Game loops

In his recent book Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, Michael Sellers – a game designer and professor – identified four principal loops that define a video game experience:

• The game's model loop
• The player's mental loop
• The interactive loop
• The designer's loop

Why do we call these loops? The idea is that a game is not a linear experience, but a looping structure where an action by the player generates an effect (and give a feedback); this effect allow the player to take another action and so on and so forth, in a loop.

Game's model and player's mental loops

The game's model loop represents the dynamic world of the game. It is the combination of all the systems...