Welcome back, dear readers, to the second installment of the Magic Circle blog. I’m going to be posting about once a week, probably on Mondays. If you’re interested in being updated each time a new article is available, consider signing up for my mailing list at the bottom of this article. I will only be sending out an e-mail with each new article, and promise not to spam you with anything else. Also, on the last article I got a lot of good feedback via messages. So, this time around, I’ve decided to enable comments on the article. If you have any thoughts after reading, I really encourage you to post a comment and I’ll try to respond to each of you.

For this second article, I wanted to stick to defining another basic game design principles to lay a strong foundation of vocabulary that we can use when discussing more complex subjects down the line. You don’t get more basic than today’s topic—the engagement loop.

The Engagement Loop

The engagement loop (also known as a core loop) is a simple cycle, present in every game, that a player goes through as they play. Visualized, it looks something like this:

Players constantly cycle through this loop as they play the game, and each cycle starts with that player’s current mental model of the game. This mental model includes everything they know about the game and its systems—their understanding of the story, of the rules, of their final goal, of other players’ strategies etc. A player’s model is (almost) always incomplete. Building and refining this understanding of the game system is an eternal process that players undergo over time as they play the game more and more. This mental model informs the player as to what they want to accomplish in the game. At any given moment of play, a player has formed a goal for themselves for what to do next based on their model.

Acting on whatever their current goal is, a player performs an action in the game by conducting some kind of input into the game system. This could be as simple as pressing the ‘X’ button on their controller, moving a game piece on a board, kicking the ball down the field—whatever kind of action the rules of the game and affordances of their interface allows.

The player’s input is then processed by the rules of the game to create some sort of feedback for the player about what effect their action has had. My description here might make the game system sound like an active player in the process, or like a computer programmed to respond. Sometimes it is. However, these “rules” can also be the laws of physics in sports or written rules enforced by the players in a board game. Whatever the rules are in a given case, they will produce some sort of result from the action, and the player will observe feedback based on the results. (Or, in some cases, no feedback at all. As that is a form of feedback itself. Some actions may not have any impact, or at least no evident impact, on a system.)

After receiving feedback, the player adjusts their mental model based on any new information they may have absorbed, and starts the cycle over again. Rinse. Repeat.

Scope

As you’ve likely observed, this loop is pretty abstract. As such, it can be used to analyze all sorts of different game systems, and analyze them at all sorts of different scopes. For example, in a game of Hearthstone, a player goes through this loop card-to-card, turn-to-turn, game-to-game, and even season-to-season. One “game” loop contains many “turn” loops, each of which also contains many “card” loops, creating a nested picture of a player’s flow through the entire game:

Using the Loop

Alright, we’ve got this tool through which we can observe a player’s cyclical interaction with our game, but how do we use it? There are some… less-than-virtuous ways we can use this to leverage player psychology for profit, but we’ll get to those in the next section. For now, let’s look at less morally-complicated example—using it as a tool to analyze how randomness is affecting our players’ experiences. For this, let’s continue exploring our example of Hearthstone.

Randomness shows up all across Hearthstone, and has received a wide range of reactions from players. Early on in the life of the game, a number of cards received a lot of hate from players for being too random—cards like Unstable Portal, Lightning Storm, and Piloted Shredder.

These cards cause random effects after being played—dealing a random amount of damage, selecting a random card, summoning a random creature, etc. So, looking at this in the context of the card-to-card engagement loop of Hearthstone, the randomness occurs right after the player’s input of choosing what card they’d like to play:

This creates an effect a bit like gambling. There is an exciting buildup of uncertainty, and then either a payoff or disappointment based on the results. Whatever happens past this point, it’s totally out of the player’s hands. This can create exciting stories when things go their way, but can also create a frustrating feeling of helplessness when they don’t.

Contrast this with another form of randomness in Hearthstone—drawing a card at the start of each turn.

When we look at our engagement loop, this lands before the player makes any kind of new decisions based on their revised mental model. Even though which card a player draws can have a significant impact on the outcome of the game, it is often far less exciting, and less frustrating, than our previous examples of randomness. Because the uncertainty comes before the player’s decision, the player feels in control. They are choosing how to solve the puzzle that has been created for them by the randomness instead of just watching something unfold before them.

This is a lesson that I think Blizzard really took to heart in later Hearthstone expansions. They began designing cards with this relationship to randomness in mind. Those of you who play Hearthstone, if you have examples of modern cards that change this relationship to randomness in interesting ways, let me know in the comments below!

Using the Loop… For Evil!

As the name suggests, the engagement loop is not only a useful tool to model a player’s interaction with a game system, but is also a pattern that is naturally engaging to the human brain. Googling “engagement loop” brings up many other synonymous or similar terms such as “core loop” (mostly synonymous), “game loop” (this is for the programming side of things), and “compulsion loop.” This last one is the one I’d like to talk about here, as it is often conflated with these other terms, and has a bit of a sinister background.

Engagement loops are often used to model how a game system is psychologically rewarding its players, something we will be diving into deeper in a future article. This isn’t inherently evil, but it quickly becomes sinister when it starts to be used to psychologically manipulate people into spending their money. This is what compulsion loops are used for.

Primarily a tool of the “freemium” game market, compulsion loops were created to track and optimize a player’s Pavlovian response in an effort to bring that player back again and again to pay more and more money. These predatory strategies prey on trusting customers and addictive personalities to maximize profits.

I’m not going to dive into detail on compulsion loops in this article. I just bring them up to encourage you to be cautious when talking about engagement loops, core loops, compulsion loops, or even game loops. Since these terms are often used synonymously, just ensure there is no confusion about which one you’re referring to. Engagement loops are a great tool for more precisely discussing a game’s design; we shouldn’t let their misuse by some get in the way of their greater use by all.

Featured posts:

Engagement Loops

The Engagement Loop

Scope

Using the Loop

Using the Loop… For Evil!

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