Playing The Force Unleashed II for the fourth time in a row got me thinking about the value of novelty. I got into the bottomless gaming hole that inspired my blog because I kept buying more and different video games, but what is a video game, really. They're just a series of images, presented to you one after another, in response to which, you press buttons, and the buttons you press influence which images are presented next. In a story-driven action game like The Force Unleashed II, there is a larger sequence of images and pressing the buttons in the right way advances the sequence, whereas pressing the buttons in the wrong way makes you repeat certain sections of the sequence you've already seen.
And that's when it struck me - upon breaking it down to such a fundamental level, beating The Force Unleashed II a third or fourth time is really only a variant of failing to beat it for the first time. If I'm fighting the Gorog and it crushes me with its massive fists, I have to start the fight over, and attempt to beat the Gorog from the very beginning. And, now, I've fought the Gorog four times. . .
If I'd fought the Gorog four times, and three of those times, I'd gotten 99% of the way through, and only gotten 100% on the fourth try, how would that be different? Does that 3 percent really matter?
What makes the images matter is meaning. I play the game and understand that the Gorog is a monster and that defeating it is different than failing to defeat it, and this meaning is largely imposed by signs, but I do have to bring something to it. Especially when doing it four times in a row, I have to bring something to it.
I think this is a little credited gaming skill in general. It's the same basic problem that some people have with Minecraft - gathering and crafting and stacking blocks seems pointless without a concrete goal.
So what meaning do I usually bring to games? I once played the original Mass Effect four times in a row, and only stopped because I'd gotten all the achievements but one (and the one remaining would have taken an entire 5th playthrough just for itself). I had no problem, then, with finding meaning in repetition.
As near as I can tell, the secret for me is transformation and discovery - if each iteration builds on the last, or if each iteration is different from last, even in subtle ways, I can always find an appetite for another go round. It's why I could easily fire up and enjoy another round of Alpha Centauri, despite playing it almost every day for two years and getting so good I could beat its highest difficulty - I may know nearly everything there is to know about the game, and I would certainly cleave very closely to the optimal strategy I'd developed over hundreds of hours of practice, but my initial map position would never repeat, my enemies would not necessarily react in exactly the same way, the random events would never trigger at exactly the same time. Familiarity only increases my appreciation for nuance. It was when I knew the game less well that I was more inclined to say that each match was the same.
I don't feel that way about The Force Unleashed II. The more I played it, the more homogeneous my experience started to feel. It's possible that I plateaued in skill, and that if I kept at it for a half-dozen more times through the main plot, that I would come to appreciate the subtle variations more and more. It seems likely, actually. I still had a half-dozen platinum challenge medals to earn. However, I never reached the stage of playing meaningfully. The only meaning I found in repeating the game four times was in sticking with my self-imposed and rather arbitrary blog mission.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I did it, but I'm not eager to do it again.
Interesting insight.
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