From Replay to Revisit

"From Replay to Revisit" argues that the existing vocabulary of replaying games, borrowed largely from the rereading of books, fails to capture the full range of ways players return to games they have already encountered. The authors propose "revisiting" as a complementary concept, drawing on the word's dual meaning of reconsidering something and going back to a place. Their stated aim is to broaden the discussion beyond linear, single-outcome games, which earlier work on re-experiencing media focused on, to include branching narratives, open-world games, multiplayer contexts, and the paratexts that surround games, such as adaptations, making-of books, strategy guides, and video content.

The paper's argument is developed largely through conceptual reasoning and illustrative examples rather than empirical data. Its central case study is Assassin's Creed, a single-player series that offers both in-game and paratextual encounters with real and fictional locations. The authors examine how completion mechanics, such as marking locations as "complete," frame revisits as a challenge to the game's intended endpoint. They draw on Georges Perec's repeated visits to a single Paris square to suggest that each return reveals experiential difference within repetition. They also explore how game reconstructions of real places can blur distinctions between the real and the imagined when players later visit those places in person, and how depictions of regions such as the Middle East raise concerns about orientalist representation.

The document situates its contribution within a growing but still peripheral strand of game research and criticism that foregrounds aesthetic, affective, and explorative dimensions of play over instrumental rules and goals. It references "new games journalism," ethnographic studies of online worlds, and recent experiential approaches to single-player games. The authors argue that attending to revisiting can enrich both leisure and analytical perspectives on how and why people return to games and the worlds they contain. The paper is a conceptual exploratory piece presented at DiGRA 2023, and it does not report survey sizes, sampling methods, or other systematic data collection.