[In an in-depth design article, People Can Fly (Painkiller) designer Wesolowski looks at games from Freelancer through Thief and beyond to examine the all-important art of correct pacing in video games.]
Good pacing can be essential to gameplay,
just like it's essential to great adventures on the big screen. Game developers
often look up to Hollywood for guidance, which seems to work well -- for at
least some titles.
But there are major differences between the
media, ones that we cannot ignore. Following big screen examples helped us make
our baby steps, but ultimately it's a dead end, because it turns good games
into bad movies.
Cinematic Experience
Modern media are younger than we
realize. My grandmother remembers Life Without Radio; my parents remember Life
Without TV; and I remember Life Without Computers. By contrast, both drama and
literature were widespread in ancient Greece.
The first computer games were created
some fifty years ago, but another two decades had to pass until there were
enough players around to talk about them. Some keep complaining about the lack
of critical vocabulary to this day. On the scale of cultural maturity, we're
toddlers.
Like all children, we haven't really made up
our minds yet. Instead, we look up to other media, and film in particular. But
cinema is only about a hundred years old itself, so we're toddlers looking up
to high schoolers. We think the bigger kid is so much like us, because it
relies on sound and animated images like we do.
Films, too, require teamwork, merge art with
advanced technology, and have similarly large budgets. And yet, they are so
much more successful that we feel a little envious at times. We don't look up
to just any film. Our ambition is to be like Star Wars and James Bond when we
grow up.
There is an obvious difference between
the toddler and the high schooler. Games are interactive. They're meant to let
people do things. But we're hoping that we can at least present those things to
players the way movies do, and let them respond, somehow, without ruining the
cinematic experience. I think we're fooling ourselves. The big kid doesn't even
like us.
Pacing in Star Wars. Intensity is an increasing
wave of peaks and reliefs. Each peak and slope can be associated with some
significant occurence. There are eight peaks on this picture.
There are a number of misleading similarities
between computer games and blockbuster films. Most notably, an archetypal story
structure called Hero's Journey can be applied directly to game narrative. All
of its key concepts translate easily into an interactive setting.
The player is, obviously, the Hero. The
combat loop, which constitutes the biggest part of gameplay in most action
games, corresponds to confrontation sequences. Missions and levels correspond
to trials on the Hero's path, often personified by End of Level Bosses.
Cutscenes and briefings serve as exposition sequences and provide relief from
intense action.
Bigger enemies, better equipment, and levelling up all
correspond to Hero's inner growth, while repetitive tasks and minigames are
recurring themes, resemblant of the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner.
From these similarities emerges the crucial
concept of pacing as an art of governing audience emotions. The hypothesis is
that if we arrange events in an "increasing wave"
of
intensity, we will achieve the cinematic effect of mounting tension. Just like
in a movie, when the game ends, the audience shall be left shaken and wanting
more.
It would probably work very well -- if only
players were an audience.
Plot Twist
A film audience is passive. It just sits and
watches. The film may influence them in many ways, but they can only rewind it
and watch it again. Their state of mind is affected, but their ability to watch
the film isn't.
In contrast, players are bombarded with
stimuli which affect their ability to respond to subsequent stimuli. The most
obvious case of this is the broadly-defined learning curve. Even if players do
notice all your hints and prompts, how do you make sure they have drawn the
intended conclusions? When miscommunication happens, a film just goes on at its
own pace; a game deviates from intended course due to player interference.
The only exception to this is a cutscene, but
cutscenes aren't interactive. So we compromise. We make sure there is only one
point of entry and one exit available. We take care not to allow players to
look in a "wrong" direction when there is something we feel they have
to see. We avoid situations that may take some time to figure out. We use quick
time events.
Our efforts are futile: the interactivity is
lost, but a truly cinematic experience doesn't appear, because we're unable to
achieve a movie-like pacing. Our dubious practices are so limiting we keep
making the same few games over and over again. The narrow category of Tower
Defense clones displays as much diversity as the whole genre of First Person
Shooters.
In order to see why this happens, let's take
a look at how intensity works in computer games. Simply put, we can either
escalate sensory stimuli or build up abstract meaning. The former happens when
guns, explosions or enemies get bigger, putting the Hero in a greater danger
than before. The latter happens when each part of a narrative means something
-- but together they mean something else. "I am your father, Luke" is more than just a paternity acknowledgement.
These two kinds of intensity tickle different
parts of our brains. Escalation is visceral and relies on our perception, while
meaning buildup is cognitive and relies on our understanding. Escalation is
temporary, because it's easy to replace a big gun with a small one.
Meaning
lasts. Once we learn to like a character, it takes a lot to convince us to hate
them. Do you remember how many Berserkers there were in Gears of War? Do
you remember what their main weak point was?