Loops and Arcs

There are some very strong reasons why arcs dominate and they're not all financial.

1) People get bored and need change. This can be partly satisfied by a larger loop that varies the gameplay mechanics, one method being "exotic gameplay" (such as bonus levels).

2) People need closure and the feeling that they've finished a task. A visibly endless task with no goal is a thankless task.

3) People get satisfaction in closed cause-and-effect chains (and have limited working memory space to process them), by which I mean converting a short string of events into a story.

I really like this metaphor. I think one of the biggest problems with the way we spend our modern lives is that we’ve made the payoffs at the ends of “arcy” activities (media “consumption”, tweeting and snapshotting our daily lives, buying food from restaurants instead of hunting or even cooking, buying clothes instead of making them, buying houses instead of building them, hiring mechanics and plumbers instead of fixing our own things, hiring landscapers instead of growing our own gardens) so incredibly stimulating that we lose patience for “loopy” activities. Up to a certain point, we get more “pleasure” out of just enjoying the fruits of mass production and other people’s labor. But we run a real danger of forcing the loopy parts out of our lives too much; the loopy parts are where Cziksentmihalyi’s “flow”, creativity, mastery, and the most fulfilling kind of happiness lie. At the extreme, people organize their whole lives around “bucket lists” of arcy items that can be checked off, each with a discrete endpoint.

And we don’t properly recognize that the room for learning is much greater when we’re in loops; schools, instead of teaching us to put connections together and ruminate, encourage us to memorize and regurgitate. Very arcy, “a singular path through a system that someone else previously explored.”

Another great post by you guys. Love the distinction between Loops and Arcs, though I'd love a specific example of Arc -> Loop -> Arc as a primary game flow. Most RPG games (like Mass Effect) go Arc -> Arc -> Arc, with Loops typically being regulated to side quests or objectives (like resource harvesting). In RTS games, the entire game is Loop -> Loop -> Loop as far as gameplay is concerned, and then the story itself is an Arc.

Loops immediately brought to mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

Can we please stop using these JavaScripts slide page tricks, it is completely broken, I can't even read the page on my phone.