[watwut]

> have games changed, or have you?

Yes the games changed. I think that the claim the games did not changed would be absurd to anyone who looked at games in the past and is looking at games now.

We changed too, sure. But kids dont finish games, typically either. And I dont even think pac-man is a good example here, very few people finished pac-man - but the game itself was not meant to be finished. It was meant to be too difficult at some point.

[StilesCrisis]

World of Warcraft is twenty-two years old and perfectly exemplifies all of the author's complaints about game loops. It's not a new phenomenon.

[s_trumpet]

The way the author defines loops is so broad that every single 90s game I can think of has them.

[sparkie]

The difference is that 90s games had novelty at the time - many introduced new gameplay ideas.

A lot of today's AAA games have converged into a small number of genres like the open world action RPG games which all have the same "side quests" repeated ad-nauseam.

* Talk to NPC

* Go kill 5 monsters

* Talk to another NPC

* Collect 3 of some item.

* Talk to another (or original) NPC.

* Get some pocket change, EXP and an item as reward.

Repeated several hundred times throughout the game with minor variations and some uninteresting dialogue that doesn't develop your the story or character besides unlocking a new skill. Every skill is acquired the same way - through "skill points" that are acquired with EXP - but there's no novelty in acquiring EXP - just the same quests which increase the game's "content".

But this content is boring an uninspired. It's almost like it's done to keep people employed - or at least, to pay fewer programmer's high salaries and replace them with lower salaries of employees who can use a pre-packaged scripting system to increase the gameplay duration without adding any new gameplay. Or maybe it's the sunk cost fallacy - they feel like they've put some time and effort into implementing some mechanic, so it would be a waste to only use it once or twice, so they have to use it 50 times to justify the budget spent on developing it.

[throw4847285]

You missed my point. The author argued that gameplay loops are a holdover from quarter munching arcade machines. I used Rogue as proof that this is at best an incomplete account. I simply mentioned Pac-Man as the beginning of the arcade boom, which happened to come out the same year as Rogue, a computer game with a much more addicting gameplay loop (in my opinion).