The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024) | Hacker News Reader

The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024)

blog.joeyschutz.com

60 pointscoinfused55 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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 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.

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).

I almost never finished games even back in the 90s/2000s. I think it's because of how long they are compared to movies and even tv shows. You also (especially back in the day) had to 'rewatch' the same part over and over until you could beat it

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.

The whole time reading this I was thinking, there's more than one kind of game. Even in the space of single player games there are many kinds. Maybe they should try playing a different one. Or maybe Dwarf Fortress will have enough depth.

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.

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."

> 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.

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.

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.

And yet with all these techniques easily available to them, modern filmmakers still churn out a lot of trash.

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.

I'd agree with all your statements. I don't think your statements disagree with the observation that on average cinematography has gotten better over time. I might have painted too broad of a brush, and I think you raise really good points.

compeltely agree, i feel like more and more games are forgetting to find an actual game. they combine some mix of achievement/gameplay loop and story or account progression and keep you busy feeling like youre still figuring the game out. But i think it is riding on the coattails of great games of the apst that ultimately rewarded players with "end game" experiences after they invest all the time in figuring the game out. Now they only need to be jsut convincing enough that the end game might exist and then never deliver on it, and they get paid and get users but ultimately no one remembers their experience with the game that well, and attitude towards gaming overall takes a hit.

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 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.

> 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...

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

That’s useful context, thank you. On the other hand, GOG allows refunds up to thirty days after purchase, which is much more ripe for abuse, and they seem to be doing fine (though I don’t know for sure, would appreciate some context there as well).

https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/360011314978-How-d...

The trolls (and haters) are always the most vocal. It was true 40 years ago and it is still true today: Do NOT feed the trolls.

There's plenty of sociopaths and people with not a lot of disposable money, but my theory is that as we (gamers) get older, richer, and with less available time, we will prefer the short and sweet experience over the 100+ hour game loop.

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.

It's difficult, I'm sure to some degree "fraud" happens (someone buys a game, enjoys it, and refunds anyways) but I also think that "game was way shorter than I expected" (where expectations are set by the store page, description, and most importantly price) is a real flaw in the product that is refund worthy.

(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.

Great comment. To add to this:

> 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.

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.

Games fundamentally require loops because they require skill. You learn through failure and repetition.

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.

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.

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.

That's the obvious part. The non obvious part is ruining game design.

More than that evidently is non-obvious here. I am mainly concerned about the ruination of people. The fate of some niche and subparadigmatic school of ludic theory moves me little by comparison. (Of course I agree we need the humanities, but these are complex times when difficult choices may have to be made.)

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.

> The fate of some niche and subparadigmatic school of ludic theory moves me little by comparison.

Just because you're not interested in video games it doesn't mean they're all bad for your health.

Have you seen that study that says "consuming" "video content" passively no matter the source leads to cognitive impairment, while video games - which are active - don't?

I haven't said that I'm not interested in video games! I admit these days I go deep rather than broad, but that's not the same at all as saying I don't play them.

That said, while I can't tell with whom you mean to find yourself arguing, I can see by now that's not me. I'll leave you to find an interlocutor better poised to provide the kind of discussion for which you're looking; enjoy your day!

Pokémon was a slow grind and popular. Diablo was a grind too

Both games have gameplay loops that were ahead of their time. Relatively free exploration + combat + RNG "loot" constrained by needing to return to town to heal/restock.

If we are bring reductive, the grand theft auto games were drive here, shoot that kind of deal. Call of duty was shoot till objective completes until 4 came around. Those never felt repetitive to me because there was a story going on, there was a deep lore to the characters and places in the map and those were changing with me.

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.

Children are entertained by open sandbox games like Minecraft and Robolox, where the narrative and gameplay loop are whatever they want it to be.

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.

> 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.

Ironically they leave out a real comparison to television shows, or episodic content like comic books. Are these forms of media broken if you don't watch every episode of every season of a show? Doubtful.

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.

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

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.

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!

One beautiful thing about loops is that they allow smaller teams to create games. The loop is content and takes real, hard work. When you play a "do everything" game like Breath of the Wild or one of the modern Final Fantasy games the amount of content is staggering and completely unapproachable by most small teams.

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've been playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, trying to clear my game backlog as it were.

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.

I suppose I've reached a similar points with a decent number of games recently such as Claire Obscur or the Oblivion remake. The game isn't doing anything wrong but I just conclude that it's work and move on to something else. Still, there are a ton of very good movies on Tubi I could be watching, books I could be reading and a dog I could be walking. These are typically guilt-free loops unless the book is monotonous, so the advice is to read something harder.

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.

Dave the Diver is the best game I've played in years, and its a new kind of game that I think really solves this. You focus on atmosphere, characters, and discrete game mechanics that work together as a system, rather than relying on any single gameplay loop. Mechanics are contextual, and introduced in a way that makes sense to the story and setting, leaving the player with that feeling of "I wonder what's next".

Interesting read. Nowadays, for most games, I do a few game loops and intentionally don't finish them. As a dad with two kids, I simply don't have that much time.

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.

It's fascinating, because I broadly agree with the author's point, but I think he's way off on Tactical Breach Wizards. Not only is it a very short game, but it adds new characters/abilities that fundamentally reshape the way the game is played all the way up to the final boss fight

No game loop feels impossible unless you're just making a movie you click through...

Game loops should be invisible as once a player can see or sense them it breaks the immersion.

I really enjoyed this article, although I love games with gameplay loops and bounce hard off of games with narrative. I wonder what the author would think of Hades?

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

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

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

Hate to say it but if your story is undermined by having a gameplay loop, your story probably shouldn't be a game.

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