Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous. | ||
| --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial, 1991) | ||
This chapter is all about the way we experience time and intensity in games, what we call the pace of the game. The chapter contains the following sections:
See also Chapter 29, “Time Limits and Time Manipulation,” for some related ideas.
Each game provides a unique experience. Some involve intense action, while others may have sequences of story development and exploration interspersed with action sequences. Some may have almost nothing that you would describe as “action.” Some games keep you in suspense, then suddenly propel you into a demanding and frenetic situation. Others keep up a pretty constant pace, with brief moments between waves, levels, missions, and so on.
Games use different methods to achieve these effects and to control, to some extent, the experience of the player. One of these ways is to plan for different levels of intensity and pressure as the game is played. For instance, in a classic First-Person Shooter, you feel the pressure of the hunt and the hunted. You are sneaking around this very dangerous place, but for long periods, nothing may happen at all. Then, suddenly, you are in a furious battle with guns blazing. When it is over, assuming you are still alive, you go back to the hunter/hunted pace. If your health is low, you will be desperately seeking a medpak while avoiding new confrontations. The game has sections that are flat but full of tension and anticipation, followed by spikes of intense action. The intensity of the game almost never lets up, but the level of action peaks from time to time. It is almost entirely in the user’s control, however. Picking a safe location, the player can be safe and even experience a total downturn in tension and activity for extended periods. Once he begins to explore again, the tension returns. This is just one example of effective pacing.
Pacing is important for various reasons. It can provide structure or unpredictability to a game, depending on how it’s used. It also creates and maintains tension and anticipation, interest levels, and variations of focus and activity, which, combined, provide an enjoyable experience. With good design, a game need never become boring.
The pacing needs of games are not all the same because game players aren’t all the same. For some people, the ideal pace is a game that is intense from start to finish, such as an online death match in an FPS game. Others may prefer a game such as a typical RPG, in which you explore at leisure, with little pressure, only occasionally encountering a very intense experience or a pressured situation. In the FPS example, it doesn’t require much to keep players interested and focused. If they don’t want to die and be humiliated, they are involved every second of the match. In the RPG example, the story drives players forward, or the promise of some reward for completing a quest or mission. Only on occasion does the intensity reach the same life-or-death intensity of the FPS, but the players look forward to it!
I once heard it described that humans like to guess things subliminally, meaning they get a “feeling” when the next action sequence or reward will be coming up. They are more than happy to wait until then, as long as they are right a reasonable amount of the time. (They actually don’t want to be right all the time.) This anticipation and reward can quickly add to the addictiveness of the game. It’s like waiting for the long brick in Tetris, which is the key to a Tetris match. You get a feel for when it’s likely to show up, when it feels right...about now...when you really need it, and when it shows up just in time. That cycle of anticipation adds to the experience. In an MMO, it’s revealed when people grind, when they repetitively kill the same monsters, trying to anticipate when they will get rewarded with a rare drop or a particular item they need.
In an RTS, the pressure can actually be constant. You are in a mad rush, developing technologies or units, exploring, seeking and stockpiling resources, mounting attacks against the enemy or fending them off, and so on. The pace could best be described as ramping up from already very busy to hectic. Contrast that with a Turn-Based Strategy game, such as Civilization, or board games, such as Settlers of Catan, in which there is ultimately a lot going on but the pace is leisurely, because you can think between turns. But even in a turn-based game, situations develop in which the intensity of your choices increases. Perhaps your units are being threatened or you are about to launch a major attack on the enemy—something you have been planning for a dozen moves. The intensity seems higher at that point. Is the pace also higher then? What compels you to play just one more turn?
As it is in literature, theater, and cinema, pacing in games is often provided in the story setup and/or the dialog as well as the action, and also in the emotional intensity of the scenes. It is your level of interest in what happens next that keeps you going.
Put another way, pacing is a measure of how compelling the entertainment is and how it may go through different stages of intensity. So another way of seeing pacing at work is thinking about how driven you are to move forward through the game or story. Looking at it this way, pacing could be related to goals. The more compelling (and important) your current goals are, the higher the pace. If this were graphed, then a good game or story would always have a pace line well above the zero coordinate, but it would spike to much higher levels periodically. Depending on the type of game, the duration of the intensity spikes would vary from very short to long. On some graphs, the spikes would be almost continuous. In others, they would be separated by very long periods of “baseline” interest.
