The artist formerly known as Prince once sang: “There’s joy in repetition”. There’s a lot of truth in that, but the way the little purple one repeated the claim throughout the song made it clear he was talking about a particular sort of repetition: the sort that comes with variations. In this case the variations were exquisite modulations of timing, with the voice slouching behind or strutting ahead of the beat, or minuscule recolourings of verbal emphasis. Similarly, the hypnotic repetitions of minimalism, as practised by composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass, as well as those of minimalism’s direct descendant, trance music, are in the forms’ best exemplars not mere cut’n'paste clonings but subtle recontextualisations of the initial statement. We might call this “constructive repetition” in order to distinguish it from the case of monotonous repetition, where you just get exactly the same thing, over and over again. In videogames, too, there is a tension between constructive repetition and monotonous repetition.
Now, merely to call a game “repetitive” is not necessarily to denounce it. In the golden age of twitch games, monotonous repetition was paramount to the induction of a zen-like “flow” in the gameplayer’s consciousness. The player would learn patterns in order to defeat wave after wave in Robotron or Tempest, and attempt to repeat those strategies precisely each time he started from the beginning. In this way, monotonous repetition was the goal of the player’s strategy, the logical end-point of hours of constructive repetition where the correct strategy was being sought through experiment and variation. This remains true for something like Ferrari F335 Challenge, in which the ideal is to race lap after lap in exactly the same, optimal way.

The achievement of monotonous repetition in twitch games, then, can represent the pleasurable acquisition of a skill, of a set of motor routines that become learned by the hands and mind. Then, in games such as Wip3out, the purist monotonous repetition of flying the track accurately becomes a constructive repetition, because you must negotiate the track with attention to the moment-specific demands of blowing other ships up and avoiding mines. At the other end of the spectrum are the videogames where repetition is not an obvious goal at all - where we are offered the illusion of a complex, non-repetitive world. Here, the sudden appearance of monotonous repetition can disrupt the flow of the gameplay and wrench us out of willing immersion. This has become especially noticeable in the paradigm of boss battles.

The standard procedure for the player faced with a boss battle is first to rush around trying different tactics and seeing what works, and then to refine her operations into a discrete set of actions calculated to defeat the boss after a set number of monotonous repetitions. And in practice, this construction has become weighted too much towards the “wrong” sort of repetition. The initial stage of a boss encounter - the constructive repetition of working out your strategy through repeating moves that keep you safe while varying offensive actions - is always the most exciting, because it engages the creative mind in a high-stress problem-solving mode. However, when the correct tactics are discovered, the monotonous repetition of applying them ten, 15 or 30 times in order to defeat the enemy can rapidly become frustrating. Any mistakes you make now are merely because your finger slipped, or the control scheme is too clunky, or you’re just bored because you’ve been doing exactly the same thing for the last half an hour.

Revealingly, one of the ways in which Metal Gear Solid, for example, varies between its selectable skill levels is that on harder settings the bosses simply have longer health bars, and so it takes more monotonous repetition to defeat them. That is not a clever way to enhance the challenge of a game; it just makes it more boring. Even on the easy setting, my feeling is that the confrontation with Metal Gear Rex at the game’s climax is a shade too long in the monotonous repetition stage; as is the battle with Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time. These are, after all, two great exploration games in which the player is encouraged all the way through to experiment, to have fun with new skills, and to pit his wits against novel situations and challenges, but when it comes to the boss battle in each game - aesthetically awe-inspiring though Metal Gear Rex and Ganondorf are - we suddenly regress to the twitch paradigm of “learn a pattern and repeat it ad nauseam”. It is not that Metal Gear Rex and Ganondorf are too difficult, but that they too rapidly become tedious.

Recently there appears to be something of a movement towards more boss encounters. Indeed, in games such as Freak Out or Luigi’s Mansion, nearly every enemy is a kind of boss, in that the player needs to construct a certain repetitive strategy to win. In such cases, an imbalance towards monotonous repetition can become even more wearing. It is lovely to discover that a certain ghost will be distracted by leaves blowing in through a window if you pull the curtain open, but once you have worked this out, it becomes annoying to have to repeat the action so many times, especially with the thumb-troubling circular action required to operate Luigi’s vacuum cleaner.

The solution is, quite simply, to adjust the balance between the constructive and monotonous repetition stages of boss battles. Make a boss more wily; make the tactics required to defeat him more cunningly opaque. Let us tax our brains in constructive repetition for longer; make it more of a cerebral challenge. That is where the meat of a boss confrontation ought to be. Once we have figured out the right way to defeat him, why should we have to repeat it more than a handful of times? For now we have solved the puzzle, and are just being mechanically hampered from seeing what comes next. There’s joy in repetition, sure, but even Prince knew better than to let that song last 30 minutes.