Mindless Repetition: Learning from Computer Games Richard Coyne Th is paper examines what an understanding of some of the key characteristics of computer games can contribute to design. Drawing on insights from Freud, hermeneutical theorists, and games themselves, we focus on repetition, its variation, and the matter of the ethical in computer games. The essay is concerned less with resolving the ethical questions posed than showing that the ethical also succumbs to the rule of play. Play is at work in design, the computer game and the realm of the ethical. here is little difficulty in associating the serious, work-oriented activity of designing something (a building, product, structure or computer programme) with play. Designers are generally pleased to ascribe a frivolous, play aspect to their work. They see the design process as a series of successive rehearsals and revisions, through drawings, models and computer simulations, leading to a manufactured product. Under the play metaphor, design involves coming to a design situation, always with some expectation of what the object will be, and engaging in a to-and-fro dialogical game. In the process the designer’s expectations for the design undergo revision and transformation. At its most typical the process is absorbing and engaging, with objects appearing into and receding from view. Th e game implicates materials, tools, the social context of the designer’s studio, the brief, the clients, regulatory authorities, and a corpus of precedents, a whole contextual field. The elements are in play. Design so described as play has been explored by theorists such as Schön (1982), and Ehn (1988), and examined in the context of hermeneutics by Snodgrass and Coyne (1997). It is against this background that we are in a position to examine computer games, and what they might contribute to an understanding of design. Educators often structure student learning assignments around the concept of the game, including specialised computer games for learning about architectural form (Radford 2001). There is a tradition of thinking about and learning from the game in relation to computers and design, and the influence of Von Neuman (1947) and game theory in the field of computation in general, and artificial T