The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024)

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

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).

There's a lot of room for nuance here and I'll bet we disagree less than it sounds. I would agree with you that blockbuster movies do cinematography badly. But take your random crappy low-budget horror movie, and compare the cinematography to an equivalent film from the 1970s. The difference is stark. Techniques such as Hitchcock's dolly zoom, or the "power" shots from Citizen Kane are well known and widely used. They're easy to reproduce, but take brilliance to initially envision. Combine this with some of the modern technology; drones, camera stabilizers, etc. and things get taken further Try looking at a car chase from your average 70s film: you'll get a very shaky shot because it's filmed from inside the car, and in most cases the footage will be sped up because it wasn't save enough to film the real event. You end up with something which is totally implausible. The same for flyover shots -- previously these would be done in a helicopter and you'd get an incredibly shaky distant shot, but now anyone with any budget can put an amazing drone shot in a film for no money whatsoever.

I play roguelikes tons and agree with the article's analysis.

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.

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.