-experiencing, the time, effort, and occasional frustration involved in doing so can minimize the pleasure. A game like Anachronox, mangled thing of splendor that it is, sports a stellar cast and emotionally engaging narrative well worth visiting over and over, yet very few will bother. Many people have favorite movies that they’re happy to watch again and again, or favorite books they have dogeared into nothingness – but you don’t have to work to revisit those narratives. If I had to do a sit-up for every page of A Song of Ice and Fire that I reread, well, I’d be in better shape but I’d be less likely to reread it every twelve months or so.

A fascinating article and discussion about replayability manage to quantify the four reasons for revisiting a game: mastery, completion, impact, and experience. Developers should look to these pieces to determine what sort of replayability paradigm most effectively fits the game they’re creating. Bruce Shelley notes that “It is better to create a game that can be played over and over, rather than one that is usually played [through] only once.” Well… maybe. But games like Diablo, which was marketed heavily on the strength of its single-player replayability through randomly generated dungeons, was played through pretty much only once by most of those who bought it. Does that make Diablo bad? Certainly not. If anything, it’s proof that while replayability is a nice feature, it is far from a necessity for a successful game. Certainly those games that we love the best and remember the most fondly are those we return to again and again – but it is doubtful that adherence to a set of rules will guarantee a game that sort of renown. Great games are replayed because they are great games – games are not great because they are replayed. I personally play Project IGI through once a year or so, a private shame that I can’t adequately explain even to myself.

At the birth of the cabinet game, there was no narrative, and no narrative-fueled replay. Games focused on addictive qualities similar to today’s popular strategy and puzzle genres. Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Asteroids and so forth never end. Replayability at that point was limited to how much fun a game could be before the inevitable defeat and loss of a quarter, because if the game was fun, a player would start the cycle anew. The model still exists today, and is as highly successful; yet the emergence of new genres and the escalating quality of narrative in story-driven games call into question the need for an overall mantra of replayability. If high replayability potential is a necessity regardless of genre or game type, developers must reexamine their creations with an eye for enhancing access to those portions of the game that the player will be most eager to re-experience. Games would likely become overly cinematic and far more brief – two unacceptable traits, to be sure. It seems unlikely that replayability, while a desirable quality, can be synthetically incorporated into every game type.