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[Gimym TILBERT]

Yes I know that too, just pointing that in game it's easier to confuse with that other terms

[Alec S.]

Feedback means that the output goes into the input (is 'fed back'). Positive here means that the output adds to the input (goes higher), negative means the output subtracts from the input (goes lower)

That's a much more clear and concise explanation than I could come up with.  I'm going to edit the first post to include that as a quote.

I've been playing a lot of Orcs Must Die which have quite a few positive and negative feedback loops, most of which that benefit the player.  The obvious positive feedback loops is the better you do, the more currency you get, allowing you to get more traps to do better and make even more currency.  There's also a negative feedback loop inherent in the fact that the rifts (what you're defending) heal the player when he's nearby.  This means if you get pushed back all the way to the rifts, you don't need to worry about your health as much as just wildly firing into the oncoming crowd of orcs, as your health is constantly regenerating.

[Graham.]

Chess gives more options to the player with more pieces and more dynamism to the player with less. The feedback is two-directional and context sensitive. Though in the long-run, and the general case, the player with more points on the board is in the better position.

Starcraft makes you more maneuverable when you are slightly behind. You have less to manage and defend. But you also have less power to mine, so in the long run you are behind. Generally you get a pretty huge advantage when you get a very small advantage. A lot of Starcraft revolves around single mistakes. That can make the game less accepting.

When you die in GTA they start you way back. You lose money (not much), have to choose to restart the mission, after waiting a tick, then steal a car and get to the starting point again. The game really punishes you for failure.

In a lot of sports a lead over the competition can inspire doubt in the competitor. It can also pump up the leader. In boxing, the reigning champion defends successfully more often than he loses, by what I imagine is a pretty decent margin - so it is more than just his skill that makes the difference. But a lead can also create complacency in the leader, creating an opportunity for the competitor. Both of these things are a result of "winning" being so compelling. I think some games could benefit from making your successes more clear.

Racing is really challenging. I started playing Forza semi-seriously in the past few months, and I've been watching some Nascar. I can say that catching up to a bunch of cars is no easy task. A single mistake costs you several places, and even solid racing can widen the gap. You can't let up in racing, so to an inexperienced player it can seem that everything is pushing against you unless you are succeeding. If you play at a lower difficulty this isn't true, but then it isn't the same kind of racing.

Mario Kart fixes this problem. It's success has in large-part to do with its balancing. Most players I'm sure don't even notice, not at the beginning. It took me some time. In hard courses the blue shell only closes small gaps. You can spread yourselves out. Or maybe I'm a mediocre kart racer.

The Mario Kart solution would be to dynamically control the balancing based on the player's skill levels. Interesting direction. In Go there is a natural ranking and handicap system. Your rank indicates how many "stones" you get over your opponent. If I'm 5kyu and you are 10kyu then when we play you get 5 stones. That's basically 5 "free" automated moves ahead of me that go on particular places on the board. Then we will have an even match, unless our rankings are incorrect.

The win for the weaker play in Go feels just as gratifying is it does to the stronger. If you "win more" then your rank goes up. If you keep on winning your rank keeps climbing. Your games always stay close but the wins never lose their gratification. Mario Kart could do this.

Players just need ranks, then appropriate handicaps that get implemented automatically. A player can disable some of the handicaps but be given more points for a win if they do. Then races are close, everything is fair, and wins are individually meaningful. With everything being online now this kind of design is more reasonable. You need some kind of ranking/handicap to balance multiplayer games fairly.

The alternative is to set sub-goals for the weaker players to meet, such as "come within 10 seconds of the leader," but in most cases, such as it is in Mario Kart, that would be far less compelling. It's really for more complex gameplays.

...

A lot of the time this kind of "feedback" is just about balancing difficulty, and creating a particular experience. In Mario you can do crazier things if you are playing well: have a suit, are big, are running fast. But the risk goes up too and will likely punish you. Mario games let you get crazy if you earn it, then punishes you if you get "too crazy." (side-scrolling Marios). Effectively Mario games ramp the difficulty if you become too careless. So it self-manages difficulty.

