Pacing - How Games Keep Things Exciting - Extra Credits

Hi there. Welcome to Extra Credits. My name is Daniel. I'll be doing the talking. This is James. He'll be doing the writing. And that over there is Allison who's in charge of the pretty pictures. We are here to talk about these and this week we want to talk about pacing. Take a look at this here chart. I don't know who made it. I found it years ago and I haven't been able to find it again since. But this right here, this is pacing. Let's have a closer look. This graph represents an ideal of pacing provided by Star Wars A New Hope. The curve shows our engagement with the film at any given time. Let's start at the beginning. We kick things off with a big chase and battle sequence where Princess Leia is captured by the Empire. Nice exciting start. You have my attention. Then things settle down a little as the stage is set and more of our characters are introduced. We meet Luke, Luke meets Obi-Wan, etc. But then we have a sudden spike in intensity as Luke's aunt and uncle are killed. And from there the curve is a succession of peaks and valleys slowly building the tension higher and higher and higher until it finally reached the most

intense scene in the movie with Luke in the Death Star trench and that whole use the force moment. Luke fires the torpedoes, the Death Star is destroyed, and the intensity settles down as the story resolves itself. Great example of pacing. Ask anyone who entertains, be they a rock star, a writer, a casino owner, or a sketch comedian, and they'll tell you that almost all good entertainment has a pacing curve that looks just like that. You want to hit it big in the beginning, get everybody tuned in and excited about what's going on, and then you want to give your audience a breather so you can set the right baseline for the experience. Your opener has to be short, otherwise the audience will expect too much and they'll take your big intro as the baseline of excitement for your piece, creating an unreasonable expectation about the trajectory of your work. The first God of War is a great example. The opening Hydra fight grabbed you and made sure you weren't putting that game down anytime soon. But then they ramped back the epicness for a bit so they could choose their moments and weren't forced to take everything to 11 halfway through the game just to keep your attention. Once you got your opener in place, then you need to oscillate that engagement level in a steadily increasing manner. Many young designers make the mistake of thinking that each moment in a game has to be bigger and better than the last. They think their game has to plot a straight line constantly climbing

higher. When in reality, that's actually kind of counterproductive. The thing is, human beings get acclimated to stimuli. Think of entertainment like candy. If you have candy every now and then, it tastes awesome. If you have it all the time though, it starts only tasting okay, and before you know it, you have to turn to even more potent sugary treats to get that level of satisfaction. The player's overall enjoyment of your work will actually increase if you alternate between periods of intense engagement and periods of rest. If you want a crystal clear example of this, simply turn to the survival horror genre. In survival horror games, they use tension as the principal form of engagement. A good survival horror game will build the tension, scare you at the crescendo, and then release so they can build you up and scare you again. Bad survival horror games tend to do one of two things. They either A, constantly maintain a high level of tension, so much that it becomes exhausting, or B, try to scare you all the time to the point that the scares end up becoming routine instead of shocking. Finally, you can't leave your audience at the most intense point of the experience. You have to bring them back down so they feel some closure. Otherwise, they'll feel as though the experience was truncated or ended abruptly. This is the very rule we break to create cliffhangers, but unless that's your objective, a well-crafted

holistic piece should spend a little bit of time at the end bringing the audience back to where they engage with the piece as a whole. If you get them hugely invested in what's going on in the final moments, and then just cut to credits, you're only going to leave people frustrated. At this point, it's probably worth mentioning that this graph measures engagement of all sorts. Many games provide engagement through excitement or fun, but like I said with survival horror games, tension, satisfaction, curiosity, even sorrow can foster that engagement as well. And as a designer, you need to know what combination of emotions you're going to be using to understand how you're going to create this curve. Let's use the survival horror example again. Consider all the survival horror games that have been ruined because the designers didn't consider what type of engagement was appropriate for their game. Instead, because they were so used to delivering excitement and fun, they turned their game into another guns blazing action fest and completely failed to deliver on any of the tension that's the cornerstone of the genre, leaving the game with a curve that looks nothing like the one we showed. So yeah, that's basically how pacing works. Simple enough. But what a lot of designers tend to not realize is that this graph doesn't just apply to the experience as a whole. It applies to every moment. When James is designing a game, he splits it into roughly three segments:

the arc, the scene, and the action. The arc represents the piece as a whole. As we just discussed, you want the overall game to follow this sort of engagement curve. Just for an example, BioShock pulls this off fairly well. At least it does if you just imagine the game ends after that scene with Andrew Ryan. After that, it just kind of Yeah. Anyway, so that's the arc. The scene is a subsection of the game. What we would often call a level, though it can take other forms depending on the type of game you're playing. Each level or building or encounter in a game should follow the exact same engagement pattern. Dungeons in Oblivion, specific firefights in Halo, bosses from the early Final Fantasies, even the greatest levels in your favorite Mario game. Nine times out of 10 when you examine those scenes, you'll find you can plot them almost perfectly on the graph above. But this universal style of pacing extends one more layer down, down to the action. The action is a specific moment of player experience. It's frequently an aspect of the mechanics, often something as simple as a single player input. You ever play a shooter where the guns feel just right? Go back and you'll notice firing the gun fits on this curve. That bit of excitement as you begin to raise

the gun, slight lull as you bring it to your mark, then bang, the shot, followed by a drift off as you bring the gun back to its resting position. It all happens in less than a second, but that second is divided up along those lines. That is the action. If the action doesn't share that curve, the game tends to feel stilted and just off somehow. This is one of the hardest things to achieve as a designer, but it's also the most important, because the action is what the player experiences the most directly. Think of this graph as a giant tessellation, and everywhere you zoom in, you'll find the same graph repeated in miniature. The three sections I've given, the arc, the scene, and the action, are just the three that James finds to be the most useful in creating a game. But if you go look in yourself, you should be able to find this graph everywhere. You want to make a well-paced game? Try to make sure it conforms to this graph in as broad and as granular a sense as possible. Anyway, hopefully that was interesting. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week.