As befits my profession, I shall have to do some statistical analysis on the corpus available to me to see if it's possible to devise a heuristic that identifies the 'running out of steam' point.
[Raak] Very nice! The game in fact shares its title with a song by the band "Liam Frost and the Slowdown Family", who I saw earlier this year supporting the wonderful Elbow. It's not my favourite of their songs, but it inspired the recursive dream game.