GTA does the exact same thing with killing people and the cops. But instead of forking out death, like Mario, it puts you in increasingly tougher positions, which only increases the level of risk you have to endure. It rewards success, and "punishes" failure... with a reward, which escalates.

If you re-enforce obedience with your dog he will become more obedient. Feedback loops are great for driving players in the right direction, towards the designed experience. You reward play that enhances their experience, such as growth.

Growth, as-in improving at the game, is often the primary point around which feedback centers. We normally are acted-on by the game for success and failure, strictly. That means the feedback most games give us is in the form: "you must be this good and improve this fast." If the game demands too much, or arbitrary things, then you will become frustrated.

You want to enforce behaviour that you think will create the best gaming experience, and is something that the player can attain. If you enforce behaviour that is unlikely or impossible, or seemingly out of the player's control, then he/she will become frustrated. See the "challenge curve" for flow or something in Google.


... my game has feedback loops everywhere.

[Azure Lazuline]

Speaking of Mario, most of the 2D games have kind of a double feedback loop for the powerups. If you're small (one hit left), you're, well... small, so it's harder for enemies to hit you but it doesn't affect your offense (negative feedback). If you're big (2 hits left), it's easier to get hit. Then there's always another powerup level(s) above that which give you more abilities (positive feedback), with either 2 or 3 hits until you die depending on the game.

Mega Man has positive feedback, in that every boss you kill gives you a new weapon, making it easier to kill all the other bosses. This kind of gets your momentum going and makes you feel ready to take on the final stages once you have all the weapons.

Most paper-style puzzles (jigsaws, crosswords, sudoku, Picross, etc) have both as well, where as you finish all the easy stuff, you're left with just the hard stuff so the difficulty increases. But filling in the parts also makes the rest easier, so the difficulty ends up being like a bell curve. I guess the first part isn't technically negative feedback, but it still accomplishes the same thing. It's really satisfying to overcome the initial increasing challenge, then you reach a certain point where everything clicks and you can just ride on the momentum to the finish line. Maybe that's why those games are so popular.

[Graham.]

Mario accomplishes a lot with a single mushroom.

Mega Man is similar to the leveling in an RPG. Leveling is so compelling that's all you need. :|

"Sharing" your accomplishments with your friends is a kind of feedback. When you play Minecraft you might think, "can't wait to show this to my friends." Even if you never do, the act of thinking it is rewarding.

Finding ways to reward actual progress is almost always a good thing. You can reward a player for doing things, and more for doing things better. I think a mistake is when you cross the streams here. For example, Final Fantasy, or any rpg, rewards playing with gold and xp and progress. It also rewards smart playing - like beating battles quicker - with gold and xp and progress. Grind-play story-progress might be side-missions and collectibles... those might be even more rewarding than main questline. Sometimes I feel guilty about playing main story in-case I miss something cool. So rpgs reward grinding (passive play)....

Playing smart, as in not leveling, raises the difficulty. You die more and fight fewer battles. The result in time spent might be even between grind and no-grind, _and_ you get less stuff with the no-grind. You get more reward from overcoming a challenge (w/ no-grind) but no recognition from the game.

You should reward talent, growth, and "doing stuff" as separate things.

In Smash Bros there's a feedback loop with increasing your opponent's damage. The more damage you deal the more easily he flies around, and the more likely that the crowd will scream for you. This makes getting close to a kill slowly more invigorating.

You can setup reward loops in these sections, like with a crossword, so that you can build-up pockets of emotion. The damage counter in smash puts a mini-climax into every death. Act 1: fighting. Act 2: who will die, how soon will he die, how will he die? Act 3: kill is likely, final blows. denouement: flying off the stage and "boom" (cheer).

You create your own story-line. The feedback loop drives you to it. "Come-back" stories in Mario Kart are also pretty awesome.

[Alec S.]

Yeah, feedback loops are useful for creating an interactive narrative-like structure without actually making a linear narrative.  You can use them to guide the player experience without forcing them to make certain actions.

[EdgeOfProphecy]

I've played a lot of League of Legends, and read a lot of stuff written by the developers talking about certain design decisions.  They use feedback loops like crazy in that game to give it its pacing.

What's interesting is that many of the feedback loops are positive, but they're balanced by other design features.  Most of the positive feedback loops are balanced by a high amount of risk required to achieve the objective.

