#8 - The importance of feedback loops

Early in my career, I worked at a AAA game studio building a first-person shooter. It was chaos in the best way. Besides being stuck in an elevator due to the occasional power outage when compiling a build, the place was buzzing with teams of sharp creatives wrangling art, code and physics into something that felt incredible. It was a formative experience.

One thing I remember vividly is a Friday playtest, late in the cycle. The game already looked pretty good. But something felt off. It was the controls.

They were sensitive and the response lagged. Only by milliseconds, but enough to make the game almost unplayable. It broke the loop between input and response. It killed players. Fixing it wasn’t simple. A team spent weeks tuning response curves and threading signals across subsystems. But when it finally clicked, it was night and day.

That’s when I learned: quality isn’t just about what a system does. It’s how clearly it listens. How quickly it responds. And how well it matches the input.

The trick with feedback loops isn’t just speed. It's calibration. Good loops feel personal. Matched to your pace. Tuned to your touch. In high-quality systems, it builds people's sense of influence, agency and trust.

In broken ones, input goes in but there's little response. Like pressing buttons on a laggy controller. You overcompensate, pressing harder, waiting for something—anything—to happen. It's the fastest way to lose trust. Look closely, and you’ll see it everywhere. People stop pressing buttons. Not because they don’t care, but because the loop is broken.

So if you care about systemic quality, focus on feedback loops. Tune them carefully until the system feels alive and responsive. Because feedback loops aren't just mechanics. They're what makes your system come alive.