Another way of looking at pacing is to think about focus. In a very tense situation, where there could be an enemy around every corner or where you are fighting for your life against essentially constant attacks, your focus must be very intense to survive and avoid a deadly mistake. However, during a typical dialog scene, you may be on the lookout for clues, but you can relax your focus somewhat. So one possible measure of the pace of a game is how much focus you require at any given point. This is not the only way to look at it, however. You might need a lot of focus to look for some tiny, rare, but important item. If you spent a lot of time searching for this item without having to battle any enemies, the game might feel somewhat dull, and despite the fact that you had to focus pretty hard to find the elusive object, the pace would seem slow. Still, in life-or-death situations, your focus has to be amplified, which is why it might be used to measure pace. How focused does a player have to be at any given time while playing the game? Think about games you’ve played and compare your level of focus at different stages of the game.
“Okay, so how do I use pacing in my game?” I hear you asking. I will point out a lot of different uses, but if you only take away one thing from this entire chapter, it should be that you must sit down and look at the spikes you will put this gamer through—the emotional highs and lows. Make sure there are a lot of both, and make sure that when the player thinks they’ve experienced a high, there’s actually a much higher high coming! That’s really the point. Okay, now let’s continue....
Another way to measure the pace from the player’s point of view might be something we can call the activity level. Clearly, if you are battling 100 enemies or working on a fast-moving assembly line, you will be performing many actions very quickly. You may be punching buttons or keys at a furious rate. Activity levels are highest when action is highest, and when activity levels are high, so, generally, is a player’s focus. So, activity level, as seen from the player’s point of view, may be another guide to the pacing of the game.
In Chapter 30, “Ways to Communicate with the Player,” there is a section called “Emotion.” The emotional impact of a game also determines the level of immersion the player has. As with a good movie, emotions can shift, moving to all extremes—comedy to tragedy, for instance—and through all emotions in between. How do we experience times of elation versus times of deep sadness or mourning? How do we experience the rush of fear versus the glow of victory? By carefully crafting a game’s emotional timeline, we can further affect the pace—the perception of the experience.
There are any number of ways to impact a player’s emotional responses, including story-based techniques, specific gameplay elements, and ambient elements, such as music and sound effects, lighting effects, and even changes in graphical style. For instance, the mood in a crystal city probably is different from the mood in a dank sewer or a poorly lit alleyway.
In the “Emotion” section in Chapter 30, “Ways to Communicate with the Player,” we go into some detail about how we evoke emotional responses in players. Likewise, in Chapter 9, “Storytelling Techniques,” you can refer to sections on “Creating Comedy” and “Making Things Scary” for more ideas on emotion in games.
Putting the pieces together, pacing could equal some magical combination of:
Interest Level/Goals. This helps a game achieve a high baseline pace and keeps a player absorbed and involved.
Action/Activity Level. This measures the current player’s level of activity and the game’s action component. Depending on the type of game, this kind of experience is used to increase the intensity and the pace.
Focus. This measures how involved the player is at any given time in the game. Focus generally accompanies periods of intense action, but focus can also be high during times of less intense action.
Emotional Impact. This is a measure of the emotional timeline of the game, showing as best we can the anticipated experience the player will have emotionally in response to the unfolding game adventure. In some games, this would be a non-factor; however, in others it can be very important. In games where there are deeper stories, significant events, tragedy, comedy, surprise, fear, and other strong emotions, this becomes all the more significant in determining the overall impression the player will have and the subjective assessment of the pace of the game.
Overall Intensity of Experience. In essence, taking all other factors, how intense is the experience the player is having at any given time? As the overall intensity level peaks and fades, the pace changes. Again, there is no one ideal pace for any game, but some genres suggest more constant overall intensity, while others benefit from a more varied pace.
Although some elements of pacing are common to most games, each type of game may achieve pacing in different ways. One quick warning about loading screens: They can actually have a negative score on pacing, meaning they can hurt the experience (negative equals boredom!), so on good games, the loading screens often give you some info (such as a goal, some story update, a new move, key functionality, your latest stats) or something to at least distract you while you wait for loading to happen.
The following sections discuss some of the ways that pacing is controlled, listed by genre.
Platform games are generally all about action, and players of platformers are generally looking for a pretty high-intensity experience. So in a platform action game, there’s rarely a complete lull in the action. There may be occasional scenes, and there’s the respite that is offered at the end of a level, when you may get some score information and a setup for the next level. But during each level, there will only occasionally be moments when you can stop all together, and some platform games don’t allow you to stop even for a moment—because a clock is ticking, because a relentless enemy is chasing you, or because the environment is changing, such as platforms that fall if you stand on them too long or a room with walls that are closing in on you.
