GoKawiilThe 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?
... continue reading