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IT'S OUT! LOOPY, a tool for thinking in systems (Patreon)

Published:
2017-03-23 12:36:53
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

So all this time I've been making educational simulations?  Well, at long friggin' last, I've made a tool for you to easily make your own educational simulation!

LOOPY, a tool for thinking in systems

Thank you so much for sticking with me the last three months as I made this project, I really couldn't do it without your support and feedback. (Did I mention Patreon is currently my only source of income? My OpenNews Fellowship ended two months ago) And, for you supporters who picked the Peep and/or Polygon rewards, check out the "credits" button in the Loopy editor – your very own Peep and/or Polygon is there!

What's next? Well, first I'm going to lie down on the floor and stare into space for a week. That's just what I do after releasing a new major project. And then, because I've now made a tool for easily making explorable explanations, I'm going to make a few short interactive essays using LOOPY! Eat your own dog-food, as they say.

And finally, I'd love to see what kinds of simulations you can cook up in LOOPY! Please either email me 'em at n (@) ncase (.) me, or post them in the Patreon comments below. And if you're an educator, please let me know if LOOPY ends up being useful in your classroom – and how I can make it even more useful.

Again, here's LOOPY: http://ncase.me/loopy/ 

Thank you all so, so much!

<3,

~ Nicky Case


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Comments

UltimApe

Yay! Its better than I thought it would be, and I thought it was going to be great! I love how fast it is for me to express ideas in it. Do you have a list of features or goals you decided against or didn't have time to implement? I wanna see if I can get some people to help me expand on some bits and would love to figure out what you were thinking. Off the top of my head, encoding json as base64 string in the URL might be an easy win.

ncase
>>4394082

Thanks for asking, Nicholas! :) Here's some features I may implement soon, or maybe for Loopy version 2.0: * More complex "arrow" logic: e.g. having a relationship where more->more, but less->no change. Or, an arrow only sends a signal if a node has a certain quantity, or whatever. * A tool to pan & zoom the camera around A feature that's often requested, but I won't do: Graphs. Because it's a step-by-step simulation, you won't get nice sinusoidal oscillators, you'd get a gross... square wave or whatever. It won't bring any insight, I don't think. And ooh, I'll think about the base64 encoding! If I *do* do base64, I'll have to make sure the URL parsing can detect if its JSON vs base64, to be backwards-compatible with all the peeps who've already saved their models to Loopy. Thanks again! :D

Green

Thank you, this is wonderful. Is there any chance you could update it at some point to include actual numbers or relationships? For instance, X increases Y by 11% per year, or X would save Y dollars per year, etc? Given that I'm saying per year here..any possibility of including a timeframe as well (days, or years, etc)? I'm also wondering....any possibility of being able to have images to represent the idea (e.g. image of fox or foxes)--either next to the circle or as a substitute for the circle, and it the symbol could shrink or grow, or could multiply, etc). Thank you so much for doing this!

ncase
>>4409826

Thank you too! At first, I thought I wanted to keep Loopy qualitative, rather than quantitative, so that it gives complete novices an intuition first. (also, how would you quantify "depression" or "political unrest"?) But come to think about it more... why not both? Why not have it be mostly qualitative, but ALSO some optional Advanced Features for quantitative modeling? Hm.... some ideas for Loopy v2.0...

Mark Trexler

Help. Today I seem totally unable to add Text to my Loopy. Worked fine the other day. Am I doing something different, or is it possible that the programs has been modified and Text got temporarily disabled?

ncase
>>4566383

Oh no! That's very odd, I didn't push any new code today – and adding Text still works on my end. May I suggest trying the following? * try a different browser * try turning off browser extensions * try emptying the browser's cache & do a "hard reload" And if none of those work, please let me know what browser/OS you're using so I can try troubleshooting it more on my end. Thanks, Mark!

Mark Trexler

Apologies. It looks like I wasn't double-clicking correctly to activate the text feature. Got it working now!