Constant Pressure. There are several types of action, even in action games. There is the kind of game in which there’s no time at all to stop, but you must play at full speed to complete the level, defeat the enemy, and/or avoid the enemies and obstacles. This kind of game has a constant high level of intensity. Good examples are Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Lode Runner, and Zaxxon. First-Person Shooters in multiplayer mode tend to be like this as well, depending on what role you choose to play in the contest. Many arcade games ramp up the level of pressure over time. (See the upcoming Escalating Events and Shrinking Worlds bullet.) Classic examples are Space Invaders and Missile Command, which started with a certain amount of manageable pressure and, over time, became so difficult that more often than not, it was only a matter of time before you were defeated.
Enemies and Bosses. Some action games feature a lot of incidental action followed by larger battles, perhaps culminating with a boss battle. In these games, there is generally a pretty high intensity throughout, with spikes of activity on occasion and a generally frenetic battle against some massive creature that takes a long time to defeat. During boss battles, the intensity of action and the intensity of focus generally increase and stay elevated for longer periods of time than they do with normal battles. In this way, the pace of the game peaks when you fight a boss. After defeating the boss, intensity drops, and you get an often well-deserved opportunity to rest, recover, and celebrate victory.
Action with Some Strategy. Some action games also contain elements of strategy or moments of quiet. Such moments are generally provided in safe locations, where the player can prepare for the next sequence, power up or heal, or enter into a stealth sequence. The pacing of this kind of game is different from that of more pure action games in that it allows you to escape the intensity for moments, rest, and prepare for the next phase.
Sneaking and Fighting. Many games these days control intensity by creating an atmosphere of danger in which the player must be stealthy and move carefully, picking the time and location for battle whenever possible. A full-on attack without care will often result in disaster. Examples include Thief, Abe’s Oddysee, and the Metal Gear Solid series.
Sense of Urgency. In most action games there is a sense of urgency, even if there is no clock ticking. There’s often no real urgency, but it’s implied in the structure or back story of the game. In any case, players approach these types of games expecting a high intensity curve. For more on this, see Chapter 29, “Time Limits and Time Manipulation.”
Escalating Events and Shrinking Worlds. Another way that pacing in action games can increase is to have the intensity of action increase due to changes in the situation. A classic example of this would be the famous conveyor-belt scene from the old I Love Lucy show, where the belt suddenly speeds up, and the previously routine repetitive task Lucy is supposed to perform becomes impossible, but she keeps trying. In games, this can be accomplished by rate increases, such as having the blocks fall faster in Tetris, or by shrinking the available space in which the player can operate, thereby increasing the intensity of concentration and action. This also happens in Tetris as the space fills up and there’s less time to react to each falling block. However, these effects can also appear in games with 2D or 3D representational worlds, using the same methods.
Level Break. Players of high-intensity action games get a break between levels. This is the time to save the game and get ready for more. Presumably, the game will get harder with each succeeding level. Of course, some games, such as Space Invaders, Defender, and Missile Command, give you mere moments to get ready for the next level, while other games may give you a short cut scene or a level summary screen where you can linger somewhat and choose when to begin the next round.
Other Changes. When you introduce significant changes in a game, the pace certainly changes. For instance:
If the difficulty suddenly increases, the player must focus and work harder to succeed. Likewise, if the number of enemies suddenly increases or decreases, the player feels more or less challenged, respectively.
The story changes, introducing new plot elements, new challenges, or even major twists. You are suddenly using a different weapon or a different armor system. You become more or less powerful, or you must master a new type of attack/defense.
Camera viewpoints may change—for instance, changing point of view or which character’s viewpoint you are using. Even this sort of change can affect how the game feels to play.
Changing, for instance, from a top-down view into a first-person view brings more immediacy to the game and changes the way it feels to navigate the game terrain.
No Safety. This is simply when you take away the safe zones. For example, maybe they had a bunker but it’s gone now. In the Commando arcade machine, if you stood still, someone would lob a grenade right at you. Having no safety really keeps you moving.
Battle simulation games also feature different types of pacing. This is often as a direct result of the type of battle simulation it is. For instance, a submarine game will generally have long periods of quiet—hunting for prey—followed by relatively brief experiences of attacking and then escaping any counter-measures—or moments of panic as the sub is discovered by anti-submarine ships or planes, and it’s suddenly life or death. Military flight simulators (if at all realistic) will also have longer periods of flying around seeking the enemy or reaching the objective, followed by very intense battle sequences. Typical moments in battle simulations include those in the following two subsections.
To many players, war simulations are at their best when the action is intense and constant, although many players also like games that alter the pace between strategy planning or stalking the enemy and flat-out action. At any rate, when you are immersed in the action, what are the elements of the game that can affect the pace of the experience?
