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 present in the game with which the player can interact. The player's loop, on the other hand, is the mental model of the game world that the player creates.
The player builds his own mental loop based on the actual game model loop. He set his goals and executes actions that generate feedback in the game and continue to do...
