Pacing is an important part in any game but may differ a lot between games. Playing Civilization has a huge difference in pacing versus Ikaruga.
Pacing in a game is defined in the Game Design Document (GDD) through a graph with challenges on the y-axis and skills on the x-axis. As we talk about the GDD as a living document, this part is one of the most alive parts as it can be changing after each test.
It describes when a game offers high challenges and when it offers more quiet moments. This is very important to balance as offering too much or too high challenges give the player anxiety, offering too less or too low give the player boredom.
Aspects which influence pacing
According to David Perry on Game Design
- 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.
- 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.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.
Flow State
A game can make a player reach the flow state, a special kind of concentration. In the 1970s a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi experimentally evaluated Flow. He found that a person’s skill and the difficulty of a task interact to result in different cognitive and emotional states.
The flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. It is a state and a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of an activity.
The flow state is reached by offering a very narrow band between challenges and skills. They are almost always in a near perfect balance with the band always in a raising angle as the player practices skills during play.