Gears of War is a third-person shooter game for the Xbox 360 that has been very widely successful despite its high rating by the ESRB and other content rating organizations. The game quickly surpassed Halo 2 as the most popular game on Xbox Live, and after just 10 weeks had sold 3 million copies. The games influences include Resident Evil 4, kill.switch, and Bionic Commando, and combines them to make a game that sets itself apart from others for many reasons. Gears of War is also a perfect example of Grodal’s theory of repetition in a video game (139). The very nature of the game, and the fact that it is a relatively new concept, make this thought of repetition even more applicable to the game.
Gears of War starts out with your character, Marcus Fenix, in jail. Your in-game friend (and the character that is controlled by somebody else when playing co-op) takes you out of jail because the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) has begun taking almost anybody into the military. The reason for this is to fight the Locust Horde, who invaded the planet Sera and have already killed more than a quarter of the inhabitants. Marcus joins a squad of three other soldiers and fights to acquire a map of the underground Locust’s tunnels so a bomb can be properly programmed to do as much damage as possible.
Repetition in Gears of War is quite prevalent, as players quickly learn that the style of play in Gears of War is not their average point-and-shoot. First off, the view is third-person, looking over the shoulder of the avatar. Though this does not take much getting used to, the fact that merely a few seconds of receiving gun-fire can kill your character comes as a shock to most new players. The game is built around the idea that players have to play “smart,” and use their maneuvering abilities, available cover, and squad-based tactics to their advantage, giving them the upper-hand in the fight against the Locusts. This makes the decisions made during game-play much more important, as a single wrong move can expose one side of the squad, leading to the death of the whole team. With such ease of death comes the need to “go back and do it again.” Repeating a certain part of a level can sometimes be fun, by allowing the player to try a different tactic or way of getting past the current obstacle. But it can also lead to very much annoyance. The difficulty of some parts of the game requires that the player repeats the same section over and over again, which can make some people give up and stop playing.
Grodal mentions how repetition is vital to a game of this type in that “the repetitive training of coping skills is an important element,” (139) meaning that if you weren’t allowed to go back and try it again, the game wouldn’t be any fun because you wouldn’t know how to do anything. Gears of War exemplifies this with its cover-dependent tactics, as this type of play takes getting used to. Most gamers are used to just running up to the enemy and shooting them. Gears of War requires that players take their time and use cover, not just brute force. The first time a person plays Gears of War, they will most likely die on the first level. Why? Because they haven’t yet learned the skills to allow them to play correctly, which repetition allows them to do.
Another way Gears of War shows how repetition is important is through much smaller things. For instance, reloading in the game is within itself almost a little mini-game. After pressing the reload button, a player can press it again, and if timed perfectly, the character will reload faster and receive a bonus damage on all the bullets that were refilled. But, if the second button press is not timed right, the gun will jam, and the player will have to wait longer to shoot, which might result in the player’s death (but don’t worry, they can go back and try it again thanks to repetition.) This “Active Reloading” is something that takes place throughout the entire game, and will most likely not be mastered by the end of the game. But as the game progresses, and the more times the player tries it, the better they will get at it.
The repetition in Gears of War allows players to do something over and over again until they have it right. This repetition is what makes it “less serious, less ‘real’” (140) than real life. Dying in real life is definitely not a reversible process, but in video games, repetition allows us to go back and do it again; we can learn from our mistakes to better prepare us for what lies ahead.