Mark Trexler

It would be great to be able to turn a node (or nodes) on or off. As far as I can tell right now I need to create two different Loopys, one with and one without the node in question. Here's an example: 1) Climate information flows without an effective knowledge management function: <a href="http://bit.ly/2o487z2" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/2o487z2</a> 2) Climate information flows WITH an effective knowledge management function <a href="http://bit.ly/2nbJP72" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/2nbJP72</a> . One node makes a huge difference to the system.

ncase
>>4569069

That's actually a really great idea! This way players can see more readily how small interventions can have outsized effects. ("lever points", I think Donella Meadows called 'em)

David Rysdam

Imma be honest: I was a little underwhelmed by Loopy. It looked neat, but it didn't seem very powerful. However, I saw your rec of "Thinking in Systems" and that book has blown my mind. It lines up with a lot of unconnected things I've thought (and been doing) myself, but I hadn't put it all together. The book made me excited to use Loopy to make larger things...and again I was unfortunately underwhelmed. Loopy only manages what the book calls "stocks". There doesn't seem to be any way to adjust flows. Am I missing something? Is that coming in 2.0? Is there another tool I should be looking at?

David Rysdam
>>4579899

Replying to myself here. "Thinking in Systems" refers to software and has equation values in an appendix. So I went search for some modeling software. There's some for-pay stuff, but eventually I found this amazing tool: <a href="https://insightmaker.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://insightmaker.com/</a> It does a lot of what I think you want Loopy to be and is apparently even embeddable in web pages.

Mark Trexler

After saving my Loopy, when I go back to the link (the ones in my note above) the Loopy system is too large for my screen. I can't find any way to resize it. Am I doing something wrong?

ncase
>>4629587

Hi Mark! Sorry about that, I haven't added a camera panning/zooming feature yet. For now, a workaround is this: zoom out in your *browser*, and once you're far back enough, refresh your browser so that it re-centers your model. Hope that works for now!

ncase
>>4579899

Hi David – glad to hear Thinking In Systems helped you a lot! So yeah, that's the thing about Loopy, it's mostly for people who *haven't* read Thinking In Systems (yet), it's a way to dip your toes in the water. I actually *did* try making Loopy quantitative at first – but then, after a lot of playtesting, realized that having things move around continuously and simultaneously looked beautiful, but left a lot of people feeling lost. So, I slowed it down & made the simulation show things happening step-by-step. (My Post-Mortem for more of the thought process behind this major change I made: <a href="http://blog.ncase.me/loopy-a-post-mortem/)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://blog.ncase.me/loopy-a-post-mortem/)</a> A few other reasons why I didn't do quantitative stock-and-flows: I wanted to be able to use Loopy in the future to talk about issues from environmentalism, to political polarization, to psychotherapy, etc! But there's a lot of concepts in those fields that don't really make sense to quantify. How do you quantify "depression", let alone determine appropriate stocks & flows for it? I think stocks & flows are an incredibly powerful tool – but so far I've only seen them effectively applied in ecology & economics, two places where it totally makes sense to quantify things. But then again, on the other hand, I think you've pointed out a big area for improvement: so far, I've been thinking of it like it's accessibility "versus" powerfulness. And in the end, I went for accessible & general over scientific & quantitative. But maybe I could create a tool that *starts* off accessible, and the more you learn, the more advanced features you can unlock. This would be better than just having Simple Loopy 1.0 and Advanced Loopy 2.0, there'd be a smooth continuum between the two! I have NO IDEA how I'd actually design that, though. I was already pushing three months with just Loopy v1.0. Oh well, stay tuned for more changes to Loopy! And thanks for asking. :)

ncase
>>4688781

Nice!! Thank you so much for making this & sharing it with me :)

Rhino Stew

Hi Nicky, Sooo this is going to be kind of crazy and out of the blue but my name is Luke. I used to pal around with you on Sheezyart and Newgrounds as spedsonaplane (once upon a time we tried to make a CRAZY ambitious game). Your work has been consistantly incredible and would love to get in touch and catch up at some point, I figure it might a super trippy experience.

ncase
>>4762243

Oh my gosh YES I remember you! We were making that creepy circus doll fighting game together! I remember we once got feedback from Edmund McMillen about the game's controls. And that the complex circus background was constantly making our game lag. I don't know why *those* are the memories that have stuck with me, but there we go. How've you been? It's been so long, we have to catch up! (my email is n@ncase.me, if you wanna chat beyond the confines of Patreon's commenting system)