Loop
Reinforcing loop
You might say: growth that feeds itself
Positive feedback makes an increase feed the next increase, so capability or reward can snowball.
- What it does
- Creates momentum, investment pressure and the risk of runaway advantage.
- Ask
- What grows, and what does that growth make easier next time?
Parts
- Reward escalation: The reward for a successful action increases the resources or options available for the next action.
- Capability growth: Capability growth is the measured increase in actions, reach, output or resilience that a loop produces.
Loop: reinforcing
Reward escalation → Capability growth ↺
Sources
- Michael Sellers, Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach, ch. 7, p. 238
First, because they are based on reinforcing loops, they have the potential to run out of control in a rich-get-richer scenario unless there are balancing loops in place to prevent this.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 6, pp. 113–117: closed circuits and positive feedback
the score of the better team quickly spirals upward as the difference increases, allowing them to field more and more players.
- Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans, Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design, ch. 4, pp. 66–69
positive feedback works to amplify small differences
- Daniel Cook, Value chains – A method for creating and balancing faucet-and-drain game economies, “Source Type: Investment (Exponential)”
Player does an action This gives them resources. But these resources ‘feed back’ into the original action.
- Ian Schreiber, Game Design Concepts, Level 5: Mechanics and Dynamics, Feedback Loops: positive feedback and score-to-power-up examples
Something happens that causes the same thing to happen again, which causes it to happen yet again, getting stronger in each iteration
Use it on your project
teardown-apply: hold "Reinforcing loop" (reinforcing-loop) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/game-design/ against my project
Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.
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