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.
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.
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 the story or character besides unlocking a new skill. Every skill is acquired the same way - through "skill points" that are acquired with EXP - but there's no novelty in acquiring EXP - just the same quests which increase the game's "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. Or maybe it's the sunk cost fallacy - they feel like they've put some time and effort into implementing some mechanic, so it would be a waste to only use it once or twice, so they have to use it 50 times to justify the budget spent on developing it.
A lot of these games feel like the "game loop" only exists as a project management tool to refine the game's release rather than to refine enjoyment. It's made so much worse with games that are in early development where EA feels like just a refinement of the loop rather than refinement of enjoyment .
It's hard to explain, but it feels like a symptom of loop focus over gameplay is that the game peaks suddenly and hard but expects you to keep going.
A game that illustrates how to break past that point is noita -- there's definitely a gameplay loop.. but it's made in a way where the loop is eventually recognizable as not actually the full game. It then goes from being a gameplay loop to a stream of play that doesn't need to loop on itself.
Really, I wish game devs, both indie and otherwise, would try to break out of these loops more readily.
The point of distilling a story into a loop does resonate though. Think of games made from blockbuster movies which succeed or fail based on the sliver that made it into the loop. I on the other hand love games that I can play for 10-20 mins, then do it again or not. These tend to be PvP games though.
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."
I vehemently disagree with this. Cinematography has gotten substantially worse in the last 15 years or so. Your run of the mill direct to vhs type movie in the 90s had better cinematography than your massive block buster of today. Hollywood totally forgot how to do everything. Go compare a garbage movie like "The Parent Trap" with Marvel/Star Wars anything, and see how bad its gotten.
It’s a matter of taste and style, not technique or quality of gear.
But I don’t agree that old==good and new==bad. There was plenty of trash back in the day, and plenty of great stuff now.
Breaking bad had fantastic cinematography and it didn’t really use advanced techniques like dolly zoom, crane, drone, etc. It had buckets of style though. Compare it to one of its contemporaries, Dexter, which had completely unremarkable, boring, functional cinematography.
The single most important advancement for modern cinematography is to be able to instantly see what your shot is going to look like without having to develop film. This allowed filmmakers to shoot at night, use natural or diegetic lighting, etc. it used to be risky and require a lot of testing to do anything other than bathe your scene in bright light and then use even brighter stage lights for highlights, to give cameras enough light, and to ensure that performances and stunts are visible in the final product. This is way way more impactful than drones and dollies.
the solution is to get back to identifying what the mechanic (or set of mechanics) actually is that is fun. It should be fun without the loop and then the loop gives you something to optimize and showcase skill. I think of Golf, where the fundamental game is hitting a ball into a cup in the ground. thats a fun way to kill time at the fundamental level for a lot of people. then the gameplay loop comes in for scoring, different courses with obstacles, specific things to hit the ball with, all sorts of things that let you capture the feeling of just hitting the ball with a stick into a cup and add more and more nuance to it which motivates replayability.
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.
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...
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011314978-How-d...
I know that's the case for me, and one of my favourite pastimes is install the little games from itch.io, which average at 10 minutes long, and just enjoy the naivety and craft that never overstays its welcome no matter how uncooked it is. You can have too much of a good thing; once I really cared about getting enough enjoyment/dollar, these days I'd rather spend $20 dollars for a good 2 hour experience, than find myself bored after 15 hours of the same.
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.
> 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.
This is why INSCRYPTION was such a hit. You learn the game rules, and as you figure out the game loop, bam! you get a whole other game layered on top.
A game loop is necessary to create any game that’s not purely narratively based, but the secret sauce is to hide its seams well enough and integrate it with the game world (DARK SOULS and the cycle of death being a whole part of the story, Outer Wilds)
Or go meta and break the player’s expectations like INSCRYPTION did.
Games have the trouble that users have very different appetites for the gameplay. Some want short games, some want 1000s of hours for their $50. Devs do their best to provide a reasonable amount of content. This means that the reality is that most will not 100% complete your game and so you need to tune accordingly.
Its not fundamentally wrong to play a game until you're satisfied. Ideally the game can be structured in a way that the core story thread can be finished by then but sometimes that just doesn't work out.
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.
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.
But I appreciate this is more an article for the - what did they call it, for five minutes on Reddit a couple years back? "Shapecels?" That crowd, anyway, the ones who excel at abstract symbol manipulation yet reliably struggle to signify.
These days, with machines automating away the entire market for oldschool, artisanally human "shape rotation," faster than most members of any prior generation would even dare imagine - well, if this were the only thing I thought I could do well, I think I would be very worried.
I can still replay them to completion. Feel relieved when help arrives after securing the little hill after normandy beach in call of duty 2. It takes so long but it’s worth it.
I’ve only ever felt the core gameplay loop repetitive on strategy games where every new challenge is the same one as last but bigger with a more complex inventory if that makes sense.
Adults have largely forgotten how to use their imagination, or how to set their own objectives, and when they play games they're mostly just chasing gold stars. They want to follow a list of instructions and then receive a pat on the head for having done so correctly.
I'm still in the kid-box, I want games where I can explore, experiment, and set my own goals. It's amazing how hard it can be to find games that simply drop you into a world with some some cool gameplay mechanics and let you go nuts.
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.
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!
Another beautiful thing about loops is that they enable short sessions. I love games like this. You can sit there for a few minutes, enjoy your time, then move on to other things. Wordle is like this. I love games that are content to be played occasionally.
I like your example of Bolero. This is a good formula for longer games: iterate on the loop and have it slowly transform and crescendo as the game moves on. I would argue one mistake some games make is that they want a lengthy game but they don't do the Bolero thing; the experiences late in the game are not meaningfully different from the experiences earlier in the game. Even games without stories have an arc, and if you don't manage that arc then yeah I can see why people would end up getting bored.
I think what the series does is to have multiple gameplay loops. Like a Dragon is the rebranding of the Yakuza series, of which Infinite Wealth is the 9 mainline entry in the series.
Yakuza 0-6 were effectively role playing games where the conflict resolution mechanism was a beat-em-up/fighting game. Seven represented a rebranding of the series and 8 is Infinite Wealth. These games change the core conflict resolution to a straight up Japanese RPG system.
However, in every game, there are minigames and sidestories to complete. They include racing circuit cars, Pokemon style battles, darts, pool, bowling, batting cages, management sims, mahjongg, poker, blackjack, koi-koi, dating sims, etc.
So I think they've addressed the problem by just giving you a lot of different gameplay loops, with the main story just a vehicle to allow you to get from loop to loop.
As far as a game that didn't become a repetitive loop I'll praise UFO 50 for having a ton of challenging variety at least and you'll quickly discover a different challenge every time you switch to a different title. Overall I think what you need to recognize is not whether you complete a game, it's whether you feel rewarded for your time spent. If not, just plant a victory flag in whatever achievement you just obtained and move on, nobody will judge.
So I don't like games that have replay value or "endgame". I don't mind game loops but I want a game that finishes in 2-12 hours. 2 games that came to mind are Inscryption and Chants of Sennaar, both took around 12 hours and gave me a mindblowing experience.
Game loops should be invisible as once a player can see or sense them it breaks the immersion.
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...
