Introduction:
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I think expanding the introduction of the essay a bit would provide a 
clearer lead-in to the actual contents. Specifically, this essay is about 
repetition, why it occurs, and how authors deal with it. What is missing 
at the start is a sentence or two about why repetition is bad, thus
providing a justification for why authors would want to read about how to 
handle it (possibly you could move the bit from below about the joke about
the curved mirror and so on up to the start). Also, ideally, a bit just 
enumerating the parts of the essay that I listed before, since the  
beginning of the essay isn't too clear about what is coming up except for
the reasons for repetition.
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The Save/Restore Cycle:
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It would be useful, I think, to make things a bit more explicit here --
timing-critical games lead to seeing the text over again because the 
player screws up and has to restart, and in fact this can happen in any 
game with puzzles, really. The Zork thief is an interesting example here, 
since the combats are partly random in outcome as well as messages, right? 
So would you say it's unfair? Also, either here or in room descriptions 
you could probably talk about repeating text based on having to do various 
sequences of actions over again: in Mulldoon, for instance, where you have 
to set the sundial to something, do stuff, set it to something else, do 
more stuff, etc.  
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Dialogue Repetition:
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It might be interesting to get a bit deeper into the difference between
"You sense little profit in repeating that question" and "Bob says "I 
don't know any more about that."", since, as you point out, there is a 
much different feel. The rest of the section is very good and raises a 
number of valuable points/techniques: rephrasing the question, the value 
of doing so, and decay/not being able to access information again. The 
last paragraph suggests you might want to retitle this section: it's not 
just about dialogue, but about any situation in which there's an 
information source you have to repeatedly query.
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Default message parsing:
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I'm willing to accept that it's not a problem for non-diagetic messages to
repeat, but it doesn't seem intuitively obvious to me, possibly because
there's no discussion earlier of the problems of repetition. I think I'd
like to see another sentence or half-sentence or whatever saying why 
it's ok for those to be repetitive. The rest of the section is good; the 
only thing I would suggest is to expand on the last paragraph a bit -- the  
issue of reinforcement/guidance from failure messages is a very important 
one, and like you say, it can be confusing to have a variety of messages 
that might suggest to the player that they are on the right track when 
they aren't (but it does usually become clear quickly if these are random 
messages or hard-coded).
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Room descriptions:
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This section all looks pretty good to me, especially the reminder at the
end not to cut out important information. 
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Simulationist text:
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This is a generally interesting point and could probably be extended a bit
more; the DM4 talks about not implementing rooms that aren't interesting. 
There's also, of course, the 65k rooms in Hunter, in Darkness, each
with a randomly-generated room description (but of course there the 
descriptions don't change when you look repeatedly). I seem to recall
a certain amount of other stuff there about repetition, if you're 
interested in digging further for examples.
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Conclusion:
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Well, ok, there isn't a conclusion in the essay as written, but I'd like
to see a couple summarizing sentences to wrap things up and let the reader
know it's over.
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Overall this was a good essay; the quotes from real games were well-picked
and illustrated the points. It could stand to be fleshed out and polished 
up at the beginning and end, and there are a few places in the middle 
where you could take your analysis a bit deeper, but in general it's good.