I've been playing Mass Effect 2 nonstop prior to my vacation last week, gunning down Geth and advancing my own personal space opera as quick order. After returning from vacation, I put Mass Effect 2 on hold in lieu of XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which I rented because, hey, maybe I should play current releases every now and again instead of two-year-old critical darlings that everyone already knows and loves. XCOM's pacing and play mechanics result in a far different experience than Mass Effect 2, as I anticipated—we're talking the difference between third-person shooter and turn-based strategy, after all; I did not expect, however, that XCOM would draw me in for many of the same reasons that Mass Effect 2 turned into such a time sink. For all of its dissimilarities in gameplay, both XCOM and Mass Effect 2 have mastered the most crucial part of a game's replay value: the feedback loop.
The feedback loop, in this case, is what drives me forward in my desire to play, and how unwilling I am to put down the controller once I've started. When I talk about being "addicted" to a game, I'm talking about how strongly its feedback loop pulls me in, and how powerless I am to put it down because of how in-the-groove I'm feeling. A good feedback loop papers over a game's natural stopping places, compelling me to continue for two, three, even four hours at a time, and both XCOM and Mass Effect 2 have mastered a very specific type of feedback loop, despite their differences.
XCOM and Mass Effect 2 create their dastardly addictive draw by artfully, seamlessly combining involving action sequences with careful micromanagement and upgrading. During the actual story missions, I'm fighting for survival against enemies while using a Neeson-esque very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over the course of gameplay, and reaping rewards based on my decisions about character progression. After the combat scenario is through, I retreat to my home base and start upgrading my character performance based on the spoils I've collected, researching different buffs and equipment and abilities so that I can go back into the fray and whup even more alien ass. Both gameplay segments feed into each other perfectly—I can't get stronger on the battlefield without outfitting my characters with better equipment, but I can't make the advancements I need without collecting further resources from the field.
It's this desperation to balance out both sides, along with the curiosity of seeing exactly how much misery my new plasma cannon inflicts, that makes both XCOM and Mass Effect 2 so deviously habit-forming. Neither game never feels "at rest," like things are so good that I can just quit in the middle, and there's always a new power to unlock or mission to conquer. The cycle of getting stuff and wrecking shop with said stuff in order to obtain more stuff appeals to the most lizard-like portions of my brain, and if I'm just doing what feels good, man, time can pass by in both games very quickly.
In fact, it's this same lizard-like appeal that makes Call of Duty multiplayer such a hit. Shooting dudes in the face with an M4A1 is a rush, especially when you know that it's a real dude in Ohio instead of a computer-controlled dude, plenty of games let me shoot dudes in the face. Call of Duty's innovation, starting with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and continuing through present day, is how it implemented a progression system, a progression system that sounds an awful lot like what I've been talking about in my previous two paragraphs. Consider: before each match, I pick a series of skills (perks) and equipment (guns, explosives, etc.); I then fight off waves of baddies (everyone online) using the totally rad combination of weapons and abilities I hand-picked; afterwards, I gather the resources I collected in battle (XP) and apply it to accruing more gear and buffs (leveling up, though Black Ops lets me full-on purchase upgrades with currency à la XCOM and Mass Effect 2).
When doled out in correct doses, micromanagement adds a ton of fun to already well-executed games, whether it's a role-playing shooter/RPG, a turn-based strategy game, or the world's most popular FPS. Top-notch play mechanics can go a long way towards making a game great, but mastering the feedback loop helps them go even further.
*Note: I have deliberately left the Diablo series out of this discussion, as I have no experience with it at all, though I understand it may as well be called Feedback Loop: The Game.
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