Game loops
In his 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 gives feedback); this effect allows the player to take another action and so on and so forth, in a loop.
Every feature finds its place within a loop, which is effectively a sequence that determines the flow of player experiences while engaging in the game’s systems.
When designing a feature, it is crucial to understand its place, how often the player is expected to interact with it, and in which way this interaction produces results that feed the next system and keep the loop moving.
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