What makes unrepeatable games possible?
Should tabletop games be replayable? I think this question is a trap. Maybe it’s better to ask: What makes unrepeatable games possible?
The most popular games are highly replayable: If someone “plays Chess,” they probably have a competitive streak hundreds or thousands of plays deep. Gentler regional favorites like Hearts and Euchre are also heavily replayed, but for different reasons: Each play is an opportunity to connect with friends and family, a diversion to wash away the stress of everyday life. And then there are gambling games, like Poker, replayable brain worms that compel their victims to return over and over to the thrill of profit and the trauma of loss.
Maybe games survive only because they are played, so games are either replayable or dead. Taken to an extreme, this has a whiff of social Darwinism: What survives is good and what’s good survives. Let’s call this “the cult of value.” One dogma of the cult is that as replayability increases, the cost per play drops to zero. This logic explains why publishers push mix-and-match features like variable setup in marketing materials. At the limit, this is a promise of infinite value! The gate of heaven! Every consumer’s dream!
Against Repeatability
But there is a strong dissenting argument. In Against Repeatability, Dan Thurot argues that non-replayable (or unrepeatable) games have an expressive power that replayable games simply lack: They can ask players to make profound choices that create unimaginable outcomes. Thurot provides a powerful example: In Dan Bullock’s solo game The Gods Will Have Blood you play as a radical magistrate during the Reign of Terror, deciding which French aristocrats to spare and which to send to the guillotine. Your decisions shape the game’s story, with tragic and memorable consequences. So memorable, according to Thurot, that after one play there’s no going back. You cannot rewind time and reverse the terror—some things cannot be unseen—so future plays are drained of surprise, and arguably of value. But the pain and joy of stumbling through these blind choices a single time can have a bigger impact on emotion and memory than a bloodless game played thousands of times.
How should we evaluate games like The Gods Will Have Blood? An acolyte of the cult of value might say that because it’s only good for a couple plays, the high price per play is just a bad deal. But is it right to put a price on a powerful, unrepeatable emotional experience?
It’s easy to get stuck right here, in the unresolvable tension between the cult of value and the cult of feeling. But this would be a mistake. Comparing replayable games like Chess to unrepeatable experiences like The Gods Will Have Blood misses the point; it’s like comparing tennis to Macbeth. These types of games are fundamentally different not just in the experiences they create, but also in what makes them possible: the technology used to make them and the communities that love them.
In favor of community
What makes unrepeatable games possible? Game production is more accessible than ever. As the price of small print runs drops, games for niche audiences become financially viable. And on the internet, niche communities can grow despite great distance. These communities are reinventing how to tell stories with tabletop games, just as filmmakers have continually reinvented how to tell stories with photography. This social and technological moment supports the growth of a modernism in games, a movement of designers experimenting with new forms: unrepeatable games, games that represent protest and rebellion, games without victory conditions, games that are broken like the world around us is broken, games that work the way the world could never work, games designed to shock us into seeing that world differently. These games are a new social and cultural technology that lives not just in rulebooks and bits of cardboard, but in the feedback loop between innovative games and the communities who make and play them. Seen in this light, taking a stand against repeatability is really taking a stand against convention, against competing on the margins, and in favor of communities dedicated to ambitious, expansive creativity.
Feedback Loop Games is our bid to contribute to these boundary-pushing game design communities, to grow the culture of games that help people understand and reinvent themselves.