Below is an e-mail I sent to a fellow audio colleague after he asked how I was going about "battling repetition" and "endless loop syndrome" in the upcoming PS3 video game from thatgamecompany: Flower...

Interesting you mention looping...

I personally adore the loop.  In most of the games I've worked on, I try my best to work with the loop rather than against it.  The loop itself strikes me as something that can be quite beautiful and elegant.  And, after all, gaming consists of all sorts of loops... from the engineers who spend hours studying and crafting the proper gameplay loop for the system... to the player who wants nothing more than to stay in that moment where his abilities and desires meeting with the game's demands creates a loop of joyful play.

Of course, every single bit of gameplay music in Flower is interactive.  There's a lot of multiple stream mixing and dynamic cuing and all sorts of stuff, and in ten playthroughs of any given area, there'll likely be ten different builds of music.

But the music is very much loop based.  I like loops.  Many of my favorite pieces of game music are loops.  I'd also say that the music that most game music fans consider their favorites are also loops.

I definitely like interactive music.  I actually got my start in game music doing MODs, and jumping between patterns and convoluting the piece structure is an amazing thing.  And like I said, there's a heck of a lot of interactivity in Flower's music.  Lots of LUA scripts and SCREAM scripts and a good bit of MIDI-driven stuff.  Despite all that, the thing that I'm pushing forward is a really coherent, discrete aural identity for Flower that I believe could not be instantiated without the use of the loop as an important musical structure...