Scott's Stuff - Feedback Loops in Games

I'm on the road at the Meaningful Play conference, and one of the speakers, Joris Dormans, talked about feedback loops in board games. I captured a few minutes and, with his permission, am bringing it to you! You can find more of his work at http://www.jorisdormans.nl

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• feedback
• games
• grid
• play
• power

[nutherefurlong]

I think knowing what his definition of a feedback loop is would help cut through the audio problems a bit.

I'm guessing it means letting the player know if what they're doing has some sort of influence on the game. I'd say many such loops are embedded despite their being open, too, where it looks like you're doing the right thing, but only later do you realize that you've run out of steam.

Had that happen in Starship Catan, where my opponent bought a bunch of modules and then ran out of money.

[snicholson]

Actually, it was more a focus on elements of the game and how they had impact on each other. The larger focus of the work was on emergent systems through a gameplay system, so that if you had a set of objects in the game that affected each other, this was a method of exploring the emergent gameplay system. So, some of those parts in a game might not affect a player directly but affect a different part of the game (which then might affect the player).

[dljone01]

I was at the conference, too. I caught Joris's presentation, and was fortunate enough to talk to him a bit over the next couple of days. His use of UML intrigued me, and seemed quite relevant to some of my own research on games as semiotic endeavors.

[nutherefurlong]

I see. I get the feeling a lot of game design now is about piling on agreeable systems, but these systems may or may not actually interact. To me it feels like a lot of the elegance is being lost on the big name games, as if complexity is trumping interesting mechanics. Or maybe I'm still reeling from the feature list of Agricola :)