Discussion

The Case Against Gameplay Loops

latexr: > For indies, the pressure to clear the 2 hour mark was hung ominously overhead when Valve updated their policy to allow refunds up to that threshold.If the game is good, I doubt most people would return it. “The Dark Queen of Mortholme”¹ comes to mind. I didn’t really find it enjoyable (good idea, boring execution) but the reviews praise it and I do get why.The game takes 30 minutes from beginning to end. Maybe you’ll do 90 minutes if you want to try multiple things, but you can do everything in under two hours. And yet it’s a success, not a return fest.¹ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3587610/The_Dark_Queen_of...

swiftcoder: A bunch of folks on social media used to crow about refunding the indie games they beat in under 2 hours. No idea how widespread a phenomenon it really was, but it certainly got airtime in gamedev circles

georgeecollins: This is a good, thoughtful article.Fun fact: Jeff Gardiner, who is quoted in the article, was hired by me for his first job in the video games as a junior level designer. Yay me!

everdrive: A lot of modern games have put a lot of time into their gameplay loop, and in part, this is why a lot of modern games feel like work. Focusing on this too much really can crowd out spontaneous fun. A gameplay loop also does not guarantee that a game is fun. Your loop might be: deploy --> shoot bad guys --> loot things --> come home --> process loot. None of this guarantees that the game is actually fun. Maybe the enemy design sucks, or the weapons feel bad, or the game just feels grindy.In this way, it feels a lot like modern movies: in a lot of cases, cinematography seems to be some sort of objective science which has mostly just improved. And nowadays even a fairly bad movie will have great cinematography. It's just that the writing / plot / acting / etc. are quite poor.That is, a proven gameplay loop can still fall flat quite badly. Easy examples would be all the modern hero shooters / looter shooters.It's also worth noting that the definition of what constitutes a "gameplay loop" is pretty loosely defined. 1993 Doom clearly has a gameplay loop in the strict sense of the word: start level --> get weapons / ammo --> get keys --> kill monsters --> exit level. But this feels much less mechanical and gameified than your average modern game which almost certainly incorporate things such as RPG mechanics / stats / level-ups / FOMO events, etc. The latter feels much more artificial and forced, whereas Doom feels like "just playing a game."

pipes: I hate having endless options of what to do in a game. It feels somewhat similar to a day at work. Flow state is impossible when I constantly feel opportunity cost.I think modern games focus mostly on content rather than figuring out what is an enjoyable feeling.These days I mainly only play arcade racers from the 90s as they feel mindful somehow, instant flow.

nottorp: It really depends on the loop, but modern games try their damnedest to ruin the experience.Number one is of course "free" games, where the loop is infinite and designed for you to give in and get IAPs to accelerate it.But the problem is older than that. I kind of blame it on a generation of designers that spent a lot of time in world of warcraft and its successors and somehow decided having a slow grind is acceptable in single player games as well.

throw4847285: The fact that this article does not mention the word "roguelike" once is quite telling. The argument that gameplay loops are a relic of arcades falls flat when you realize that Rogue came out in 1980, the same year as Pac-man. The entire argument falls flat when you realize that a gameplay loop is simply another way of explaining the means of interactivity, and interactivity is core to the idea of video games. Even the shortest narrative game has a "loop" of some kind.Honestly, when I read essays like this I always have to ask: have games changed, or have you? I had what felt like infinite time as a kid to devote to gaming, and as I've aged, my relationship to video games has changed substantially. I can relate to wanting more bite sized experiences, but then again, a single run of a roguelike, the ultimate "gameplay loop" can feel just as satisfying as a short narrative game.There are plenty of valid complaints to lodge against modern game design, but I think the author's framing is flawed.

watwut: > have games changed, or have you?Yes the games changed. I think that the claim the games did not changed would be absurd to anyone who looked at games in the past and is looking at games now.We changed too, sure. But kids dont finish games, typically either. And I dont even think pac-man is a good example here, very few people finished pac-man - but the game itself was not meant to be finished. It was meant to be too difficult at some point.

SiempreViernes: > For books, I track my reading habits and I finish around 85% of the books I start. For games (which I do not track diligently…) there is no way I am even hitting 33%. I do not finish games. But it doesn’t seem to be something about my media habits at large,Here I spontaneously wondered how many of his meals Joey finishes, that feels like it would be about as relevant information as the two numbers he gives here: there's just not obvious how one helpfully compares the Lord of the Rings book with the video game Celeste.

jeffbee: A person who says that Celeste did not need all of its levels to tell its story did not pay any attention to the story, or is not able to empathize with the character. Also if this person bounced off Celeste then they probably saw 5% of the content, not the 33% they suspected.

StilesCrisis: World of Warcraft is twenty-two years old and perfectly exemplifies all of the author's complaints about game loops. It's not a new phenomenon.

StilesCrisis: I completely agree with your analysis. Gameplay loops are fine. The author is just in a different stage of life and appreciates different things now.

throwanem: World of Warcraft damaged lots of people. My own circle saw a couple of casualties - jobs lost, marriages failed, promising professional careers left by the wayside, all for the sake of more time with that grind.The fellow I knew who hit it huge in EVE Online was a casualty of another kind. But then, I did know him before, and he really was always pretty much that way.

throw4847285: You missed my point. The author argued that gameplay loops are a holdover from quarter munching arcade machines. I used Rogue as proof that this is at best an incomplete account. I simply mentioned Pac-Man as the beginning of the arcade boom, which happened to come out the same year as Rogue, a computer game with a much more addicting gameplay loop (in my opinion).

snarfy: One of my current favorite games is aimlabs. Click as many dots as you can in 60 seconds. There is no game, only skill.