Briefing and Preparation. Many battle simulation games involve sequences of mission briefing and preparation. These sequences are low on the intensity scale but create a sense of realism and involvement, as well as a full understanding of what the mission entails.
Travel. Once the mission is underway, there is generally a sequence of travel, as you move toward the objective. Travel sequences can be somewhat low on the intensity scale, but they are increased if there is a threat of danger along the way, and they spike if there is an unexpected battle en route. (Some of this stuff even works for deer hunting games.)
Reaching the Objective. This is the crux of the matter. Once you reach the objective, the battle begins in earnest. This sequence raises the overall intensity level, and suddenly the pace speeds up.
Peak Battles. Even during the main mission objective, the battle may ebb and flow, and there can be moments of calm within the storm. On occasion, however, players will find themselves in epic battles or in situations where they must fight especially hard to survive and achieve their goals. These are peak battles, and these are where the pace is at its most intense.
Ebb and Flow. Pacing can be dramatically affected by changes in the situation; for instance, if the enemy is bringing reinforcements and you know that they will arrive in two hours (accelerated game time), or if you are planning an assault, but some of your own forces are delayed. Unexpected circumstances can also occur, such as the discovery that the intelligence info was wrong and the enemy wasn’t where they were supposed to be, or they were stronger than anticipated, and so on. Or they may appear to be much weaker than expected, but lead you into a trap where you have to scramble in a high-intensity battle to survive (such as in the movie The Last Samurai).
Retreat. At some point in a mission, you may have to retreat—regardless of whether the objective has been reached. Some mission-based games will end the mission once you have gained or lost the objective. In such games, there is no retreat. However, the retreat or withdrawal experience can remain intense, gradually decreasing in intensity.
Debrief. This is a chance to assess the mission and set up the next. This is, once again, a low-intensity sequence.
All Action. Although the various stages listed here are typical of simulation games, and they form a sort of arc of intensity, some simulation games dispense with the slower segments and place you right at the objective, where you will then engage in high-intensity action through most of the game. However, even in games that dispense with lengthy preparation and travel sequences, there can be pacing similar to the Sneaking and Fighting entry described in the “Action Games (Platform, Arcade, FPS)” section, where you must be wary and pick your battles carefully.
Some battle games actually place you in the role of the general, while the action takes place under your command. In such games, there is a different sort of urgency and pacing. In particular, ebb and flow (discussed a moment ago) play a significant role, as the battle may go through different stages, with advantage falling to either side at one time or another. All of the other aspects of battle simulations can occur in the General’s Perspective, but the overall intensity may be slightly lower. On top of that, there is generally a strategic aspect to the game, perhaps assigning more specific importance to each battle or mission in the concept of an overall war plan. With such long-range goals, the intensity of each battle may be slightly less, though some battles are critical, and circumstances can either increase or reduce the amount of intensity experienced. For instance, if you know that losing a particular battle will make it impossible to win the war, then that battle takes on some added value, and its intensity is probably going to be maximal. However, if you know you’ve really won the war already and you’re fighting a battle that, in reality, doesn’t matter, then the intensity of the battle is likely to be lower.
RPGs and adventure games have very different pacing from more action-oriented games. They operate at a generally slower pace, with long periods of moderate intensity and occasional “mobs and bosses” types of encounters. They have a lot more times of exploration, dialog, and even shopping in which the pacing is downright leisurely. However, such games are not flat, and various methods are used to control pacing.
The Big Goal. Long-range goal, low intensity. The achievement of the long-range goals of the game keep you moving through the game, so they add somewhat to the basic interest level.
Incremental Goals. Short- to medium-range goals, including side quests—moderate to high intensity.
Surprise Encounters. High intensity.
Timed Events. Generally high intensity due to time pressure.
Anticipation. Anticipation in the story can lead to an increased intensity, but the overall pace may still be slow.
Story and Emotion. Story and emotional scenes can add to the player’s investment in the outcome and therefore to the intensity of upcoming events, but the pace at this point is generally slow unless the scene is very active and intense, at which point it may be able to gain some of the pacing energy of a good movie or book. In terms of interactive pacing it may be slow, but in terms of story development it may create drama and new information, set up situations, or in some other way increase the game’s pace.
Mobs and Bosses. Large-scale fights and boss fights are always high intensity and increase the pace, in interactive terms.
