The “Meaning-maker’s space” is a path that winds toward a new narrative system that corresponds with players and the dynamic behavior of games. As part of the “Putting into play” series, it leads the way toward designing engaging and motivating experiences based on how our thoughts, learning, and emotions interact.
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The Hidden Art of Pacing is a three-part trip, which takes you on a journey to trace the core to the hidden art of pacing by stripping familiar story and game structures from standard elements to discern the engaging and motivating forces that trigger the receiver´s building of experiences, feelings, and expectations.
To enhance the reading experience, I suggest you start with the first part if you haven´t done so already.
As a result of the stripping of the dramatic story structure, and the removal of its standard features (acts, turning-points, rising and falling actions), the previous part revealed a learning curve. The flow-state of the learning curve (illustrated below) shows the motivating engine by how the receiver gradually builds experiences and feelings on the path towards the goal.
The Hidden Art of Pacing is a three-part trip that takes you on a journey to trace the core of the hidden art of pacing by stripping familiar story and game structures from standard elements to discern the engaging and motivating forces that trigger the receiver´s building of experiences, feelings, and expectations.
If you would like to read the first part, here is the link to The Hidden Art of Pacing 1 (3)
Driving a car is often used as a metaphor to describe the pacing of accelerating and decelerating information. The art of pacing examines how you can inconspicuously engage the receiver’s thinking and the strength and speed at which the receiver processes causal, temporal, and spatial networks. In doing so, you make it possible to utilize the drive behind the motivation to understand. This was something I became aware of when I moved from scriptwriting to game design. Evident was the difference between engaging and motivating someone. It elucidated the balancing of providing and withholding information, which deepens the experience, emotions, and expectations of the receiver.
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The title Putting into play is inspired by the term mise-en-scene, which means “putting into the scene” (or “put on stage”). The term had its origin in theatre and was later picked up by film scholars to have a way of referring to the practice of directing, planning, and controlling the elements for the desired effect on a stage or in a frame of a film. Since the term isn´t established in games but where the concept could provide an overlook of the stylistic elements that are to be organized and arranged in the creation of a form, my intention is not to put a new term into play. What I will “put into play” are the thoughts that precede the choice of elements that are to become the parts of the desired form of an engaging and dynamic game system.
In this part of “Don´t show, involve” we will follow Jenova Chen´s plotting of the online game “Journey” with the help of the thought-based method Narrative bridging. The article “The journey to create Journey – the quest for emotion”, which this hands-on plotting builds upon, can be found at Gamasutra. If you haven´t read the previous part of “Don´t show, involve”, it can be found here, and for further information about Narrative bridging and its theoretic background, you can go here.
I was recently asked if I could show a perfect narrative composition for everyone to see. There aren’t any, I replied, and remembered the puzzled faces when giving lectures in narrative design when I avoided answering which video game I liked; since if I did I was likely to receive concepts that looked the same.
KATARINAGYLLENBÄCK 
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