How Fast Should We Play Games? →
Thoughtfully written article. It’s an eternal problem, isn’t it? It always takes more time to design the content than it does for the consumer to experience it… which is why PvP ends up being so valuable sometimes, I guess.
There was one really intelligent comment left on the article… it’s too long to re-quote here, but the gist was that s/he believed a lot of modern games are too “schizophrenic”.
If you scour obsessively for secrets and treasures, you completely break the pacing of the game, greatly diminishing its impact, and if you are playing for the story, for the artistic, narrative aspect of the game, few things can ruin your experience as immensely as flawed pacing.
Well designed games, s/he continued, will give the player the illusion of being freely explorable, while preventing them from going too far off track from the main plot.
I think this is part of why I thought Portal was, as much as any game could be, totally “perfect”. The pacing was simply excellent, just enough tutorial and then letting the player loose in the field to really use everything they learned. Plot peppered throughout, especially in small areas that when discovered… they make the player feel like they’ve stumbled onto something optional, but their placement was really quite deliberate.