Mini-Games. Mini-games are generally (but not always) arcade-like sequences that are fast-paced and require focus, especially because they may use different rules and controls from the main game (meaning the player is less familiar with them and has to focus harder). However, in terms of game pace, they are also (usually) not related to furthering the story. So, while they may fit the definition of fast-paced content, the fact that they are essentially irrelevant at the same time slows the pace. Some mini-games are not fast-paced at all. For instance, playing cards or chess (or chess-like games) as mini-games is definitely not fast-paced. Generally, mini-games are used as a break from the main game action. Exceptions exist. Some games use mini-games as part of the overall game design, and therefore they figure into the overall story pace of the game. And some mini-games really have an intensity of their own, so they could be considered a separate experience from the pace of the overall game—like playing a game as a vacation from a game.
Equipment or Ability Changes. A game can feel quite different when your character is suddenly much stronger (or much weaker) or faster (or slower) than before. This can happen somewhat when achieving a new “level” and therefore new skills or better statistics. But most games attempt to moderate the amount of increase you get from one level to another. There can be what I call plateau levels—levels in which your character obtains some key ability or reaches a milestone that, in either case, alters the character’s effectiveness significantly. Another way in which a character can suddenly seem stronger is by obtaining equipment that is much better than before and that might even have associated spells or abilities far beyond the character’s current level. In any case, this sudden increase in ability, whatever the source, generally leads to excitement and anxiousness to go test the new skills. This is generally an especially rewarding part of any game, and therefore the pace seems to be faster.
On the opposite side, a sudden loss of abilities or essential equipment can lead to an increased sense of danger and more focus and immersion. Though you can’t plow through the enemy landscape as quickly as you did before, you must play smarter and more carefully. Caution can seem like a slower pace, but concentration and focus can turn a few minutes of play into hours....
Cut Scenes. Generally, breaking to a cut scene slows the pace. The scene may be fascinating or simply necessary to complete plot elements. Occasionally, a cut scene is visually so far superior to the main game that it captures your attention. And don’t you find yourself wishing the whole game looked like that? But overall, sitting through a cut scene—particularly one that isn’t really interesting for some reason—slows the pace. You might sit through it because you’re afraid you’ll miss something important, but chances are you won’t want to sit through it again if you play the game more than once. And if the game does not include a way to skip the cut scene once it has been viewed, then it is really a pace killer.
The general arc of a strategy game begins at a relatively low but constant intensity at the beginning of the game, becoming more and more intense as the game progresses. Generally, once the game has developed, there are plateaus where the action once again levels off, interspersed with high-intensity encounters and sequences. As I mentioned earlier, there is a difference between RTS games and Turn-Based Strategy games, though turn-based games are less common these days than the RTS variety.
Generally, strategy games, especially Real-Time Strategy games, are races against one or more opponents. It is critical to manage all the resources, tech trees, and exploration and battle strategies simultaneously, so there is a constant urgency. However, that urgency increases as the game matures and reaches peak levels occasionally when battles erupt, particularly when battles are happening in more than one location simultaneously.
The stages of strategy games include:
Buildup and early exploration
Exploration and encounters
Next level tech
Major battles
Cat and mouse
Incremental gains or losses
Domination or defeat
So what controls pacing in strategy games?
Developing new technology
Amount of resources
Time
Build time
Amount of time needed to build into the tech tree
Enemy actions (attacks, land grabs, technology milestones, and so on)
Discovering new lands
Conquering or losing territories or assets
Story-driven events (where present)
Timers
Cinematics
Mission briefings
Pacing in Massive Multiplayer Games online is often quite different from pacing in single-player games. Partly, this is because MMORPGs are combinations of games and social networks and offer players a lot of freedom of choice, meaning that they can hang around in towns and talk or role play, or they can engage in exploration and high-paced battles. Typically, one of the few ways that designers can control pacing in MMORPGs is through the staging of events in the world, and to some degree by introducing expansions. Using plots, quests, and special events, designers can change the nature of the persistent online world by changing the sense of urgency inherent in the game or by increasing the danger level through the introduction of new enemies or even invasions.
In essence, with MMOGs, the designer can only provide the structure and opportunity. Using this infrastructure, players create games that meet their own pace requirements. Typically, however, the level of action and intensity will still vary, much in the same way that the intensity varies in RPGs, with a lot of exploration and player maintenance tasks and occasional battles. The frequency of battles generally varies with the location of the player, how the game has been populated with action-oriented activities, and the specific individual players’ goals. The use of instances, which are adventure spaces specifically spawned for a player or group, allows designers more control over the experience of a specific player or group and can allow for deep, intense, fast-paced, or any other kind of experience without the potential confusion of other players coming in to affect the experience.
