The Engagement Layers of Writing

So for a long time now, I’ve had this theory about how we engage with books from both sides of the page, which I would desperately like to strong arm into common use so that I can start using it in conversation with other writers and readers and have them understand what the hell I’m talking about. So today, in lieu of the many other things I can and should be doing instead, I’m going to share that theory with you.

I even came up with a better less confusing name for it specifically so I could share it with you, so you’d better appreciate it.

Gameplay Loops

There’s a set of ideas within game design circles called gameplay loops, which are used to describe a player’s experience within a game in terms of what the actual gameplay of a game is within different time frames, but also in a way that allows us to see how different elements of gameplay interact with and build off of one another.

The primary gameplay loop, the most important aspect of a game, is what a player of a game is doing on a moment to moment basis. This is the running and gunning in a shooter or the moving and jumping in a platformer. The primary gameplay loop is so important because it’s what the player is going to be doing all the time, and everything else in the game (in theory) is about giving context for and excuses to engage with the primary gameplay loop. It is the foundation of the entire experience.

The secondary gameplay loop is what the player is doing on a slightly larger scale, like clearing a level, while the tertiary loop is focused on an even larger scale, like clearing enough levels to reach a boss fight or advance the story.

For a metaphor to understand it borrowed from Yahtzee Croshaw, if a game is a house, the primary loop is a brick, the secondary loop is a wall, and the tertiary loop is a room.

Why do I bring this up in a discussion about writing?

Because I think writing has gameplay loops too.

Layers of Engagement

To make that more clear, I think the way with we engage with books can be experientially divided into different layers that build off each other in the same way gameplay loops work for games. When I first came up with this idea, I wanted to call it the gameplay loops of writing, which made complete sense to me and probably only me, because books and whatnot don’t actually have gameplay. Because they’re books, not games.

Yes I know visual novels exist, let’s move on.

But “gameplay” is just the game specific term for the audience’s experience of engaging with a given work. Games have players, books have readers. Games have gameplay loops, books have… layers of engagement. Yeah.

Look, it’s my idea, I get to name it.

Specifically, I think all books essentially have primary, secondary, and tertiary layers of engagement which define the reader’s experience with them.

The primary layer of engagement of a text is, like in gameplay loops, the moment to moment experience with it. In other words, for books, the primary layer is the prose. The word choice and sentence structure, the dialogue and narration, the scene selection. The experience of actually, physically reading the book line by line and sentence by sentence.

When a book has a really good primary layer, the mere act of reading it is enjoyable, and it can be done in different ways. Blacktongue Thief has so much voice and wit to its prose that I smile just reading it, and I haven’t even gotten far enough in it to remember the main character’s name or know what the story is (Update 6/13/2022: I finished the book. It was very good.) In contrast, Priest’s prose is so lean it basically just ceases to exist, leaving me somehow more transported into the world than a book with twice as much description could ever manage.

The secondary layer of engagement covers the more overarching experience of a text, and as such is the probably the biggest and broadest layer. Here we find elements like plot, pacing, characterization, and worldbuilding. You can get a sense of a book’s primary layer of engagement by reading a few sentences of it. A book’s secondary loop can take much longer to get a feel for, as it’s something that can take time to be built—sometimes for the whole text.

Then we have the tertiary layer of engagement, which I think is going to get the most pushback from people. Because I define the tertiary layer of engagement as the things you experience almost outside the confines of the book itself, using the whole of the text. Here is where I argue things like themes, thesis, meaning, and cultural context live. I call it the “thinking layer” because its the layer of engagement that you’re left to think about when you’re not actively engaged in reading the story itself, probably because you finished it. When you’ve hit “The End” in a story, and you “dig deeper” (as your English teacher was probably fond of saying) and ask “But what does it mean? What’s this about?” That’s when you know you’re talking about the tertiary layer of engagement.

So What?

I want to just take a second to clarify what I’m really putting forward here, because I’m worried it might seem to some people like I’m just saying “Hey guys, did you ever notice that to read a book, you have to read the sentences in it? And if you want to get the plot, you have to read a whole bunch of pages of it??”

Talking about a book’s prose or plot or even themes and context is not inherently new in and of itself. But I think the idea of framing these things as the building blocks of the experience of reading something is. The idea that I could break down the experience of a book into its sentence to sentence experience, its chapter to chapter experience, and the experience all those chapters synthesized together to culminate in kind of permanently changed the way I think about books as I’m reading them, and it’s started affecting the way I talk to other people about them.

It’s helped me organize my thoughts and feelings about the books I read by giving me a framework to sort my experience into.

And just for fun to help illustrate this, I’m going to walk you through different kinds of experiences you can have with a book, as defined by the layers of engagement.

The Popcorn Read

When you enjoyed the hell out of a book’s primary and secondary layers but it’s pretty clear 90% of the people reading this including you didn’t give the tertiary layer a second thought.

My Trash

When you really enjoyed the secondary layer, even if in the back of your mind you know the primary layer is weak and the tertiary doesn’t have much going on either.

The Thinker

When the tertiary layer sticks with you, the secondary layer was thought provoking, but the primary layer a slog.

Not for Me

When the primary layer is indisputably solid but you were not vibing with the secondary and/or tertiary layers much, if at all.

Garbage

The primary layer is awful, the secondary layer is also bad, and if there is a tertiary layer at all, it’s probably racist or something equally revolting.

Pretentious Garbage

The book is really fucking proud of its tertiary layer and is going to put it front and center at all times to the detriment of the other two layers.

Your Favorite Book

The book where all three layers just worked. Every paragraph was a treat, fire writ upon the page. The story gripped you cover to cover. And, what cements it in your mind, you keep mentally coming back to the book because of the meaning behind the story, and by extension its personal meaning to you.

The Layers of Writing

The other big thing it’s leaked into for me is my writing. And really, just like the concept of gameplay loops is much more useful to game designers than players, I think layers of engagement might end up being more useful for writers than readers.

Except maybe not, because I named them wrong.

See, while keeping the layers of engagement in mind when writing is, I think, useful for prioritization as you think about what layer you’re currently working on within any given moment, the “primary, secondary, tertiary” scale we borrowed from gameplay loops is a bit misleading from a writer’s standpoint.

In game design, it’s really paramount that you get the gameplay loops down pat in order, or something is going to go wrong. But, at least for me, I would never in a million years come at writing a book in the order the layers present.

Me personally, I start in the secondary layer, getting the broad, overarching plot, pacing, and character beats down, usually discover the tertiary layer somewhere amidst that process, and don’t really pay much attention to the primary layer until the very end as I’m polishing it up enough to show to other people. I’m sure for other people, they start at the tertiary layer and work their way down to the primary. (I think if you started a writing project focused on the primary layer of engagement, making sure all the words and sentences are just right, you would never get that project done.)

So maybe I’m wrong about this whole thing being more useful to writers. At the very least, everything’s kind of labeled deceptively on our end.

But I still find this whole mess fascinating to think about. And like I said, if we could all just collectively strongarm it into common parlance, that’d be super helpful to me for a bunch of reasons.