A game that I play often is Honkai: Star Rail, which is a turn-based gacha game. At the smallest level, individual battles have you to look at enemy weaknesses, deal damage, and chain skills/ultimates to defeat the enemies in the shortest amount of time. At the medium loop, there is exploration and progression, playing through story chapters, pulling new characters, and building their stats through relic farming. The largest arc spans months because each version brings a new story chapter, limited characters, and endgame content like Memory of Chaos and Pure Fiction that resets periodically, giving you a recurring goal to optimize toward. The architecture keeps you engaged daily through time-gated trailblaze power, weekly through challenge resets in Currency Wars or Divergent Universe, and long-term through the new story and playable characters. The cycle of new updates follows the sequence of arcs that Cook describes and there is definitely a content treadmill to continue keeping players interested and spending money.
