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Keeping Pace
How long do you suppose, on average, the typical game player spends per session playing a given game? I'm sure the statistics would skew heavily based on the genre of game and based on the platform. For instance, I'd venture a guess that the average player of massively multiplayer online RPGs for the PC spends a lot more time per session than the average player of racing games for the Game Boy Advance. And while game platforms and their audiences do vary widely, I still think there are certain universal truths about how to effectively create and sustain ideal pacing in all games, making game-playing sessions, both long and short, that much more entertaining. Put another way, have you ever caught yourself getting bored with a game to the point where you stopped playing? Of course you have. And if you play games across multiple platforms and genres the way I do, maybe you've also noticed the unusual fact that, regardless of how different these games may be, it's almost always the same sorts of things that make us get sick of them in a hurry.
 |  It's incredibly difficult to set the proper pacing for any work of fiction, and games are no exception. |
Let me give you a more-specific guess of an answer to my initial question: I'm going to say most game players are more inclined to spend hours as opposed to minutes playing games. This guess is based purely on anecdotal evidence--my own game-playing habits and my casual observations of other people's game-playing habits. My observations are that, usually, people sit down to play games for blocks of time, maybe one or two hours. This is leisure time they choose to spend playing games as opposed to watching prime-time TV, reading books, watching movies, or things of that nature, and the game-playing fulfills similar needs. As evidence of this, it seems clear that most games these days are attempting to tell a story and to maintain some sort of a brisk pacing from beginning to end, as if encouraging the player to stick through to the finale all in one sitting.
So, what makes good pacing? For starters, there are simple technical issues that all game designers, in my opinion, should be very conscious of from the inception of their projects. I think the most critical of these is loading times. Loading times are quite possibly the single worst thing about today's games, and in a way I'm amazed that despite all the advancements in technology over the past decade, loading times seem to have gotten worse instead of better. As if waiting around for your game system to boot up the next level is anyone's idea of a good time. As if fancier 3D graphics are an excuse for waiting 30 to 40 seconds in between getting killed by the same old bottomless pits we've been falling into for years. If I made a game, I'd set this ground rule first and foremost: The loading times should be short to the point of being unnoticeable, as they are in games such as Metroid Prime and Soul Reaver.
|  I'm sure Marche here is enjoying his first snowball fight, but I'd rather skip it. |
Other issues that affect pacing seem even more obvious. Games are still being released that don't allow you to skip cinematic cutscenes and that force you to rewatch those cutscenes if you, say, want to play through the game a second time or maybe failed a mission and need to replay it. I'm currently playing Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a game I'm generally enjoying quite a bit, but it overlooks this seemingly insignificant little item. The fact that I can't skip the dialogue not only irritates me whenever I get trounced by one of the game's tough and long-winded bosses, but also means I'll probably never play the game again after having finished it. Too bad, since otherwise this is exactly the sort of game that I wouldn't mind going back to on occasion. I'm sure game designers put a lot of time and effort into their cutscenes and storylines. But the people who actually buy and play their games will appreciate that stuff much more if they have the option to pass it.
|  Vagrant Story had an interesting combat system that got bogged down by tedious menu systems. |
Providing the player with easy access to often-used features also seems like something every game would do, but in actuality, this isn't always the case. To this point, I like to think back to Square's widely praised action RPG Vagrant Story, one of the company's last games for the PlayStation. Vagrant Story was an original, unusual game with some really incredible graphics, but its gameplay had some serious technical issues: Specifically, it revolved around using different types of weapons to defeat different types of monsters, so you'd be switching weapons all the time as you went from one room to the next, and sometimes even in the middle of a single battle. However, switching weapons involved navigating the game's rather slow, rather unwieldy menu system. Thankfully the game paused while all this was going on, but this led to haphazardly paced, often tedious gameplay as far as I was concerned. In the end, I wished Vagrant Story's great visuals were part of a completely different game.
|  After years of trying to reconcile the strategy and action elements of RPG combat, BioWare pretty much nailed it in Knights of the Old Republic. |
Here's another one for you: The ideal game should never require pausing or fast-forwarding. If it needs to be fast-forwarded, then it's probably too slow to begin with and should automatically fast-forward when it needs to. If it absolutely, positively needs to be paused, it should be turn-based. If the action can be paused for convenience's sake, then either the interface or the artificial intelligence could probably be improved to the point where the pausing isn't necessary. I like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as a recent example of this. For years, BioWare's role-playing games have allowed the player to pause the action at any point, issuing new orders as necessary. You still have this option in KOTOR, but I for one almost never used it. The combat was paced seemingly just right so that I'd be able to react to what was happening as it happened, not in between desperately toggling the pause button.
Interestingly, game reviews rarely pick up on these sort of nuts-and-bolts mechanical issues, because game players themselves probably don't attend to these things. We're too focused on the mechanics of the action, the graphics, or the story to notice the technical issues that have everything to do with whether we're having any fun while playing. Fortunately, I do think more and more people, and more and more game designers, are realizing that some very simple types of things can have a profound effect on how entertaining a game can be.
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