On Replayability
Every now and then I stumble upon the random dismissive "this game is good/bad because it has/doesn't have a lot of replayability" comment and it grinds my gears. This is mostly something I see in computer game discourse, but it does happen pretty much everywhere regarding games. I've done it in the past too and I don't deeply regret it or anything, but I wished I had stopped and thought about it back then because it's not really that complicated.
I'm not going to setup a web crawler to find out when exactly words like "replayability" and "replay value" started becoming mainstream in games' discourse1, but if I had to guess it would probably be somewhere in the early 2010s with the launch of lovely roguelites such as The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky and sandboxy survival-crafting games like Minecraft and Terraria. They had a lot of emphasis on random outcomes and some kind of emergent gameplay, so people started to play around with that more. But what even is the problem I have with this particular buzzword?
Basically, it means absolutely nothing. There are other flaccid buzzwords in games' discourse such as "open-world" that at least try to communicate some semblance of aesthetic or mechanic cohesion, but "replayability" is literally just a smiley face stamp. A game is replayable if you like the game and if you feel like playing it. It's not about how much "content" it packs, it's not about if it's numerically "worth your money" and it certainly isn't about releasing a new season to try to finagle some more virtual coins out of your physical pocket. Nobody looks at a song or a movie and says "yeah this is good but it's lacking replay value": if you like the song enough, you'll be listening to it until your last breath. People rewatch comedy movies even though they already know the jokes, horror movies even though they already know the scares and mystery movies even though they already know whodunnit: it's just a matter of liking the thing.
So why did I replay Pokémon SoulSilver again that fourth time? Because I like the game.
Why did I run Mork Borg's Rotblack Sludge two weekends in a row to two different groups? Because I liked the module.2
Why did I replay all Batman: Arkham City challenges dozens of times but never finished the New Game Plus? Because I liked replaying the challenges and didn't like replaying the story mode.
I've heard plenty of times that ttrpgs are an affordable hobby (and they generally are) by using the argument that "you get one U$60 book and use it to play forever" and like, you realize that that's not true, right? Because if the person doesn't like the game, they can't even play it more than a single time! The same thing while browsing opinions regarding roguelites and praising the possibilities of procedural generation, saying that no run is the same and the replay value is infinte... So what? If I play five runs and I'm bored to death, why would I play an infinite amount of runs?
Well, this is my grumpy sunday night post. Are there ways to design your games to increase expected gameplay time? Sure I guess. Should we call them replayability or replay value? Hell no. It makes it seem like there is an objective quality that this one game can be played several times while other lesser games can't, which is just a blatant lie. Unless you're talking about all the shut down, formerly live service games. Poor souls ended up with no replayability after all.
anb
As someone who started interacting with ttrpg and boardgame communities rather recently, I'm not going to try to make a guess regarding them, even though I've seen the term pop up more often than what I would like. It feels less ingrained, though.↩
I actually liked it so much I almost ran it online in the following week, but I did manage to come to my senses.↩