Positive Feedback Loops:
A)  Baron buff - See below
B)  Dragon - See below
C)  Neutral buffs - Special creeps that can be killed to confer a strong buff to the champion that gets the killing blow.  Taking these neutral buffs will make you more capable, thus a positive feedback loop.
D)  Death timers - The longer the game goes on, the longer death timers get.  Killing an opponent can take them out of the game for a very long time, further rewarding killing another player.

Negative Feedback Loops:
A)  Feeder gold reduction - If a player dies over and over and over (feeding, as it is known), they start granting the enemy team less and less gold and experience upon their death until they're eventually worthless.  This helps minimize a player who is griefing intentionally, or a player who is hopelessly outclassed by their opponents, has on their own team.

Edit:  Thought of another important loop!
B)  Gold bounty - Kind of an inverse of A.  Whenever a player goes on a killing streak, they build up an ever increasing gold bounty (up to a maximum) that gets rewarded to their opposing team upon being killed.  Effectively, a portion of the gold that a player gets by killing other plays builds up into this jackpot to be claimed by whomever kills them.  Matches are very frequently turned around by a team who is ahead (and has built up a big bounty) getting defeated in one or two fights.

A and B combine to give the losing team a really good shot at winning if they can pull things together for a fight or two.  If they can't, then the gold and experience advantage from the kills will allow their enemy to "snowball" and keep picking up momentum, eventually outstripping the losing team so much it becomes virtually impossible to win.  Games tend to end shortly thereafter.

On the subject of the baron and the dragon, they're very powerful neutral creeps stick in the middle of the map.  Neither team innately has strong control over them, but they both provide immense benefit to the team that kills them (Dragon provides a large gold bonus to the entire team, Baron provides a large gold bonus and a very powerful buff to the team that defeats him).  

The team who manages to take baron or dragon tends to be the strongest team, or the team most skilled (i.e. capable of controlling that region of the map).  Taking dragon/baron only makes that team stronger, thus positive feedback.

However, dragon/baron are pretty strong in their own right, and it is a serious commitment to fight them.  If the enemy team swoops in when you're halfway through fighting one of the boss creeps, you'll suddenly be fighting two battles at once.  Beyond the increased damage that's being inflicted upon the team, they're also faced with the choice of abandoning the boss fight entirely or trying to power through it as fast as possible.  Both are risky propositions.

So while the boss creeps are a huge positive feedback loop, trying to take them is a massive risk.  This creates great conflict in the game, both enemies trying to kill the boss creeps and both trying to stop the other, and gives the end-game structure and hotspots for both teams to rally around.  This is very intentionally designed, both the risk and the reward, for the express purpose of making matches end.

1)  It puts the teams in a vulnerable position, where one can trounce the other.  Neither can walk away from the impending fight.
2)  It gives the team that wins said fight a huge boost in power, allowing them to end the match.
3)  It allows for a weaker team to comeback, since their best shot for victory is going to be ambushing the stronger team while they're fighting a boss creep.

It's an interesting system, combining positive feedback with risk-versus-reward to give the game tension and a means of ending.

[Alec S.]

Negative Feedback Loops:
A)  Feeder gold reduction - If a player dies over and over and over (feeding, as it is known), they start granting the enemy team less and less gold and experience upon their death until they're eventually worthless.  This helps minimize a player who is griefing intentionally, or a player who is hopelessly outclassed by their opponents, has on their own team.

This is interesting.  I tried playing DOTA a while back, but was intimidated by the community.  Because of how many positive feedback loops are in the game, a bad/inexperienced player will end up benefiting the opposing team (rather than at worst being essentially dead weight).  At that point, the other players will start yelling game terminology at you that you don't understand because of being inexperienced.  There's little motivation to help new players, as the team is benefited more by the weak player leaving the game rather than staying and trying their best.  Having this negative feedback loop in there sounds like it tries to counteract this problem.

[EdgeOfProphecy]

Negative Feedback Loops:
A)  Feeder gold reduction - If a player dies over and over and over (feeding, as it is known), they start granting the enemy team less and less gold and experience upon their death until they're eventually worthless.  This helps minimize a player who is griefing intentionally, or a player who is hopelessly outclassed by their opponents, has on their own team.