Another important way in which MMOGs achieve pacing variation is through the interaction of players with other players. It is simply a different experience when you play alone in a world than when you play as part of a group. However, explaining how that differs is somewhat challenging. Playing with groups often entails long periods of waiting for one or more players to join or to complete personal tasks, times when someone has to go “afk” for some reason and you wait for him to return, little emergencies, people being lagged out or disconnected...in short, many obstacles to smooth play through the game. And of course there are simply those times when people like to chat and get to know each other.
On the other hand, when you are actually engaged in battles and exploration, being with a group is very intense, offers a lot more concentrated action, and often requires a lot more quick decision-making. Even within the group, however, the intensity of action may vary. The puller, who takes the risk of attracting the enemy’s attention and “pulling” him to the group, has a fairly high-intensity role. The tanks, who engage the enemy in close-quarters combat and protect the rest of the group, are pretty thoroughly engaged. Archers and magicians, who typically stand back and attack from a distance, have the pressure of doing a lot of damage and in some cases controlling enemies through spells that weaken, freeze, or slow them down, but the role is sometimes less “in your face” than that of the tanks. Still, if the enemy breaks loose and comes after them, things get really intense—quickly. Healers, like range fighters, have low-intensity jobs in fights that are not very challenging, but they have their hands full keeping the tanks and other players alive if the enemy is strong. They know that if they fail to keep the attackers alive, they will go down fast. Since group play is a hallmark of MMOGs, it’s safe to say that most, if not all, players experience a lot of group play and the variations of pace it offers.
Other challenges exist in MMOGs when it comes to controlling pacing. For instance, in some special areas, people “camp” to fight the best monsters or to open special chests. Instances solve some of these problems, meaning that MMOG developers can put such special content inside private experience spaces available only to a specific player or group at a time. Bottlenecks in MMOGs often cause irritation and frustration in players, and when they do, certainly the pacing of the game slows, although often there are social interactions that result from the waiting period.
Grinding is another problem for some MMOGs. When a player is simply fighting low-level enemies over and over in order to gain items needed for a quest or money or to gain experience to level up, the pace of the game rapidly devolves. There is almost no risk, and the repetitive nature of the battles can quickly become boring.
There are many ways to avoid the pace reduction of grinding. One is to increase the level of challenge and danger associated with the challenges the player is trying to meet. Another is to increase the likelihood of highly prized drops, or rewards that appear when the enemy is defeated. Various theories of MMOG game design can encourage or discourage grinding as a primary mode of play. Asian MMOGs are famous for relying on grinding, but most of the major MMOGs have some element of it.
Given all the various ways in which the pace of gameplay in MMOGs can vary, it is still true that individual players have control over the pacing of the game, by choosing where to be at any given time and what to do when they are there. This freedom and control, combined with the immense variety of activities available and the social interaction, make MMOGs unique and popular by allowing people to create their own pace.
In addition to the overall subjective pace of a game, there are several ways in which the actual structure of the game can be paced. These include the pacing of:
Skills development
Difficulty
Item values
Information acquisition and story development
Tasks/missions/quests
Taking turns
Game rewards
One significant aspect of a player’s experience is how the character develops. This is particularly true in Role-Playing Games, but many other games, such as First-Person Shooters, strategy games, and even action games often contain some elements of character development in the form of added skills/technologies or character statistics and character levels. From a design standpoint, these specific improvements in the player’s character should occur at a reasonable pace. In Role-Playing Games, improvements are often quick at the beginning but may become somewhat less frequent later in the game. In some games, such as action and arcade titles, character improvement can be steady, or it can only occur at very specific points during gameplay, when the player has accomplished certain significant tasks, such as collecting all of a certain item or completing a significant number of areas or levels. In RTS games, the development of new technologies, factories, unit types, and so on is largely based on the player’s choices, but the mechanisms for such development are available.
Sudden temporary changes in skills and abilities can also be acquired during gameplay in various types of games. The acquisition of a special item or spell may grant temporary boosts to the player’s abilities. Conversely, a curse or unfortunate encounter might actually lessen the player’s abilities temporarily. These changes can affect the player’s gameplay, making the game more fun in the case of a boost and more challenging in the case of a debuff or other temporary skill decrease.
Pacing difficulty is one important way that a game can feel right or wrong. If a game starts out too difficult or too easy, it suffers from the start, but the pace at which difficulty is increased can also significantly affect the player’s enjoyment, involvement, and ability to continue. Some games offer a certain amount of difficulty adjustment based on player competence, as measured by gameplay. However, most games assume a lower level of competence and attempt to increase difficulty and challenge (for the stronger players) without overwhelming the less-skilled players.
