The following post was made on the Roblox developer forums, written by one of my friends. I find this entire post very fascinating, and I had their permission to publish it here.
i think the idea of “core gameplay loops” as a backbone of game design is a really recent invention, and quite an absurd one at that.
namely: i think that the “gameplay loop” myth is a result of game analysts extracting information from popular games, and then later people turned that into development advice.
consider what a “gameplay loop” is.
a structure of “objective, challenge, reward”, that supposedly is supposed to keep players invested in the game. or “anticipation, action, reward”. actually, i’m finding a lot of conflicting definitions on what a gameplay loop is, but whatever… game developers are expected to build games on top of this structure - why?
people will list as an example, “in Super Mario Bros, there is a gameplay loop - you see an enemy, you jump over it, and you are rewarded with survival.” the idea that Super Mario Bros is an engaging game because you jump over enemies is frankly absurd. or you could argue “the gameplay loop of Super Mario Bros [that drives engagement]” is this: you start a level, jump over enemies, reach the goal, and then start a new level.
how is this game development advice, exactly?
is playing a level or jumping over enemies or collecting powerups inherently stimulating? is it stimulating enough to become one of the most famous games in history?
the problem, i think, is that the definition of a “gameplay loop” is so vague and stretched so thin that you can apply it to anything that repeats. all good games have some action you do repeatedly. thus, all good games have gameplay loops. thus, you need a gameplay loop to make a good game that gets a lot of players. it’s very silly.
i would compare Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” (or “The Hero’s Journey”); the criticisms of that narrative structure are numerous and all over the place, and i find it is comparable to gameplay loops. there is no singular narrative structure that unites all good stories regardless of history, context, and culture; nor are there singular gameplay structures that unite all good games. art is infinitely varied.
i grew up on flash games, arguably an even more accessible game development medium than roblox
there was no holy scripture of good game design that these developers adhered to; many of them were teenagers aged 13-18. this era of flash games, when the “indie game” scene was fledgling, was mostly people with free time and no money making interactive little toys to show their friends. the idea of a “nobody” developer making a “successful game” was ridiculous to aspire to for many, so few even tried. how far we’ve come - now new game developers plan for success from day 1!
in the flash game era, there were a lot of narrative “artsy’ games, and a lot of outsider art at that.
for the moment let's define outsider art as art created by people who aren't "classically trained", and thus their methods of creating art are considered unconventional, often to mixed success. for example, someone who knows nothing about game design making a game.
in this time i played a handful of these games that i don’t even remember the name of, or the gameplay of, but something else about them embedded themselves in my head. i’m also not naming them because many of them are a little too graphic for the Roblox Developer Forum.
i will be the first to tell you these games were extremely compelling, and not because they were “fun to play”.
the key i want to highlight here, i think, is that if you are making a game for the sake of telling a story, your focus on engagement should be the story - the rest of the gameplay should serve to convey the story effectively. this is what we call “ludonarrative”. you can, of course, make a game with a mix of fun gameplay and storytelling elements - many would argue Earthbound here. but there have also been countless games where the gameplay is quite minimal but the story is rich - we call them “point and click adventures”! or Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.
do not sacrifice your story for the sake of gameplay. it will do one thing: undercut your story. this seems like something you do not want to do