Loops and Arcs

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The ‘game’ aspect of this beast we call a computer game always involves ‘loops’.

  • The player starts with a mental model that prompts them to…
  • Apply an action to…
  • The game system and in return…
  • Receives feedback that…


Nested, dependent loops yields complex feedback loops and unexpected dynamics.  Loops tend to deliver value through the act of being exercised.  Thus they are well suited for mastery tasks that involve trial and error or repeated exposure. The goal of both loops and arcs is to update the player’s mental model, however loops tend to rely on a balance of the following:

  • Functional feedback that helps players understand causation. 

Loops are very good at building ‘wisdom’, a holistic understanding of a complex system.  The player ends up with a mental model that contains a thousand branches, successes, failures and nuances that lets them approach new situations with confidence.



Arcs are well suited for delivering a payload of pre-processed information.  You’ll typically find many arcs have the following footprint:


Arcs are highly efficient at communicating ‘success stories’, a singular path through a system that someone else previously explored. The best teach a lesson, either informative, positive or negative. This is a brilliant learning shortcut but the acquired knowledge is often quite different and less robust in the face of change than ‘wisdom’. With a slight shift in context, the learning becomes no longer directly applicable. It is not an accident that we make the distinction between ‘book learning’ and ‘life experience’.



Mixing Loops and Arcs

Since both loops and arcs can be easily nested and connected to one another, in practice you end up with chemistry-like mixtures of the two that can get a bit messy to tease apart.  The simplest method of analysis is to ask “What repeats and what does not?”



  • Levels:  The spatial arc of navigating a level provides context for exploring variations on a central gameplay loop. The ‘Golden Path’ in a single player level is really just another name for an arc. 




The growth of arcs in games

In the pre-computer era, games dealt almost entirely with loops.  The light arcs that games like Chess or Monopoly contained served the highly functional purpose of triggering a player’s mental schema.  Once that setup payload was delivered, the games focused almost entirely on loops. One could easily claim that historically the term ‘game’ was used to describe an entertainment made predominantly of loops.









Untangling loops and arcs in existing game forms

So how do we evolve our designs with the market environment?  One exercise I’ve been performing on various games is identifying loop and arcs in a popular genre and then removing the arcs to see if what is left stands on its own.  What I’ve discovered is that arcs are almost never critical game elements. You can remove them and still have a playable game.


  • Puzzles
  • Missions

To take this one step further, remove any elements of a computer game that you can ‘beat’ or that render the game boring or meaningless upon repeated play.


A brilliant future for loops

However, this is admittedly a rather reductive exercise.  What I’m far more interested in is what happens when we, as designers and developers, invest our full energy in exploring the potential of loops.  The language here is far less developed and it is an extremely fertile field for a young developer to make their mark.  Consider the following sparely settled frontiers:





  • Author evocative arcs
  • Build sequels 


  • Invent dynamic loops
  • Build a hobby
  • Create a fortified island nation with an ongoing stream of revenue


Above all, evolve.

take care,


  1. Hi!I'm a beginner game designer and I fully understand your concept. But in the past I found myself stuck in loop-based games like TF2 or LoL. I was pleasuring my brain's reward system endlessly and these games became real killers of my time.While practicing to design loop-based games, I'm afraid of the situations when some of my players will be too addicted to gameplay loops. Do you have a solution to help them get out?I thought about an energy-like stat without an option to refill it via micropayments. Or maybe a simple message like \”You are playing more than 3 hours! Please, take a rest!\”What do you think about it?Thank you. And thanks for your articles – they helping me a lot!!//Sorry for possible mistakes in English.


  2. What I find most fascinating about this article is that I came up with a concept using the exact same terms, about a year ago. However I didn't apply a strict terminology or sequence as to what occurred inside an arc or loop – that was the \”player's mental vocabulary.\” (as opposed to the game's internal vocabulary) What the model represented was still essentially \”what the player thought about\” but the content of thought was unlimited – in Pac-Man, for example, it could be the movement of the ghosts, the movement of Pac-Man, the state of the board, and the \”eaten power pill\” state, and the intersections of these various loops was how the player perceived gameplay. (An arc, as in your model, presented a one-way path.) A key assumption was that the player was most able to focus attention on just one intersection at a time, and awareness of all intersections was part of skill mastery.Increasingly I've dropped the loop model in favor of simply developing concrete vocabulary for the game; if something happens, I have to be able to describe it in terms apart from the mechanical content, as that forms the basis of communication to the player. What I discovered when I modelled purely in loops was that it was too easy to create ideas of excessive scope – games with massive, yawning loops for broad concepts like \”build,\” \”explore,\” \”battle,\” \”share\” etc. that imposed mighty technical requirements and never achieved focus. It seems better suited as a shaping construct for after the basic play vocabulary is conceived and a successful prototype has been made.


  3. This was a good post, but I want to pick a nit. You say no one talks about how religion is a loop. In fact, one of the most prominent theories of \”loop learning\” is called \”hermeneutics\” and it began from Biblical scholars who wanted to explain the loops involved in understanding and translating scripture. A good introduction is Ron Bontekoe's Dimensions of the Hermeneutic Circle.