When developing games, you soon realize that a computer playing against you, controlling multiple enemies simultaneously, is pretty impossible to defeat. So as the code gets better, suddenly this stuff really comes together, and you find yourself dead every time you turn a corner. This is a good thing, because we can see everything really works, and we know that we will always have a really good challenge coming for the best players out there.
I remember once watching a guy play the old arcade game Missile Command. The machine just couldn’t defeat him. That’s not good. So what we commonly do is get the AI so that you don’t stand a chance—as if you stepped onto a battlefield with eight Rambos—and then we scale their intelligence back from there. The negative description is “we dumb them down.” It’s true: We do, and we have to. But remember, as the designer you completely control that—how it works, how they interact, how they respond to a player that’s learning quickly, and so on. Ever played a game where you work out that a certain move kills just about everyone better than every other move, so you end up doing it a thousand times? That’s when you, the designer, need to be diving in with a response. (Sure, let them think they have this walnut cracked!) It’s trivial to detect when they use the same gambit again and again, “This player is just a one-trick pony! Let’s surprise them!” If you design it right, you know what they’re doing, and you can offer them some challenges by changing things up in a logical manner—logical from the game’s point of view, that is. Keep the game a challenge (and interesting) for everyone!
Since all players are different, and there needs to be some variety and even unpredictability in games, it is a challenge to find the perfect pace for increasing difficulty. Some ways to control the pace of difficulty include:
Difficulty modes, such as Easy, Medium, Hard, and Impossible (chosen before the game starts).
Heuristic dynamic difficulty adjustment, in which the game tracks the player’s success rate and adjusts such elements as enemy strength, aggressiveness, frequency of encounters, or simply the size or strength of enemy groups.
Level matching, in which the enemies that appear (that are created on the fly) in the game are matched by some preset standard to the player’s current skill base and statistics, often as measured by the character’s level.
Geographical distribution, in which harder enemies are found in specific geographical “dangerous” areas of the game world, allowing the player to make certain decisions about when to increase the stakes. It’s fun when those “dangerous” areas are the shortcut to where you’re going!
Handicaps, in which some players are given slight advantages over characters or other players who have obvious superiority for one reason or another. The first time I saw this in action was in a game called Virtua Racing from Sega, where the guy who’s losing the driving race gets a little boost so he can catch up. By always boosting the guy at the back, it makes the whole race less of a simulation and actually more “arcady” and exciting. Their Daytona arcade machine also made really good use of handicaps.
Fixed ramping, in which the game simply gets harder in a smoothly increasing difficulty curve managed by the game code. This can be implemented as a gentle and slow increase or as sudden and steep increases in difficulty, depending on the designer’s choices. Steep increases generally are accompanied by increases in the player character’s knowledge or skills, so that players are actually prepared for the jump in difficulty. Otherwise, a word of warning: This is the point when I end up switching off a lot of games, at least when the designers get this wrong. Meaning, you’re doing great—you are flying through the game. Then a new enemy (or situation) shows up that requires you to do five things at once. After dying for the hundredth time, you start to think maybe it’s not you, it’s the designer’s fault, and you shut off the game. So be careful about your expectations, and make sure the game is ready to respond to a player who might be getting frustrated. Being challenged is great. Being way too frustrated is like cancer in the game world.
Stair-step increases allow players to reach certain plateaus of skill, where they can play for a while, then increase the difficulty at certain points in the game by an incremental amount. The difference here is that the difficulty increases in discrete steps instead of in a smooth curve.
Spikes may occur in some games, where the difficulty may increase very slowly at the beginning of the game, but at some point it may spike and become far more difficult at the beginning of some new event or level or at the end of some “training” or introductory period.
Allowing pauses and save/load cycles can also affect difficulty. Pauses can allow players time to consider their actions, while saved games obviously allow players to try different approaches to situations and, if they didn’t work out, to try again or take a different direction. Pauses and saved games also affect the overall pacing of the game by allowing players to stop the action at will, and even effectively reverse time.
Like skills and statistics, the quality of items used in a game is often carefully planned, and the introduction of new or improved items is often a part of the overall pacing of the game development. This is true in First-Person Shooters, where the introduction of new weapons is a reward for the player, but also a strategic element in the overall game arc. In other games, such as Role-Playing Games, the ability to acquire better weapons and armor goes right along with other pacing issues. The same is true in strategy games, games of conquest and exploration, and even action games, where power-ups may get stronger as the player increases in abilities, and new items may appear that weren’t available earlier in the game. These days, because gamers have so many choices of games to play, sometimes it’s a good idea to reward them earlier in the game so they get pretty invested in their progress. Doing so can make the experience a little more sticky, meaning a little more difficult to walk away from.