This is interesting.  I tried playing DOTA a while back, but was intimidated by the community.  Because of how many positive feedback loops are in the game, a bad/inexperienced player will end up benefiting the opposing team (rather than at worst being essentially dead weight).  At that point, the other players will start yelling game terminology at you that you don't understand because of being inexperienced.  There's little motivation to help new players, as the team is benefited more by the weak player leaving the game rather than staying and trying their best.  Having this negative feedback loop in there sounds like it tries to counteract this problem.

Well, League of Legends still very much has that MOBA community behind it, so people will complain loudly and do the blame game quite frequently if things turn south in a match.  It does help dull the blow of a bad player on the team, but certainly they're still quite the drag.  Mostly, it helps eliminate situations where an otherwise horrible the enemy team wins by preying on one extremely weak person.

Edit:  Added some more stuff to my first post.

Best way I could describe the exchange of advantage in LoL is that it's like a pendulum whose swings get bigger as the game goes on.  Advantage will often change hands a couple times during the game until eventually it gets so large for one team that the other can't grab it back, then the game ends.  So it's this interesting combo of giving really strong positive feedback so that one team can eventually win, but also giving negative feedback and hiding the positive feedback behind high risk-reward to give the losing team opportunities to seize the advantage.  It's a pretty neat system.

[Jackson31]

Did somebody say feedback loops?

[Gimym TILBERT]

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/pdf/dormans_engineering_emergence.pdf

the definitive game design guide about feedback loop

[Muz]

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/pdf/dormans_engineering_emergence.pdf

the definitive game design guide about feedback loop

Wow, looks like a really good resource, thanks.

[Muz]

Oh, just remembered this old game, Advanced Civilization which is actually a board game.

It's got tons of feedback loops in both directions.

This is how the trade system works:

Those players who have built cities are permitted to receive trade cards with a commodity printed on them (hides, salt, cloth, etc.) later in the turn. There are nine decks, and players obtain progressively more valuable cards based on the number of cities they have. Those with five cities receive a single card from each of the decks one through five, for example, unless one or more type of card has been used up. Players may have up to nine cities. Cards gain value quadratically, so two value "3" trade cards are worth twelve points, while three are worth twenty-seven points. The first two decks have two types of cards, for number one it is hides and ochre, and for number two, it is papyrus and iron, these two different types of cards do not add up in value together. It is to the player's advantage to collect multiple cards of a single commodity, as four or five of a single commodity can be quite valuable.

So, you want to trade for certain kinds of cards, and you want to build lots of cities to have higher level cards.

Positive:
- The more cities you have, the higher level cards you get, and the more cards you get. So holding a lot of cities for an extended period of time will put you exponentially further ahead of the others.
- More cities give you more troops and taxes.
- Unlocking technology softens the impact of calamities.

Negative:
- The more cities you have, the more "calamity" cards you'll pull. Calamities are pretty nasty. The weakest ones reduce population/cities. The stronger ones will split up your empire in a civil war, destroy several towns, or flip your city to an opponent. Probably the most powerful negative feedback loop I've seen in a game, a player that's strongly winning can quickly end up behind others.
- Civil wars are nastier the bigger your empire is.
- There's a cap on the number of troops/tokens you can have. Looks like a technical limitation of a board game (sort of like not being able to build more houses in Monopoly if the houses run out). But it acts as a negative loop in that if you overextend your empire, you won't have the troops to defend it against attacks.
- Similar to Risk, the bigger you are, the more people will gang up against you.

So, the game rewards slow and careful expansion, and really punishes greedy growth.

[Alec S.]

Yeah, a common use of balancing positive and negative feedback loops is rewarding expansion, but punishing over-extension, meaning there's an incentive to grow, but a need to do so carefully and strategically to maximize the benefits of the positive feedback and minimize the drag from the negative feedback.  One of the purest examples of this is the game Risk, where that's pretty much the crux of the whole game.  The more places you occupy, the more units you get, but if you spread your units to thin to occupy the most space, it's easy for your opponents to start chipping away at your territory.