I started working on this presentation because I was reading about game loops a lot, but I didn’t really understand; a) what they are, b) how they could be useful to me as a designer and c) how they fit in my box of dilluted game design terminology that had accumulated over the years.
Most of this is basic game and interaction design. The only contribution I really made to all this is mapping a game loop to a tension curve and arranging my game loops centered around the “Mental Model”. Anyway, I was asked by a good friend to share it here, so here we are: Slides
Interaction Isolated
An isolated interaction can be broken down into three components:
Context
Action
Consequence
Context describes the whole subjective reality of the user. The information you provide as a designer may be part of it, if the user was able to absorb that information in the first place. But so may factors outside of your design such as:
Game Literacy (Previously aquired knowledge about how games generally work)
The persons general understanding of the world
Cultural Background
The very literal situation the user is in during the time of the interaction
If I struggle with designing a part of a game, this is usually where. How explicit do I have to be in providing information, how little or much must be revealed or hidden in a level for players to figure it out, without feeling like there was nothing for them to discover?
Action describes what ever a user has to do to engage with your design. This can be on a level of giving a specific button input, but in the context of games, it is usally more helpful to talk about a specific action in the context of your game. Pick up, Jump, Select etc. Action is relatively simple, because it is the only part of the equation we as designers have full control over.
Consequence is the result of the users action. This includes:
Visceral Feedback(Sound effects, visual effects)
Progress(An objective change of the system the user is interacting with, often called Game State in Game Design)
Emotional Response(Subjective)
Interactions with multiple possible outcomes are usually called decisions or choices.
You are only able to objectively design a part of the consequence of an interaction. The rest is just you making assumptions of what might happen in your players brain. This includes both, their emotional response, but also what part of the Information you are providing, they are able to absorb.
If you have troubles to identify issues of your design, usually you are struggling to a) design context or b) design consequence. This is an incredibly banal statement, but thinking about these things in isolation, may help you to break down complex problems to a solveable level.
The Feedback Loop and Game Loops
Most systems require repeated interaction. So a user is provided with Context, takes an Action and is confronted with Consequence or respectively, new Context(also called, the Mental Model) and the cycle repeats. In interaction design, this is called the Feedback Loop.
The term Game Loop is thrown around for almost any sort of sequence of interactions or events that happen to be in a game and may or may not repeat themselves. But on the lowest levels of game loops,(I use the term Interaction Loop), a Game Loop and the Feedback Loop can be the same. More often than not however, one Game Loop is actually an arrangement of several Feedback Loops. What they do share however, is that every Game Loop, no matter how miniscule or large, starts and ends at the Mental Model, the users subjective reality.
Note that if you unwrap a loop, or circle, you get a sine wave, which looks similar to a tension curve. When you play a game, your mind is in a constant cycle of rising and releasing stimuli. The way your isolated Feedback Loops or tension curves are designed, and then arranged in relation to each other, is called Pacing.
Game Loops as A Lense or Tool
So how is any of this of practical value?
Understanding Genre: A genre is nothing more than an arrangement of Game Loops that is common enough, that they feel familiar and recognizable to us. But being able to identify common Game Loops inside these genres is pivotal as a designer when trying to make one of those games.
How is context presented?
What do players do in these games?
What is a normal magnitude and nature of consequence inside this genre?
Innovation: After understanding genre and brekaing it apart, you can start to experiment with it. What if you change the Context, Action or Consequence of a specific interaction? What if you change the frequency or pacing of it? Some great games follow genre loop structures quite strictly, but then break with them in some ways that make them feel unique or fresh.
Innovation(Isolation): Many indie games, are esentially isolated parts of larger games, or genres. Take Mini Metro for example. The aspect(or Game Loop) of organizing traffic ways efficiently is present in almost all real time strategy games. But mini metro radically removed every single other part of the genre, creating something outstanding. You can probably come up with dozens of other examples where one very specific part of another genre was taken and turned into a thing of it’s own. Reigns, Islanders, or Bad North are all, at their core, closely related to Strategy Games. Endless Runners as a genre also are comparable, in that they only provide players with agency in a very small and isolated sub part of what a Jump and Run game does.
Innovation(Rearranging): Another common trend is people taking existing genres, and changing the scale of single Game Loops. Rogue Likes, for example, are esentially RPG games. But instead of having a permanent character, you slowly progress with over a relatively long amount of time, the progression loop is made much much more frequent. How ever to compensate and avoid characters getting completely overpowered, the macro loop of the game is adjusted. Losing your entire character, or at least a part of it’s power is a thing now. Roguelikes, Battle Royal, Extraction Shooters,… on a very abstract level, the are just rearrenged Game Loops of pre-existing genres.
Innovation(Recontextualizing): The third and most tricky way to use Game Loops is to combine Game Loops of different genres. Warcraft3, a real time startegy game developed some time ago, inovated by bringing RPG elements into the equation. Later, some hobbyists combined elements of Warcraft3 with Tower Defense games and created Mobas, which went on to dominate the e-sports scene for a while.