For obvious reasons, the pace at which a story unfolds or players obtain relevant information is important to the overall enjoyment of the experience they will have. Not all games have stories, but most games feature elements of the game world that need to be discovered during the course of gameplay. The pace at which this discovery takes place and is experienced by the player often spells the difference between a game that feels “short” and a game that feels substantial. Of course, this is a subjective impression, but pacing game information revelations, new area discoveries, and story elements does affect the experience. For more on stories in games, see Chapter 9, “Storytelling Techniques,” and Chapter 12, “Character Design.”
As part of a story-based game, players must accomplish tasks, ranging from minor, short-term challenges to complex, multi-stage quests. (See Chapter 23, “Goals,” for more on this.) The subjective pace of a game can be affected by how these tasks and quests are structured. By constantly having a range of tasks to accomplish, players are pushed forward in the game and sucked into the experience, not wanting to quit because they can complete just one more of several overlapping goals (remember, it’s their choice) before they stop playing. By having secondary quests that span long periods of game time, the player has what I would call looming goals. These are goals that are established at a certain point in the game but are not completed until much later. This is typical in some MMOs and in games such as Dungeon Siege II, where secondary quests can often remain incomplete for long periods of gameplay.
An excellent example of turn-based pacing can be seen in Sid Meier’s Civilization series. Though the game starts simply, and things seem to move quickly in the early stages, little by little it gets more complicated. Yet the level of intensity and absorption creates a sense of near urgency. No turn ends without you wanting to start again. The cycle repeats again and again, and hours can go by. Though the game may not seem fast-paced compared to an action FPS or an arcade game, its pace is driven by the focus and the promise of nearly constant rewards as you build new units, settle new cities, develop new technologies, and maneuver politically or militarily with your rival civilizations, all the while building roads, irrigating land, and exploring the undiscovered territories on the map. A game like Civilization could seem leisurely and relaxed, but somehow it doesn’t.
Games generally offer some kind of reward, whether it be a high score or a game ranking, a title or other recognition of achievement, or even more tangible rewards, such as weapons and useful items, new characters to play or to play against, new skills, and so on. Generally, there is some sort of reward that occurs when the game ends successfully, but there are also other types of rewards. Check Chapter 24, “Rewards, Bonuses, and Penalties,” for more about rewards, but here it’s worth noting that the pace at which rewards are earned and received by players is an important aspect of the game design. Working with immediate, short-term, and long-term rewards, designers can keep players hooked and involved from the start of the game to the finish—and often beyond in repeat plays. So it’s certainly worth considering how often players are rewarded, the processes by which they are rewarded, and what kinds of rewards they are getting.
Not all rewards are equally valued, and mixing up the kinds and qualities of rewards that can be achieved is often a good idea. One of the best ways to make something more valued is to compare it to less valuable items. In games such as Diablo II, there are many ordinary rewards, but the extraordinary items dropped by various enemies stand out all the more because of the ordinary ones you take for granted. In games such as the Mario Bros. series, there are all kinds of rewards, some more tangible and some simply experiential. There’s really never a dull moment, and there’s always a lot to anticipate.
Design Challenge
Consider the games you have played recently, specifically what the pace felt like. In each game, rate the pace according to the following criteria:
Overall, how did the game action speed feel in the first level or zone?
Insane?
Fast?
Medium-paced?
Slow?
Chart your impression of the action speed over time as a graph. How could it have been more fun?
How was the pacing in the first level?
Steady/constant?
Varying?
How much did it vary?
How often?
Chart your impression of the pace as a graph. How could it have been better?
How was the challenge in the first level?
Couldn’t work out what to do?
Just right?
Chart your impression of the challenge over time as a graph. How could it have been better?
What was the intensity (pressure level) like in the first level?
How constant was the intensity?
How often did it change?
What was the range of intensity within the game?
Chart the intensity level for a specific section of the game. (How much pressure did you feel?)
If there were areas in the game that required intense focus, what did they feel like? How long did they last?
How did the game represent the passage of time? Did it feel fast, slow, or moderate to you?
Did the game create tense situations or situations that made you anxious? If so, what was the effect on the feeling of the game and the pacing in particular?
Think of your own game designs and chart the overall activity and intensity graph, as well as what your ideal pacing would be.
For your own designs, consider different ways to control the pacing to accomplish the kind of game experience you want players to have.