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.