I just read an interesting and thought provoking piece on game loops here. It starts by imagining a video game translation of the waltz from The Leopard, a 1963 Italian film about a Sicilian nobleman in the time of Unification and accurately imagines a game about dancing with the trappings of modern video games; collectilbles, side quests, unlockables and other detritus that misses the point of the movie.

The article blames this on the dominance of the core loop. I go one further and blame the current imagination of video games as a whole. The game, as a rule, doesn’t aim to say anything beyond the fact that it is a game. Games can be flavored in a myriad of ways but ask them to express something outside the hermetic space of video games and they fall apart.

To illustrate this, I’ll take one of my favorite recent games, Against the Storm. The statement of the game is city builder + roguelike, a compound very exciting to fans of the genres and entirely meaningless to anyone else. This is a game that has a lot to say about being a game and very little to say beyond that.

Frostpunk might make this even clearer. Ostensibly, the game has something to say about how extreme circumstances force us into sacrificing humanity. However, the game doesn’t explore variations on that cruel calculus, a maneuver that incidentally may have helped it realize how impoverished a statement it makes, but instead presents an assortment of challenges based on the in-game economy. The intersection point here, that tough times call for tough choices and those tough times are provided by game systems is never elucidated, just repeated, as befits such a shallow point. I did really like this game, by the way. It’s a very good city-builder.

This results in a game design space that finds it fairly easy to represent the mechanics of dancing but has no precedent when it wants to represent aging gracefully. The issue is not the core loop. It’s the philosophy.

Material Considerations

It would be remiss to talk about gameplay loops without talking about material considerations. Many players want hours of gameplay and the core loop is an effective, standard pattern with which to generate those hours of gameplay. Games are expected to soak up time in a way that books and movies are not and this is key to why they get finished and games do not. The 10mg series of games, including droqen’s HANDMADEDEATHLABYRINTH issue 0, are an attempt to reject this assumption. I wrote more about that here.

The core loop also changes the way that players engage with the game in ways too meaningful to be overlooked. Firstly, learning a new game involves labor and the player often plays for respite from labor, a point I go into more here. Secondly, when the player knows that the decision point was authored by a designer, they approach the problem by trying to understand the designer. When they come to a decision point generated by a system, they try to understand the system. These are both valid styles, but if you want the latter, you have to design for it. I write more about this here and here.

Challenging Games

Every Day The Same Dream challenges the idea of the core loop and says something deeply meaningful by doing so. Drowning in Problems does the same while stripping it down to the bare minimum.

I am obliged to talk about my own work in this space though. Firstly, The Quiet Sleep uses the loop to communicate important story beats. The key moment of the first of the three stories involves coming to rely on the work ethic you get from your homeland to generate energy and then having that disappear as you renounce your homeland in order to break free of your Manchurian Candidate-esque programming and needing to cobble together alternative sources of energy to keep going. Here, the mechanical variations and the narrative variations are one and the same. This is further expanded on in the other two stories in the game and their representations of relationship dynamics.

Syphilisation makes the politics of the mechanics intentional and so breaks out of the sealed space of video games. The variations in gameplay over the course of the game are built, not to express the possibility space of the systems, but instead to make explicitly political points. You don’t play Syphilisation to consume the content, you play it to engage with the politics of the game and how that informs the design.

These examples illustrate that the core loop does not necessitate padding and empty variations. It is merely a powerful way to enable a designer to deliver them. The real issue is a player base that expects both and a design culture built to satisfy this expectation.