I've probably played hundreds of video games during my life so far. From RPGs to shooters, strategy games, simulations, adventure games, and a lot more. Some of you might know this because I mentioned in the past just how much I love video games.
I'm currently playing Kingdom Come Deliverance, a story-driven RPG game that takes place in Bohemia during a war in 1403. I really like the game for a multitude of reasons, but I'm not going to go into that right now. This is not a game review article.
However, as much as I like the game, there are moments in which I hate taking it slow and looking around and exploring and doing small activities that don't seem too interesting. I've got a lot of games to play and I don't have a lot of time, so small things that seem like nothing but a waste of time aren't always attractive to me.
This is sometimes good, because it means I can avoid time wasting collectibles or activities that aren't important to me, but it's also bad because once in a while I'll miss some very cool things that a game has to offer because I rush through certain parts.
After I finish a game however, and enough time has passed, if the game left a good impression on me, I might wish to play it again. It happened with a lot of games so far, from the "The Witcher" series to games such as Gothic 1 & 2 or Dark Souls.
One thing that I like about replaying a game is that it allows me to focus more on the small things that I missed, or just different ways of playing the game entirely, because I already know enough about the main way to play the game.
For example, knowing how the Gothic games end and how the main "Warrior" gameplay works, I can spend more time exploring and trying different ways of completing the game on a second playthrough, because at that point my objective is not to finish the game and see how it ends. It's to notice the other things I might have missed in my first playthrough.
The same thing applies to a game like "Dark Souls", which you can finish multiple times with different playstyles. You can play as a normal "Warrior", a sword wielder, on your first playthrough, and on your second one you can try playing as a Mage. You can finish the game using only swords, or only spears. You can fight certain bosses while skipping others.
Another good example would be Dishonored. You can play the game in different ways, from killing everything in your path, to being a pacifist and killing only the required targets. You can use different playstyles and use a multitude of skills to do very cool things.
One particular thing I love about replaying games is that because I know the game well enough, I can just take it easy on my second playthrough and admire its world. There's a lot a game can offer. Sometimes you can just look around and admire its beauty. Sometimes you can admire the interactions between NPCs. Sometimes the world design is so well made that you can explore every bit of the game and always find something new.
These things can, of course, be noticed the first time you play the game, but I always get more pleasure from focusing on those things on my other playthroughs. Repetition can help you see the beauty in what you do.
The same can apply to life. There's a lot of beauty that we don't notice because we're always in a hurry to do more, to do better, to get to our goals faster. Just like in a video game. We want a house, a car, a stable income, a boyfriend or a girlfriend, a family, a better job, a better computer, and a lot more. Those things require work, effort and time, things we're willingly giving away in exchange for what we desire.
But in the process we become blind to the things that surround us that are full of beauty.
Sadly, unless there's some afterlife after we die, this is our only "playthrough". We won't have the chance to go through our life again and look at the small things we missed, or to just admire what's around us. We might not be able to enjoy the gift that repetition gives us.
That's why we should use whatever chance we get to notice the beauty around us and those things that we become blind to in our chase for whatever it is we desire. We repeat the same activities every day and just like in a video game, we can slow down once in a while, take a look at what's around us, appreciate the small things, such as a good cup of coffee, a nice interaction with a colleague, a great productive day, a well written article, and so on, and after that move on with our work.
Repetition can help us see the beauty around us, because repetition is a part of our life. We just need to take our time and focus a bit on what we do.
