plotting

Part 8 Putting into play – The hidden art of pacing 2 (3)

| Katarina Gyllenbäck

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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Part 7 Putting into play – The hidden art of pacing 1 (3)

| Katarina Gyllenbäck

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.

Before shifting to interactive media, I wrote story arcs for films and television series. The technique of scriptwriting was to follow your gut, establish a conflict, take it to a climax, and end it with a twist. The receiver’s engagement was built into the dramatic story structure, which meant that focus was laid on the character’s motivations, relations, and behavior. As long as the audience stayed seated and the ratings were good, work continued as usual.

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Part 3, Don´t show, involve

| Katarina Gyllenbäck

The series “Don´t show, involve” builds upon the narrative as a cognitive process and how to go from a thought to the plotting of an involving experience. As to get the most out of the third and last part of “Don´t show, involve” I would like to recommend reading the previous parts before continuing.

Part 1 Don´t show, involve – how to propel a thought towards a goal.
Part 2 Don´t show, involve – hands-on plotting towards a goal.

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Part 2, Don´t show, involve

| Katarina Gyllenbäck



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.

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What is narrative?

| Katarina Gyllenbäck

When setting up the site I realised when a child passed by and asked, “What is narrative?” that I had beat around the bush. Since adults tend to make things more complicated than they are, and before me I saw a ten pages report about narrative as a not media specific and thought-based system, the child´s question was a disturbing reminder that it was time to grab the bull by the horns.

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