As E3 approaches next month, we prepare for the slew of sequels sure to be making waves. BioShock Infinite. Borderlands 2. Halo 4. The list goes on.

Games have often been critiqued for essentially creating the same material over and over again. Arguably, there’s something slightly different between each successive title — Nintendo has found novel ways to iterate on past successes in the Mario franchise. At this year’s DICE conference, analyst Michael Pachter pointed to woes of the big publishers where “the financial guys have taken over” as being a problem with innovation. 

Business models aside, returning the same pastures may not be the same thing says Mark O’Connell in Slate this morning. In a review of David Vann’s new novel Dirt, O’Connell sees promise in saying the same thing twice (or more):

It seems to me that this repetition—which is, at its best, a kind of productive thickening and entanglement of a central cluster of themes—comes from the same source as so much that is good and bad in art: obsession. One of the presiding book review clichés is that of the “artist in full control of her powers.” But this kind of formulation ignores the artists whose “powers” seem to be in control of them. There’s something enthralling, in other words, about a novelist who seems to be writing not so much individual and self-contained novels as successive installments in a single, ongoing, and compulsive work of art.

He then points to author Paul Auster and director Woody Allen, both of whom have essentially tackled the same material again and again. Yet neither of those figures have suffered in the public square. So perhaps 10 more Master Chief titles may not be a bad thing? As O’Connell closes, “One artist’s rut, after all, is another’s groove.”

[via Slate]