  4. What you refer to as loops is essentially a map of arcs. That said, if arcs can be \”consumed\”, so can loops be \”consumed\”. All the talk about how consumption is bad is just plain ridiculous because all art is consumed. No art is infinite.The real difference lies in that some games are made out of huge map of problems and others aren't, and so, some are easier to consume and some are harder. But still, few consume their games (incl. sports and board games) fully.You also seem to confuse two different concepts – that of a problem and that of an analysis.Reading books is not a problem. Yes, people turn pages and yes turning pages can sometimes be a problem (one you can solve by licking your finger), but so can everything else in the world. The real trick here is hidden in what's being enjoyed, and, in the case of books, it is the analysis that's being entertaining. If there are actions to be used with these sorts of entertaintment, then they are merely there for functional reasons.With problem solving, beside analysis, there is decision making, making actions much more important. Actions aren't just functionally important, they are also valued differently.Now let's get back to ARCS and LOOPS.What would be better if you replaced \”arc\” with \”problem\” and \”loop\” with \”map\”.Arc is thus a problem and loop is a map of problems.If a problem is always the same and if the range of possible solution is low the problem would, normally, burn out quickly. Puzzles are of that sort.What's different about sports and board games like Chess and Go is that problems are interrelated and kept fresh by the presence of human opposition and controlled randomization.


  5. You definitely should have a look into David Bordwell's chapter on narrative comprehension in his book Narrative in the Fiction Film, published in 1986. I know you will probably not look into it because it is about movies and narrative, but it has great concepts additional to those that you use here. It speaks of how a film presents audio-visual cues that ask the audience to carry out certain operations. Based on the perception and interpretation of these sense-data the audience would form a number of related schemata and set up hypotheses which would be justified or falsified as this loop repeats. It is very similar to what has been referred to gameplay cycle in someone else's article on gamasutra + your model of skill atoms. Bordwell distinguishes between a number of schemata (the term schema or model in your \”loop\” diagram): prototype schemata, template schemata, procedural schemata and style schemata. He later shows how these are related and \”chunked\” into sequences by the audience. I think it would definitely help you to refine your model even more, and may give you new ideas about the interaction between loops and arcs.


  6. If a player plays a game, and they don't want to play it again, that means they've been changed by the experience. Perhaps they learned something.If a player can play a game over and over, then it just amuses them, it doesn't change them.I would rather make games that actually teach.


  7. Wow. A lot of comments that obviously didn't follow the train of thought.Loops teach. I like the analogy of honing a knife edge. Do it long enough and you'll usually get a really nice sharp edge, but that doesn't mean you can't screw it up and nick the edge. There's an extra wisdom that comes from experiencing a range of failure and success states that a loop may contain. Once you fully explore that space, you'll grasp it a lot better than the \”arc\” that just tells you how to win. Knowing how, and actually having done it, are two different things.I don't believe a loop can be fully consumed. I would like to point at Douglas Hofstadter's strange loops discussion. You can even be self-aware of the loop, but that doesn't excuse you from it.Oh, and here's a final thought that may just be trolling. An arc may just be one of many that together form loops that are too meta for us to see or rationally model.


  8. pinball comes to mind reading this. there is no end. you can beat high scores.. but then again, you can beat that high score.anyhow, can you link to sites that define the phrases and words you use? like a wiki? I can't find what an 'evergreen game' is.


  9. That's a reasonably interesting way to think, actually: I'm not sure how much it applies to a lot of things which aren't games, but for that specific type of programming it's a cool concept. As a programmer, I find that I rarely think about the \”story\” that the application I'm writing \”tells\” — it's more about whether the bits of it work so that the user can make it do what it wants. I guess the difference is that a game has its own ideas about what's going on, which get enacted regardless of what the user does.One small (and possibly obstreperous) thing: don't write \”to better understand\” — in fact, don't write \”to better [verb]\” — it's not English and it kind of ruins the piece by making it seem ill-conceived. use \”the better to understand [x]\” or, \”to understand [x] better\”. Sorry – had to do it.


  10. ???? What are you talking about. \”To better X\” is perfectly cromulent. Don't spend your life looking for new normal phrases to get a grammar hate on!


  11. Hi. I didn't use these loops and arcs in my designs, but after reading this article, I 'll definitely try to use these loops and arcs in my next design. Could you please tell me if i got any problem while creating design using these loops and arcs then how can i contact you?


  12. While reading this my wife is playing Triple Town on Facebook, one of my current favourite games on Android. Something that has been missing for me on my phone has been a feeling of progress, something that I see has been added to the FB version. Reading this article makes is very clear what the difference is, the use of arcs to complement a loop gameplay.Basically it's the kind of games I install for my mother in law that tends to get it right. Games like Zumba that are in the core very much a loop type of game but still gives a feeling of progression.I tried to apply this to another game I've played a lot, World of Warcraft, and realised how complex their model is. They have basically built a game on a very large set of loops strung together loosely by smaller and larger arcs. That model makes the players both feel like they are mastering the loops at the same time as they feel they are traveling forward. The smaller arcs give constant payloads, the loops makes it easy to sit down, the larger arcs give a long term goal.I've tried the starwars MMO as well but didn't like it, to much of an arc based game. This article made it very clear why WoW worked for me while StarWars didn't, with my ADHD I need the loops to be able to sit down and feel relaxed. Starting a loop takes a lot less mental energy then starting, or jumping back into, an arc.Thanks for a very nice article.


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