Does replayability matter?

[droqen]

Regarding "Empathy as play, and vice versa", in particular "I seek out a game designed by its player - by someone who is enthusiastic about the idea of playing the game"... I want to relate to a game by its players, and in the case of an indie game, I want to relate to a game by its designer-as-player. If a game isn't replayable, it means the designer has long since ceased being its player...

[droqen]

I want to relate to a game by its play.

I've never thought about replayability this way... it's not about replay value for me as a player, but replay value for me as an archaeologist. To play a game is to study its play, to relate to its players, to see what they love about it.

The longer the game, the more play there is to dig into.

[droqen]

i really enjoy games which reward curiosity and experimentation, which let you incrementally develop a relationship with the space over time.

tweet by loren schmidt

[droqen]

i don't know if "replayability" is necessarily a useful term. eg in narrative-heavy games that hype up their replayability by emphasizing explicit narrative/moral decisions, if i replay such a game i usually just end up making the same decisions

because if this is a game i'm only gonna replay again in 2-3 years if ever, why would i spoil this playthrough by making decisions i think are bad? so the "replayability" is entirely notional in practice

vs the games that i actually want to and do replay the most often are games like doom or blood that are viscerally satisfying moment-to-moment, even if there's less room to make different choices within the game

games that lean heavily on random/procedural content also have. you know, the old saw about "every run is different!" meaning "every run is basically the same in important ways", such that again any "replayability" just comes down to whether i enjoy the game moment to moment

thread of 4 tweets by googoogjoob