cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/45593582
The author notes that players generally do not finish games and suggests that designing in terms of gameplay loops leads to a certain kind of boring and predictable experience. They suggest that the modern medium of games is much more flexible and capable of more variety.
I’ve never been able to quite put into words why I don’t find most retro or indie games fun for more than a short while. It’s the simple loops. & I get bored of these loops very quickly and stop playing.
I can not think of a single game of any kind that does not have a “loop” in it. Even sports and board games have a gameplay loop. I can not even fathom how one would make a game of any kind without a gameplay loop unless it’s an incredibly short game you can only play once in your entire life like Russian Roulette with 6 rounds in the chamber. At some point you will be doing the same thing over and over again.
Not every board game is multiplayer, Solitaire is over 100 years old now :)
One very important thing the author missed is availability of games. Kids in the 80s would be hard pressed to have a collection of 10 games, in the 90s, with cheaper CDs for the Playstation, it was common to have 20-30, but that’s still a manageable amount. Nowadays, everyone has 200+ games at their disposal at any given time. You won’t play all of that, you likely won’t play even 33% of that. This is also why people with emulation stations very rarely play anything at all, even less so experiment with new stuff. Analysis paralysis caused by excess of options is a well documented behavior.
When you’re up against a virtually infinite competition, you aim for a design that is supposed to be as mechanically tight and addicting as possible, otherwise you won’t stand out and are less likely to sell. With such a competition, and the still present, and wrong, idea that more game time = better bang for your buck, making a game that lasts less than 1 hour can feel cheap, like it’s not worth the player’s time.
Now, when you only have 10 games and won’t be getting any new games for 4+ months? You make do with what you have. Some games you refuse to touch at all because you’ve reached the conclusion that they suck. The games that get played will feel repetitive after a while for obvious reasons, but they never had to worry about being the most addicting or the one with the longest runtime, the competition wasn’t big enough for that to be needed.
The game loops aren’t the problem.
