Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Replay Value!

I’m something of an aberration amongst my gaming friends. While we all love games and the experiences they present my friends seek out new experiences constantly. Without any incentive otherwise they’ll beat a game and put it down forever, their experience completed. Sometimes they’ll give it a second playthrough if it promises a unique enough experience, something like Dragon Age where the game’s shape shifts dramatically depending on the choices you make, but they’d never dream of delving into something like Metro 2033 again, where the game is more or less the same each time through and the only real choice to be had is the choice between two endings, neither of which seems to offer much satisfaction.

Because they don’t replay games. Once an experience has entered their consciousness it’s done. It’s over. Next please. And this isn’t a bad thing at all. Replaying games can be tedious. It can be tortuous. It can be pointless. But it can also be illuminating.

I replay games constantly. Part of it comes from my educational background. As someone who was forced to read and re-read books for the sake of writing papers about them I tend to approach narratives like experiments: I see them as a way to collect data, as a set of conditions that I can observe, record information on and extrapolate ideas about narrative in general from that information. So when I read an experience and I’m curious about my response to it, for better or worse, I’m immediately compelled to step back into that experience, to engage it and take it apart from the inside.

I even have this compulsion with woefully bad games. When I finished Jericho, a game that I purchased for a dollar and felt, after playing it, I’d just barely gotten a fair trade on it, I decided to delve back in. I wanted to see if I’d been correct in my assessment of the Jericho experience. I wanted to see if a higher difficulty would make the game more interesting. I wanted to see if the characters might become even somewhat endearing (aside from Cole, sweet, sweet Cole) upon a second playthrough. They didn’t, of course, but I still stuck with it. I stuck with it for a good long time and, in a sense, I’m still sticking with it. I’m just taking a break because right now it’s super frustrating and I’ve got other things to do and play.

I did the same thing with Modern Warfare 2’s single player. After I finished it I decided I’d sit down and see how it played on the hardest difficulty setting, see if the missions became more or less of a challenge, if there was some hint of the brilliance behind the first Modern Warfare game. Again, there wasn’t, but I still braved the experience all the way to that last button mashing session which ended with a knife in Lance Henrikson’s eye, because I wanted to give it a fair shake. I wanted to see how I’d respond to the narrative knowing all of its elements, how I’d process it with additional information.

These aren’t qualities that make me a better gamer. In fact, they kind of make me a crappier gamer. There are plenty of games I just don’t experience because I’m busy replaying other games and they fall off my radar. Alan Wake, for example, was buried under a sea of “meh” responses while I was replaying Fallout 3 for the third time. Right now I’m not playing Elemental because I’m busy replaying Alpha Protocol and just finished my second playthrough of Metro 2033 (which took considerably less time and effort this time around, by the by). I do expect that to change, just because of the excitement surrounding Elemental, probably even before this is posted.

My point is that, instead of seeking out a large number of experiences I delve into a set of them, both good and bad. Sometimes this shows in my writing, with my frequent references to titles like Fallout, Bioshock and Far Cry 2, games I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into and know bits and pieces of by heart. Sometimes it doesn’t make it in, as is the case with Jericho. But I reflect on these experiences by reliving them, by reconsidering the approach I took to them the first time around.

Therein lies the appeal of replaying games: it isn’t the recodification of an experience, but the reappropriation and reconsideration of it. It’s not about finding something new, but reassessing the experience you had, mulling it over, being aware of it as a whole as you experience each part of it. It’s something people don’t do often enough in life and literature, and it’s certainly not something people do often enough in games. Reflecting on these experiences is what helps us actually understand where they fit into the tapestry of art and the world in general, and when we don’t consider them.

It’s especially valuable because it doesn’t fit into the critical or communal discussion surrounding games. The people who write and converse about games are all too often less concerned with investigating an experience and far more concerned with ranking it, assessing it as something to be consumed and then moving on to the next experience. It’s the worst example of consumerism, an aggressive push away from assessing the works of art that we experience towards a rawer fire-and-forget form of consumption. Every game that we don’t replay, every game we shelf and leave behind without considering where it succeeds or fails in the greater spectrum of gaming becomes a sort of casualty to the ever plodding forces of progress.

And that’s a shame. Because even the silliest, shittiest game has a lot to teach us. Indeed, the shittier the game, perhaps, the greater the lesson it may provide. Because games are, like most narrative, an artistic experience. They edify us in some way, even if that edification is simply a movement towards enjoyment. And when we fail to consider this edification in a greater context, when we fail to treat games the way we’d treat books or films and think of them after we’ve finished and remember the experiences we’ve had when we approach new games, we’re doing the medium as a whole a disservice. So recycle your old games. Replay games you want to reassess your experience with, or games that you just can’t stop thinking about.

Take your time. Enjoy your experiences, think about them, discuss them, and never worry about being called a nerd for it. For fuck’s sake, we’re talking about video games. We wouldn’t be playing them if we weren’t nerds.