jmyeet: I'm not sure the author realizes just how formulaic books, TV shows and movies are.For movies, a hugely influential book in Hollywood is Save the Cat [1]. Once you understand this structure, you'll see it everywhere and it's quite prescriptive. Certain milestones are hit at a very specific percentage way through the movie.Books and TV shows tend to follow the Three Act Structure [2]. Those turning point events will match up pretty closely to 25%, 50% and 75% through a book.So the author doesn't really define gameplay loops and, reading through it, I'm not sure they know exactly what they mean. I say this because the first paragraph mentions things like "2 out of 5 chapters complete" and other such familiar elements. That's not really a gameplay loop. That's a convention. And there are lots of them like in-game achievements, cosmetics, load outs, etc.Think of any battle royale game and you'll find the same elements across the genre. A drop in, supply drops, abilities and/or weapons and so on. Fortnite, PUBG, Warzone, etc can have 95% of the same features mapped across each other.Roguelikes have many of the same conventions: gear acquisition, power progression, dungeon delving, etc.New genres don't come around that often and a lot of what we're talking about here is really genres.A gameplay loop is really the cycle of action, reward and progression. The issue isn't how repetitive this is, it's how repetitive it feels. Take a game like GTA or RDR. It absolutely has gameplay loops with missions/quests. Or Breath of the Wild has shrines. But these games are beloved in spite of that.I think the underlying problem is that big companies in particular want a repeatable, proven formula for all content. That's something that can be tracked and is predictable. Doing something novel or innovative is far riskier and really a lot harder.I'm reminded of a scene from The Office where Gabe said "Maybe the filmmaker realized that even narrative is comforting" in response to this disturbing genre of horror movies he liked.At the end of the day, games are fundamentally different to books, movies and TV shows because the time played is highly variable. You do have more linear story telling games (eg the Walking Dead, etc) but repetition isn't really the problem (IMHO). I think the author is really reacting to nothing in their chosen genre feeling fresh. It feels samey. I don't think gameplay loops are the reason for that.[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Save_the_Cat!:_The_Last_Book_o...[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure

silvester23: The claim is not that they play about 33% of every game but that they completely finish about 33% of all games they play.

jeffbee: I understand. But even people who get to the credits of Celeste might not be aware that they're maybe 20% of the way through the game.

pphysch: Aimlabs has been significantly gamified, though the core is maybe more of a "toy"

i_c_b: (I'm a game designer, so I can't help but respond to this as a designer first, and not primarily a player)I wonder how much of the issue here is the rise of the abstraction of "gameplay loop" itself as a lens that shapes what gets made.One of the things that can keep a game fresh is players being unclear on where the border of play is, or what the range of the possible is. When I was playing Mario 64, say, I really wasn't clear on what was possible in the game, and so one of the main pleasures of playing the game was encountering new kinds of interactions and new kinds of activities embedded in specific space that I didn't know would be in the game. Same experience with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As a matter of fact, this was true for me when I was first playing through the original Half-Life and the original Metal Gear Solid as well, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The boundaries of the possible were not clear, and I had to play to tease them out. There was something like an implicit promise (because those games were violating my expectations early) that I might see and do stuff I hadn't seen and done yet if I stuck with the game.Refined gameplay loops with variation are certainly cool and a great and an important tool, and many games I love do rely heavily on them (like, say, Slay the Spire, or the original Doom deathmatch as a kind of competitive play, or Street Fighter 3). But my general sense is that the more designers think in terms of game play loops, the earlier the edges of a game design and limits on the realm of the possible become clear for a player in a subconscious way. In a way, this is similar to a player noticing early that they seem to have heard all the music a game is going to provide, or seem to have seen all the enemies or weapons early - they recognize they've found all the novel stuff they're going to find, and everything going forward is going to be re-combinations and permutations. But I think it's a little harder to reason about when it comes to a player discerning the limitations of what kinds of play they will ultimately encounter, because it's a bit more subtle of an issue.There's something here about the aesthetics of open-ended discovery versus the pleasures of achievement, I think, perhaps in something like a fractal sense.I think there's a lurking development tension here, too. Constrained variations within game play loops can often help constrain arbitrary interactions in game play code, and arbitrary interactions in game play code make systems harder to reason about, and balance, and ensure stability, and modularly farm out different tasks to different developers. So I suspect there are development reasons for preferring these kinds of designs as well.

MetaWhirledPeas: What you're describing I would categorize as "exploratory". Those games are fun and make good "big" games. The Portal series... early JRPGs... even the original Super Mario Brothers gave me that sense of not knowing where the boundaries are. You can have an exploratory game without much of a loop at all. But I also think exploration is unnecessary in some contexts. That's what I like about the field of games in general: they can look like a lot of different things and be good in a lot of different ways.

s_trumpet: The way the author defines loops is so broad that every single 90s game I can think of has them.

sparkie: The difference is that 90s games had novelty at the time - many introduced new gameplay ideas.A lot of today's AAA games have converged into a small number of genres like the open world action RPG games which all have the same "side quests" repeated ad-nauseam.* Talk to NPC* Go kill 5 monsters* Talk to another NPC* Collect 3 of some item.* Talk to another (or original) NPC.* Get some pocket change, EXP and an item as reward.Repeated several hundred times throughout the game with minor variations and some uninteresting dialogue that doesn't develop your character or the story or add any new gameplay elements. They add little novelty and just churn out sidequests for the sake of increasing "content".But this content is boring an uninspired. It's almost like it's done to keep people employed - or at least, to pay fewer programmer's high salaries and replace them with lower salaries of employees who can use a pre-packaged scripting system to increase the gameplay duration without adding any new gameplay mechanics.