Rampancy

It's hard to escape the concept of repetition in entertainment, especially in gaming. While the word "repetitive" itself is often used as a criticism (hello Halo 1's interiors) games are designed to be played repeatedly, and incorporate repetitive elements into their designs.

It's understandable. As an object lesson in entertainment economics, look at the DVD player. Widely hailed as the fastest-adopted new entertainment technology, it is built on the foundation of repetition; the idea that people will want to play the movies and television shows they love over and over. Given that game console hardware and software are both about three times as expensive as DVD players and DVD discs, they have to be at least as repeat-friendly to warrant that kind of investment.

There a lot of different ways to extend a game's useful lifetime and give gamers more bang for their buck by allowing for repeat plays; the Halo series, as well as many other games, provide excellent examples of this.

Since the nature of online multiplayer itself is repetition-- short competetive matches played with a seemingly endless revolving door of random opponents-- we'll leave that aside for the moment. Many games don't have multiplayer at all, and even most that do don't encompass all of their purchasers in online matches. However, there are many ways that repetition is used in designing a single-player campaign that can remain interesting after many playthroughs.

Earlier this week I experienced something that, up until now, I thought only other people had to go through.

Xbox hardware failure.

I plugged it in, and instead of the familiar sights and sounds of console startup, I got a loud pop and a puff of smoke.

Is it the Red Ring of Death, people ask? Am I going to get a new unit under Microsoft's new three year warranty?

Nope, I say. Because I'm not talking about my Xbox 360. It still works fine.

I'm talking about my original launch Xbox, which gave me nearly six years of mostly faithful service, from December of 2001 until now. Sure, the past three years or so there were periodic disk errors. Sometimes it refused to "recognize" a game disc in the tray. When it was Halo or Halo 2, it was comical; how could the console not recognize those?