The Case Against Gameplay Loops

Recently I found myself playing Tactical Breach Wizards, the new tactics game by Tom Francis. I really liked it! I enjoy tactics games, and this one felt fresh and interesting, with good mechanical hooks and nuanced abilities. But at some point along the way, it began to feel stale to me. It was putting out a steady trickle of new powers, new mechanics, new problems, but foundationally it’s all pretty similar: you enter a room full of bad guys, then you clear the room of bad guys. I began to feel the old pull in my heart that maybe it was time for me to stop playing this game; and then, after beating a boss, the game declared in big bold letters: “Act 2 out of 5 COMPLETE.” My god…3 more acts and I’m already tired! So I put it aside and went on with my life.

This is nothing new for me. Chances are, this is nothing new for you either! Pretty much none of us are finishing games these days. Here’s a random article looking at Steam achievements (now public) showing almost no game even reaches a 50% completion rate amongst its players. Here’s an IGN article summing up a GDC talk that says companies’ internal data reveals the typical number is about 33%. But anyways I suspect you don’t really need data to believe me on this – we already know it. It’s obvious.

And for a while now I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon. What’s going on? It is very rare that I don’t finish a movie I’ve begun. 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, which means…

It must be about the games themselves. This is maybe also obvious, but I wanted to think it through out loud. I wanted to be sure! Because really I think it might be a problem with gameplay loops…

Picture this: you are making a movie about a man aging into a world he no longer belongs in. You need a scene where he passes the torch. If you’re Luchino Visconti, you’ll shoot it as a dance, a grand waltz before an audience in awe of the mouldering beauty of a fading aristocrat.

Now picture the game. It would be a cutscene. Or, worse, the whole game would be about dancing. You’d start as a young dancer, talented but raw. You’d have rivals and challengers as you grow into your craft. New locations and clothing to unlock, side quests and collectables. And it would end with Visconti’s scene, where you fade into elegance, a touching finale. And perhaps it would feel quite beautiful: a dying breath in the clamor of candlelight, made all the more beautiful by the repetitions preceding it. But let’s think about this…the story isn’t about dancing! It’s not about clothing or exotic travel, or side quests or trinkets, it’s about a fading aristocrat. In the film, we see them talk, they hunt, we see battles and political rallies. We see dinner parties and long walks. The action changes. Of course it does. And our game, which is now about dancing, we’ve lost all of this. We lost the grandiosity of the character. We lost his multifaceted nature, his quiet interiority. We lost the political climate’s bombastic reverberations. We have taken all of this and gone and made a game about dancing. We’ve made a game loop.

How did this happen? Well, let’s see how things developed for the film. We have a film about a fading aristocrat. We’ve thought about the story, what it means to us, and so we come to this scene hoping to reveal something. Our aristocrat suddenly finds himself in twilight: he, and everyone in attendance, can see it plainly. The world is changing. So we take this meaning – this is our foundation – and we construct action to reflect it.

For the game, we begin with the action – this is our foundation – and the meaning can come later. We think we can make dancing mechanically interesting enough to repeat, and so we make a game about dancing. We have some mechanical developments we want to trickle out through the game’s runtime. We want to have a big story with a lot of locations and a lot of nemeses, so we’ll go ahead and commit to 30 dances and let’s just focus on making the dancing something you can do 30 times (we’ll have far fewer than 30 mechanical variations, but no bother). Within that, we’ll find a few set piece moments where we can reveal more about the character, or the historical context, or a thematic idea (still told through dance, or else a cutscene). And then at the end we’ll wrap with that lovely moment: the passing of the torch. And no one will play it, because who finishes video games?

Do you see where we went wrong? We approached it backwards. For the film, we began with the meaning and staged it accordingly. But for the game, we began with the action and grafted meaning into our tracks. But if the action isn’t born out of meaning…how did it get there in the first place?

How did we get here? I think in some ways it’s a historical relic. For board games, which vastly predate video games, it’s much harder to have a game where mechanics are malleable. The designer writes the rules, and there they are. You read the rules, you play it, and if you had fun you play it again. The hope is that the play is rich enough to justify repetition. Put another way, the hope is each playthrough is meaningful. And this is accomplished because board games are multiplayer games. I’ve played Battle Line dozens of times with my roommate, and every time leaves us sweating over who’s going to win. And this grants the play its meaning. Every turn taken is a step towards or away from victory, which makes every step meaningful. Eventually we had played enough times to where one of us won more regularly than the other, and the meaning was lost, so we stopped playing.

The core mechanic as a paradigm got solidified in video games through the arcades, I think. For coin ops, the need is interminability. We don’t ever want the player to stop playing (and paying), and this is best achieved through a core loop that addicts us. Whatever the play is, it should be looping, repetitious, infinitely extendable. Keep those coins coming. What grants arcade games their meaning is their high scores: arcades are social spaces. Like the combative meaning of Battle Line, Space Invaders is granted meaning through leaderboards and face offs. Even if you’re just playing against yourself, there is a tension of getting farther, doing better, honing your craft and seeing it reflected in concrete terms. Everything you do in the game furthers this goal, which makes everything you do meaningful.

But even as games moved to the living rooms, and slowly shed their points systems (which lost most of their meaning when divorced from the public arcades), it seems we’ve never quite shaken this idea of the core loop. For board games, it’s a quirk of the medium: the static rule book. For arcades, it’s a quirk of the market: keep players hooked. But for video games…I don’t see how it’s necessary. It can be a useful tool, certainly, but it’s not wielded as a useful tool. It’s an axiom of game design textbooks.

The other factor here is the medium’s obsession with playtime. My cursory historical sense is that this has always been a spector in the medium, haunting our production cycles and marketing campaigns. But it seems to have really taken on a life of its own around the 2000s and into the 2010s with the boom of the open world game. In the lead-up to its release, Fallout 4 producer Jeff Gardiner told GamesRadar, “I’ve played the game probably 400 hours, and I’m still finding stuff that I haven’t seen yet.” Todd Howard added, “I’ll be playing the game and run into something and be like, ‘Who built this? What is this? It’s so big!’” (God help us.) Bethesda excesses aside, there are real market pressures these days to make our games sufficiently long. How long is a bit nebulous, but at any waking moment there is a horde of redditors w