In my post I plan to really examine experience based replayability.  I do this because the former two types of replayabilty have been, well replayed a lot in games.  Impact replayability is already being explored by a number of games including The Sims, Little Big Planet and to a great extent the World of Warcraft.  Expeirnece based replayability on the other hand is not used nearly as much in games and I want to discuss why.

Experience based replayability is an area that I feel has not been explored enough in games.  For the vast majority of other mediums experience based replayability is king.  Because these mediums are static in nature (and by mediums I am referring to film, novels, and most kinds of art) they are only replayable if the audience wants to experience it again.  You can’t change a film to explore other avenues of the story if the director didn’t give them to you.  You certainly can’t improve your ability to consume a piece of art (some will argue that you can and there is validity to this, but in the most general sense there is no improvement in your ability to see a painting after you have seen it). The only way static pieces of media are capable of replayability is by means of Experience based replayability.  This in fact is why these mediums are good at it, they have to be.  You can’t paint the Sistine Chapel every other day so you need to paint it in such a way that it causes people to want to see it again and again.

Games on the other hand are not static by their very nature.  Change is inherent to a game.  If you play a game where nothing changes, then you aren’t really playing a game.  The question I ponder is, does this make experience based replayability inherently impossible?  If a game changes everytime you play it because of it’s very nature then is replaying it to experience the things that you experienced before impossible? I believe the answer to this question is no and it gets back to what a game designer is doing when they design games.  A game designer is designing experiences not games. The game is the method that the designer uses to create the desired experience. Ironically you’d think that Experience based replayability would be the most prevalent source of replayability, but it is actually the least used method.  This is because the systems that designers use to create games make it easier to implement the other types than it is to create an experience worth coming back to for the experience alone.

If the other mediums are good at doing experience based replayability, how are they doing it?  Looking at the mediums mentioned before I think the most applicable ones to video games are film and novels.  Art is a static medium in terms of time and video games can’t be static in time.  Plays seem like a good match, but because they are so similar to video games in their replayability they are not a good object of comparison.  Films and novels that have replayability tend to have archetypal stories.  An archetypal story accoring to Robert McKee’s book ‘Story’ “… unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression.” That jumble of $10 words essentially says that if a story conveys a true experience in the context of its setting and characters then it is archetypal.  The reverse of this is cliches and stereotypes. These are things that are superficially true to one experience, but is not universal. We see this principle apply in many of the classics of both film and literature.  Good examples are Lord of the Rings, Chinatown, and Star Wars.

Well how do we apply this to games.  I say it is as simple as it is to apply to film and literature (which of course means extremly difficult). At this point I am going to say that experience based replayability is inherently narrative based replayability.  This does not mean that the experience we design is not one that can’t be repeated via the Experience model unless we have a strong narrative.  Instead it is a failing on my part to ascertain the method to do this.  I can only look at this through the lense of narrative.  That being said the lense of narrative is one that I feel is very broad and can provide some insight in how to do this in other ways.  In order for a game designer to design a game with experience based replayability they need to find a nugget of truth in which they can wrap their story around.  This nugget tends to be something very basic like independence vs dependence or powerful vs the powerless.  It needs to be something that is diametrically opposed to one another.

A game that has done this well is Final Fantasy 7.  In this game the nuggets are nature vs technology, power vs powerless, and family vs clones.  These nuggets allowed the story of the game to be multi-faceted and rich.  You couldn’t get all of the detail in one playthrough, you needed to play again in order to get the nuances that you missed before.  The games mechanics were in general ok, but nothing to write home about and its graphics while revolutionary for the time were frankly a bunch of faceted polys moving together.  The reason why this game was replayable was because players wanted to experience it again and again.

Designing this type of replayability is extremely difficult.  Most games are twitch based games and while narrative for many is a crucial part of gameplay, creating games that are replayable tends to take the backburner against more important features such as tuning game mechanics and level design. I do believe however that we definitely need to look at replayability as a core game design tenet.  With console and game prices continually rising we need to serve our consumer with games that will stand the test of time.  No longer are we designing games that are 40 hours long for $50.  More often we are desining 20 hour games for $60.  Our consumers will start to balk at paying a hefty premium for something that doesn’t last as long as it used to and we as an industry cannot afford to create games with more content because of the ever increasing costs of production. The way to solve this problem is to create games that are inherently replayable.

Other readings on replayability:

Ernest Adams on Replayability Part 1

Ernest Adams on Replayability Part 2

Lucian Smith on Replayability in Adventure Games