Repetition vs. Challenge in video games

In previous posts, I have touched on just exactly what is meant by the idea of “challenge” in a game.  On another website I got into a discussion about repetition in games, and someone asserted that you pretty much have to repeat anything hard because by definition you will fail at it at least a few times just because it is hard (and thus challenging).  Although he didn’t say it explicitly, this implies that if you don’t have to repeat the same thing over and over, you don’t have challenging content.

And indeed, what constitutes “hard challenges” in some games does seem to involve an awful lot of failing and either re-loading from a save point or, in online games, coming back from the dead to try again.  The reason people in general have reacted negatively to these things (leading to them being watered down recently) is not because they are hard per se, but because they lead to repeating the same thing over and over again. And no matter how interesting it is to fight Boss Bob, I am not sure most people find it fun to battle Boss Bob 30 or 40 times before “finding the secret” that lets them win. Repetition tends to bore people. It defeinitely bores me.

I like challenges — really, I do. But I don’t like repetition. Let me use an example of a non-MMO game I’ve started playing again lately: Sims 2.  In this game you take the part of one or more sims (a “household” of them), either that you created or that the game randomly provided for you, and you interact with other NPC sims and basically RP your character. It’s a 100% social game of course (social for the sims — not for you, since it’s a solo game).

At any rate, there’s really no end to the Sims 2, like there is none in an MMO. You just play the same family until you get tired of it. Individual sims will, of course, die eventually, but if you want, you can keep playing their kids, grandkids, etc. One person on the boards at EA mentioned that she had played enough generations of one single family that she had gone alphabetically through first names from A through Q (that’s right, Q!) and was still playing them (intending to end with Z and then start over, I guess, or maybe do numbers this time, LOL).

Now, if you play it normally, the Sims 2 can actually be quite challenging.  Although your sims are mostly just socializing, and there’s no real “goal” to the game, there are things you can do to “lose” as it were. Your sim has 8 needs, such as hunger, energy, comfort, fun, social… They all drop at a constant rate unless you are doing something to raise them, and things that raise them tend to be mutually exclusive. For instance, you can raise fun by watching TV, but your hunger will drop while you do (for some reason — probably because the game would become too easy — sims cannot watch TV and eat at the same time).  You can raise your hunger by eating, but you will lose energy (which can only be regained by sleeping) while you do.  The first 3 sims I made up, I deleted because I got them into “need failure” — they had 3 or more need bars all down in the red at once, and there was no way to get them all up fast enough.

Over time I have learned how to avoid this, by figuring out which bars drop fastest (bladder, hunger) and which the slowest (hygeine, unless your sim is doing something that makes him dirty, and fun).  I’m playing a family right now that started as one lone guy on an empty lot with little money (to make it harder) and he now has a wife and two kids.  Controlling all 4 and keeping their needs and wants fulfilled at once is definitley harder than 1 and requires a huge amount of pausing the game to make sure I don’t miss anything… But again, I have not had any of them go into needs failure yet.

Now, if you read the forums you will find that a lot of people don’t really work at it like this.  The game company published (it’s in the readme file) all the cheat codes. You can do ctrl-shift-enter and type “maxmotives” and all the needs bars will fill up. You can do this over and over, and some players just do this repeatedly because they don’t want to bother with balancing the sim’s needs and wants (fullfilling needs usually means you are NOT fullfilling wants — hard to do both at once).  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing it like this, but I don’t find it challenging and I would rather not employ the cheat.

So, what is my point here? It’s possible to fail at the Sims (and have a sim die, for example).  It can be VERY challenging to keep everything out of the deep yellow or red/orange at once on the needs panel. It’s even more challenging to do that while improving the Sims’ skills, getting them promoted at work, and fullfilling wants like wanting to have a baby or kiss another sim.  But despite being challenging, and despite the fact that I have on occasion failed, I enjoy it because I have not once, ever had to repeat anything in a Sims play session. Every session is different. Every simulated day is different.  Every sim plays differently. Even when you make them similar  (I twice started out with male knowledge sims), the game sitll plays differently each and every time.

My point, then, is that challenge is great, but to me (and to many gamers) repetition is not.  COH in particular is vulnerable to what I call the “many are better than one” design flaw (and yes, I consider it a flaw). The basic logic is, “If it’s fun to do this once, then it must be a thousand times as fun to do it a thousand times.”  Maybe that’s true for some people but for most people that’s not true, and in fact after the first several times, the amount of fun most of us derive from doing the same activity over and over again declines, often dramatically.  I think because so many games have conflated challenge with “the need to repeat the same identical content”, people who don’t like repetition are sort of forced into the position of seeming not to like a challenge, when that’s not really the case.

So, to me, challenge is not just good — it’s great.  Failing to keep the needs up for my Sims did not make me stop playing Sims 2… it inspired me to try again, and each time I got further (the first Sim went into needs failure like 3 days into her life… the second got to day 8 or so… the third to about day 12… even the current one is only on day 21, and so far so good but it takes 30 days to get to “retirement”).  But I only kept trying because the game is DIFFERENT each time (even if you try again with the same sim).  If it had been the same exact set of variables every single time, I’d probably have long ago uninstalled Sims 2.  Instead, I am planning to install it and all the expansion packs (of which I have 6 and that’s less than half) on my laptop to keep me entertained over the Xmas holiday.