Games teach us the value of doing the same thing over and over

In 1975, musician and producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt published Oblique Strategies, a deck of more than 100 cards which offer short, gnomic sentences intended to inspire artists suffering from creative block. One of these often springs to my mind while gaming. It reads: “Repetition is a form of change”.

Repetition is employed in a great deal of art, ranging from the minimalist compositions of Philip Glass to the catchy choruses of pop songs, from TV procedurals to poetry. Yet it takes on a different aspect in video games, where you’re not simply witnessing something repeating, but are actively performing it. Repetition is foundational to the design of every game, yet paradoxically it is often wielded as a criticism: “I got bored of that game, it was too repetitive.”

A key term in game design is the “gameplay loop”: the central action performed repeatedly during gameplay. You might be in new environments or holding a different weapon, but you’re still pressing the attack button, then the block button, killing enemies and earning loot. In certain casual games, such as Tetris or Candy Crush Saga, the basic gameplay loop is so satisfying that it can keep some players engaged indefinitely with no need for substantial variation. So a successful game does not avoid repetition; it simply employs it in a considered way.

Heavily repetitive elements were once most apparent in retro and mobile games, but over the past year the commercial mainstream has increasingly turned to repetition as an explicit theme. In Sony’s new sci-fi shooter Returnal, the astronaut protagonist crashes her ship on an alien planet and attempts to fight her way out. Each time she dies, she mysteriously wakes up again at her crash site and starts again. The upcoming Deathloop, due in September, is set across a single day that repeats ad infinitum. Two of the biggest indie hits of the past year, Hades and Loop Hero, both stick to a strict rhythm of repeated environments and battles.

One of the repetitive tropes of older games often maligned by fans of role-playing game is “grinding”: fighting weak enemies over and over to level up or earn loot. Grinding can be so monotonous that players have been known to write code to perform the repeated actions for them or to stick tape over their controllers to save them forever pressing the same buttons. Today’s developers are more advanced, using sophisticated techniques to explore the philosophical ideas around repetition while maintaining satisfying and rewarding gameplay.

The first priority is to make the gameplay loop as strong as possible, encouraging players to enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “flow state”, a pleasurable feeling of being wholly immersed in a task. Games such as Returnal and Hades ask players to explore the same labyrinths over and over, but the arrangement of the rooms and enemies shifts with each attempt, adding novelty. They allow you to improve your character across multiple runs, offering a tantalising sense of forward momentum despite regular setbacks.

Players are also offered a random selection of abilities each time, tapping into an addictive phenomenon called “variable ratio reinforcement,” also exploited in slot machines — the fact that you know something good might come up, but you don’t know when, makes it hard to stop playing.

It’s curious that repetition is a complaint commonly levelled at video games but not at, say, football or chess

As well as upgrades to your character and minor variations on each play-through, games embracing repetition offer another important draw: they challenge players to master the game’s systems. Titles such as Dark Souls and Cuphead ask you to fight the same difficult enemies over and over, yet the tight combat design keeps you coming back to learn the patterns of the game and then test yourself. The joy of these games is that they teach us how to play them not with tutorials but organically through experimentation and repetition, like learning to play a musical instrument or speak a language. Even if the character’s abilities do not improve, the player’s skill does. The environment and enemies may be the same but you are different, rendering the experience fresh each time.

It’s curious that repetition is a complaint commonly levelled at video games but not at, say, football or chess, both activities which are largely repetitive, with a few variables thrown in to make each game feel different. Repetition is a fundamental facet of human life: we eat breakfast every morning and go to the same offices every day. The pandemic year has unsparingly confronted us with the gameplay loops of our daily lives. Besides offering escape, games can teach us about the value of incremental progress. Our small gestures might lead us somewhere better, and if they don’t, there is inherent value in perseverance. Repeated actions are rituals which ground us in our lives and give us comfort. They offer something to hold on to in a shifting world.