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repetition
Repetition is the name of the game with Dynasty Warriors 7. And it kills the entire experience.
Colin Moriarty, IGN
Repetition is a regular criticism of the maligned video game. In the review of Dynasty Warriors 7 it was "repetitive gameplay" that drew ire. The game is, for Moriarty, boring to play. But repetition can also be something actively pursued by the gamer, seeking the bonuses and rewards of an apparently otherwise linear adventure. The game is then played to be boring, a self-imprisonment or, worse yet, a real one. Neither sound especially appealing.
But, when we break it down, isn't all gaming repetition of a sort? It's the repetition of familiar characters and situations. Respawning and multiple lives. The same level over and over again. But it's also the repetition of the player. Learning the routine of a boss level, for example. And the best games, in spite of Moriarty's criticisms, are built on an interplay between repetitive game and repetitive gamer.
If Ocarina of Time (1998) was the Homeric epic, complete with nostos, childhood longing and a belief in its own self-importance, then Majora's Mask (2000), in its recurring three day structure, was Waiting for Godot: stuck at the end of history, with even the stable heroic identity replaced with the multiple personality disorder of the world of mask. As we learnt the routines of peripheral characters, we could use them to our advantage and gradually move the narrative forward: progression through repetition. With Majora's Mask, both game and gamer may have demanded repetitive actions, but it's our capacity to tie together repetition with memory, both our own and the physical kind, which confers these moments with meaning.
Indeed, to confine repetition to the symbolic realm of play perhaps even allows us to take ownership over our very human desire to return to that which we already know. Freud believed that psychoanalytic therapy provides a "playground in which [the compulsion to repeat] has licence to express itself with almost total freedom." Therapy, Freud argued, provided a symbolic level to live out these fantasies "in the present", rather than "remembering it as something belonging to the past." In so doing, the patient overcomes the "intensity of the experience", within the confines of an artificial illness and becomes "master of the situation". In providing a space to live out our primal fantasies and repetitive compulsions, do video games actually allow us to progress in our own lives?
When Steven Spielberg saw an early version of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) - with, astonishingly, multiple levels and an unfolding story - he loathed it and wanted the game to be more like Pac-Man, the Midway port of which had just blown open the home gaming market. Warshaw obliged and got rid of the multiple levels, leaving the game with a repeating first level and a points system. In contrast to 1982, recent years have seen a growing obsession with filmic narratives, David Cage perhaps being the biggest advocate. In Heavy Rain (2010), his rejection of gaming as repetition extents even to the continuously unfolding interactive narrative wherein actions that would, in other games, cause you to go back and replay a level, are here made the driving force of the story. Cage wanted to mimic life so completely that he even recommended that the game should only be played once.
Cage's attempts to raise games to an artform are admirable, but ultimately ignore what made video games unique in the first place. The most interesting stories in gaming culture have historically existed outside of the games themselves: in their sociological character. When the games we love make it across to other mediums, the most interesting depictions are always of the players and not the games themselves. And, if we are correct in thinking that video games provide a controlled space for our desire to repeat, then even the most repetitive games are nothing to fear. They can, in fact, help us to avoid repetition in our own lives.
Further Reading Sigmund Freud - Remembering, Repeating and Working Through Roland Barthes - S/Z Edge Magazine - Time Extend: Zelda - Majora's Mask
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Nintendo Virtual Boy (1995)
Waterworld (1995)
Nester's Funky Bowling (1996)
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Copy Cart for Atari 2600 (1983)
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Net Cafe (2001)
Like a dot-com era 'Dragon's Den' where everyone loses.
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"bitch took my skull!"
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand (2009)
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ARS ELECTRONICA (1997)
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Linz-based art/technology/everything festival, ARS ELECTRONICA, have recently uploaded a mass of wonderful archive footage. Highlights include 1990's Virtual Reality Symposium - featuring William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Jaron Lanier; a somewhat gothic 1979 demonstration of a homebrew visualiser and the opening ceremony for the all-too-human 1997 edition.
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"The following piece of Polonian advice pretty much encapsulates his whole arcade ethos: “PacMan player, be not proud, nor too macho, and you will prosper on the dotted screen.” I’m no expert, I’ll admit, but I’ll go out on a critical limb here and suggest that this might be the sole instance of the use of the mock-heroic tone in a video game player’s guide."
Mark O'Connell - The Millions
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