posted 10-28-2000 02:43 AM               

I will not endeavor to spell out all the nuances of pacing in stories and games, but rather I’ll illustrate the broad stroke: the sine wave of rising and falling action.

The concept of rising and falling action is fundamental to just about every story. In drama, the ups and downs of a story play off each other. When a character gets a taste of success, his later downfall becomes that much more tragic. In horror, allowing characters to periodically visit “safe zones” where they’re free from danger only serves to make the “scary zones” all the more scary. The film The Blair Witch Project uses daytime (safe) and nighttime (dangerous) in this way. Without the juxtaposition of these highs and lows, a story can end up being flat, boring, or unbelievable.

An interesting “counter-example” is the film The Shining. This horror film does NOT juxtapose safe zones with scary zones. In has very little rising and falling action. It’s basically rising the entire time. Things get more and more and more freaky and scary with no break and no sign of letting up. To me, this made the film totally ineffective, since it was asking me to sustain an emotional rise for far too long. Critics and moviegoers seem to disagree with me on this one, but hey, what do I know?

Metal Gear Solid
My award for Best Use of Rising and Falling Action in a Video Game goes to Metal Gear Solid (PlayStaion) hands down. Heck, my award for Best Game on PlayStation also goes to MGS hands down. In Metal Gear Solid, the player takes on the role of Solid Snake, a covert military solider who infiltrates an enemy installation. The game is all about sneaking around rather than directly fighting. This in itself is a great idea, since sneaking around is woefully underrepresented in games today. But what Metal Gear Solid realizes is that building an entire game around only sneaking around is a bit much—a bit too repetitive.

Metal Gear Solid’s gameplay formula is this: sneak around, fight a boss, sneak around, fight a boss, repeat. Simple and effective. The boss-fighting sequences are incredibly varied and each fight feels like an entirely different game. We chase Revolver Ocelot around a room whose walls reflect bullets, we fire stinger missiles from a first person view from a rooftop at a helicopter, we engage in a sniper duel with Sniper Wolf, and so on. Fighting bosses are all about a action, and a wide variety of action at that.

The bosses are the high points—the crests—and the sneaking around parts are the low points—the troughs—of our rising and falling action sine wave. Again, simple and effective.

Pacing Gone Wrong: Sonic Adventure
The juxtaposition of rising and falling action is no panacea. When I bought Sonic Adventure (Dreamcast), I expected to be able to run really fast through a bunch of cool 3D levels with Sonic, and hopefully find some secrets along the way (you might read my article on secrets in platform games). Instead, I was forced to walk around this huge 3D world in a pace absurdly slow for a game staring Sonic the Hedgehog while I looked for the so-called “action stages” which were really all I wanted all along. The “adventure mode” was slow and exploratory—the troughs of falling action—and the action stages were fast and fun—the crests of rising action. Yet I have to ask, why the heck did I have to sit through all the boring stuff just to play the action stages which should have been what the game was all about in the first place? The answer: I didn’t. I stopped playing it.

Perhaps this was more of a marketing problem that caused me to expect the game to be different than it ended up being. The game was called Sonic Adventure, not Sonic Action, so you’d think I would have got the message. Maybe it just goes to show that the adventure portion of the game was so weak that the formula of rising and falling action totally broke down.

It might just be that some games are better off without rising and falling action. Deathmatch Quake, for example, would certainly not be improved by taking 5 minute timeouts to smell the roses; the 10 seconds between switching levels is quite enough of a break.

In closing…go play Metal Gear Solid!

posted 07-31-2002 03:50 AM               

Maintaining constant tension is possible - it's just very difficult. You need a lot of creativity and variety in a game situation to maintain the same tension as in the Shining.

Cube is another great example. I can't think of a game that does it. Maybe Ico (in a weird way).