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This is a valid way to look at things too. It's sort of a matter of semantics on how the meaning of the word "play", referring to video games, has shifted over time. In the arcade-game era, a "play" was the outermost unit of gameplay. It's what you'd get in exchange for a quarter from an arcade machine: one attempt at beating the game (possibly with the assistance of mechanisms like extra lives.) So "re-play-ability", if it came up in the game-design vocabulary of that era, would refer to how effectively a game could continue to solicit quarters from a given player. This included difficulty, but also required a feeling of progression rather than frustration, and a decent minimum length for any given "play" (because no parent would keep giving their child quarters for a machine that eats one every minute or two.) Coming with the era of battery-backed save files, the "play" (play-session) was replaced as the overarching unit of gameplay consumption with the play-through: the creation and on-and-off usage of the same save file, for weeks/months, until you get to some point where the game shows you a "The End" screen and you (in many games) get a percentage score for how many of the game's optional puzzles you solved. (Basically bringing to home consoles the conception of gaming that existed on time-sharing mainframe systems in the 70s.) Both before and after the ability to restore progress, players could decide to quit a game before beating it, unless the game was good enough to drag them back in; and both before and after, players might continue to play after beating a game, to do better. But the arcade† and arcade-inspired eras definitely favoured the first kind of "replay value" compared to the progessive-play-through era. † (Assuming that "beating" the game was a sensible thing to talk about. Many games of the arcade era would let pretty much anyone "get to the end" with the barest effort; the point of them was instead to compete on point-score or leaderboard-ranking. "Replay value", in these games, effectively referred to the same thing the term "depth" does in competitive games like chess: how well the game serves to measure skill difference in high-level play.) |