Repetition vs. Repetitiveness.

My personal gaming activities recently have been primarily focused on Shadowgun Legends with the occasional Castle Burn match thrown in for "variety".
Shadowgun Legends is, as I've recently come to know, a Destiny clone FPS for mobile devices that runs well on my midrange phone and is simple to control due to its partially automated mechanics i.e the default gun shoots whenever aimed at an enemy without having to press an additional button to both thumbs being placed on the device for movement and aiming. This, I'd like to point out, makes a previously hard to manage genre on mobiles very playable. Since it's a Destiny-like, SL incorporates several mmo/rpg elements like customizable gear, inventory management, a levelling system and rubber ducky lifesaver cosmetic items.
Even though quite substantial in terms of content for a mobile game, SL currently has a lifespan of around 6 months and its story campaign and other content can be "completed" within just under an estimated 30 hours.
But then the fun just starts. Being an mmo the game has a ton of repeatable adventures the player can embark on and since it's also an rpg upgrading gear is also always an option. Effectively prolonging a game indefinitely without having to add much new content, by giving incentive to repeat the available content with the goal to acquire a special item that will make the player stand out of the crowd and boost stats, which in turn boosts the perceived value of the player, base skills presumed.

Jumping back in history, for a quick remark about human technological progress, the fact that 150 years ago humans still made most of their goods by hand and communication technologies were limited to paper letters and maybe telegraphs, the industrial revolution changed that by allowing products to be created at a much higher rate, with reduced required human supervision while also introducing conveyor belt jobs that offered relatively attractive salaries for hyper specialized repetetive tasks to be completed by human personnel, since the machines for those exact tasks hadn't been invented yet. Within the last 50 years or so, apart from the auto industry, jobs that used to represent a central backbone of western economies have lost their appeal, highly repetetive jobs that consist of a small subset of base movements to be looped for 8-10 hours on end are something only lowskill workers with little education apply for, generally speaking.

With the rise of video games repetition has since become a fun past time, surprisingly enough. What employees would generally not accept as a job in terms of complexity of interactions, they'll engage with freely for hours on end as a hobby, sometimes paying money for it.
As an example, the game Cook Serve Delicious has the player slip into the role of a line cook in a restaurant. The games activity consists primarily of the preparation of food items for customers on their lunch break from a corporate job, hence the activities are quite busy and pressure for faster service is a constant around 95% of the time. This is a situation that would be considered stressful by most people in the real world, and not intellectually engaging, yet people purchase and play this type of game for fun, apparently.

The point of this blog is to point out the line between something being considered repetetive and something that contains enough complexity or variety to be considered a repetition of an enjoyable activity, rather than a chore. This takes into account levels of gameplay i.e the hacking in Minecraft. Bashing pixelated objects with a pixelated pickaxe for resources is something that has likely been done for millions of man-hours since the game first entered alpha and was made available to the public.
If the game was just about breaking blocks it likely wouldn't be a hit, but since the smashing enables the player to create whatever they want, within the randomly created digital framework, it is tolerated and embraced as part of the fun. Considering that resource gathering likely takes up 40% or more of the playtime of anyone interested in actually building something in Minecraft this means that doing something incredibly monotonous is accepted within the greater equation of receiving a feeling of achievement for creating a structure.
Other, very popular genres, such as FPS's may vary in the way the content is delivered to large degrees in terms of gameplay loop, story and assets, but they all focus on the activity of firing virtual guns at virtual targets with no exception. SL developers Madfinger chose to focus on rpg elements and events layered on top of the base game, to keep the activities from turning stale all too quickly. The fact that certain scenarios can be repeated indefinitely for specific item rewards or to gather event specific resources for event specific rewards turns something that would turn boring as a base experience much quicker, into an activity that is "endured" for the sake of a kick at the end of the mission in the shape of legendaries or jingle bells that can be turned in for a santa beard hat.

In conclusion: Shooting aliens in the face for the fun of it becomes boring quick. Shooting aliens in the face so they drop thingies to pick up can be fun much longer.