GDrive link here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YjPkUOmRunyc79TtmXzZr3OXRYA9HjhB/view?usp=sharing
I’ve been playing a lot of the Arena mode in League of Legends lately, so I will talk about that! There are a lot of nested gameplay loops in Arena because of the round-based combat structure. There’s the most frequent loop of combat each round, where the player’s role is to figure out how to win the 2v2 matchup with the resources that they have. In this fast loop, the player enters with an idea on how they must play to win, and then executes actions and observes the outcome to see if their mental model was correct. The larger loop is the overall match, purchasing items and selecting augments that synergize well together. Players make decisions on how to spend their resources and enter the fast combat loop again. The outcome informs the player whether their item/augment choices were good.
The game doesn’t have arcs in the sense that Cook describes (as they mostly pertain to simple narrative arcs). However, it does touch upon the fact that if we deconstruct a single iteration of a loop, it can be considered an arc for the player. Each match of Arena is an “arc” for the player, in this sense, because they learn something new about the interactions between the vast pool of augments.
