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Pacing
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.
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Metal Gear Solid: Solid
Snake sneaks around and hides from a guard.
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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.
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Metal Gear Solid:
Snake must defeat boss Vulcan Raven and his tank by throwing
grenades into the hatch.
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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.
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Hey, it's an Action
Stage in Sonic Adventure! |
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! ;)
Talk
back! Discuss this article in the forums.
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| "blah,
blah, blah. Metal Gear this, Metal Gear that." |
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| I'm
going to order a hit on Sonic. His time is up. |
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