Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

Almost a year ago I offhandedly mentioned that I was planning all-new series of videos for 2023. The start date is later than I had anticipated, but I’ll still be sneaking a few in by the end of the year.

It is my pleasure to introduce Shape Up!, a new series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. It is the fruit of a whole lot of academic work I’ve done in the past year, including two different courses I taught about shape and form in art (narrative and otherwise).

Episode one is uploading as I type this. In the meantime, as we wait, the script to this introductory video is below the jump.

Hello, everyone. Ian here. I’ve had some long dry spells between videos in the past two years, and to prevent that in the future I’ve taken some time to plan out a new running series.

As a way of introducing this series’ topic, let me describe a common occurrence in my life.

I’m playing a new single-player game that I quite like. I’ve gotten what feels like pretty far into it, and I’m considering powering through to the end of it.

The immediate question I face is, “How much longer is this game?”

But the secondary question that falls fast on its heels is, “How would I possibly go about determining that?”

This is something I don’t think we think enough about.

If I’m reading a paper copy of a book, the question “how much longer do I have to go until I reach the end of this book?” is a trivial one. You can answer it by looking at the physical state of the object you’re holding in your hand.

If I’m watching a movie—whether on a disc or streaming—I can usually pause it and see a progress bar. If I’m seeing a movie in a theatre, I can’t do that, but if I know the runtime of the film and the time it started, I can look at the time and do the math myself.

How long a book is, how long a movie is—these things are public knowledge, easy to look up, or just see at your fingertips.

If I want to know how long a game is going to take me, or how far I am into it, that’s a different beast. I could look up a walkthrough, see where I am in it, and see roughly where that’s positioned in the whole. I could look up how many hours people logged who reviewed the game on Steam, or I can check the website How Long to Beat. If the game has achievements for finishing specific chapters or levels, I can see how many there are, how many I’ve played, and extrapolate from there. In recent years, some platforms have introduced larger sets of tools for giving players a better sense of exactly where they are in the game, and exactly how much remains—probably because more and more gamers are adults with busy lives, who need to be able to anticipate and schedule their game-playing time.

Part of the trickiness of the question, “How much longer is this game?” is an unavoidable quirk of the medium. The answer will always be rendered fuzzy by issues of skill and play style. But part of it, I think, is an issue of narrative form. 

As a general rule, if someone’s in the middle of a story you’re telling, and they don’t have the foggiest idea how long the story might go on, then that’s a problem of pacing. It means narrative events aren’t being delivered in a way that builds a clear sense of momentum.

There are all sort of ideas about how to fix this problem of momentum in storytelling. You can’t walk three paces in the world of cinematic screenwriting without tripping over a guide to the three-act structure. Over the decades, these guides have grown more and more elaborate, more likely to add in frameworks such as Gustav Freytag’s pyramid of five parts and three crises, or Joseph Campbell’s proposals about the Hero’s Journey. 

There’s an argument to be made that the over-abundance of story structure guides in the film industry have resulted in too many cookie-cutter, by-the-beat screenplays, and an overall stultifying lack of imagination in Hollywood. (I’m personally sympathetic to this argument.) But not all large-scale analysis of structure and pacing needs to be prescriptive. It can also help to just have good descriptive models of the types of shape a story can take. 

And there isn’t a lot of writing about games that attempts this sort of large-scale descriptive work, charting the narrative shapes that interactive media can take. I haven’t read every single book about narrative design by any means, but I have done a basic survey of the field, and while there’s plenty of discussion of useful concepts such as conflict, stakes, and character goals and motivations, most authors shy away from the big questions about what it means to structure a story that requires at least some sort of player effort to progress through.

So that’s the void this series intends to fill. I’m going to ask big, formalist questions about pacing, about structure, about shape. I’m going to look at what lessons games can learn from other media in these areas, and also point out instances where it’s probably best to borrow less. I’m going to talk about issues of narrative—but not just issues of narrative. A symphony is not a narrative form, but it is something that’s broken into a large-scale structure of different movements, with an overall emotional arc. And sometimes that overall arc doesn’t work, maybe because the tempo of one movement is a bit too slow, or the movements themselves seem to be arranged in the wrong order. Some games are more like musical compositions than they are like movies or novels. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still talk about underlying issues of structure and pacing.

Two ground rules for this series: 

The first is what games I’m going to be looking at. For the the most part, my case studies will be indie games that have come out in the past decade or so—although I’ll occasionally pull an example that’s older, or that’s from the AAA space. I’m making a concentrated effort to talk about games that I think are good, that successfully do something interesting with their form. If I talk about a game I don’t like in this series, it will either be because I think it’s a noble failure, or because I’m placing it in direct contrast to a game I do like as a way of better describing that game’s strengths.

Let us be perfectly honest here: It’s no secret at this point that game development as a general rule is horrifically mis-managed, filled with labor abuses and also typically lacking the equivalent of the cinematic pre-production phase, in which scripts are written and revised before a camera ever rolls. Writing guides for people trying to get a foothold in the industry openly acknowledge that game writing is subordinate to other aspects of game development, and that to be a writer in games means you will far too often have unenviable task of quickly whipping up some dialogue explaining why we’ve abruptly moved from location A to location C, when there was supposed to be a whole dramatic arc that took place in location B, before that area got cut during crunch. It is not sporting to talk about the litany of narrative problems that emerge from such labor conditions. Nor, frankly, is it particularly illuminating. I’m not saying that the indie space is free of bad or even abusive management—because it is not—but at the very least the games that emerge out of it don’t tend to have the same predictable flaws as AAA games, born from a production pipeline that’s broken in the same predictable ways.

My second ground rule is that I always want to strive to be descriptive over being prescriptive. My aim is to elucidate some of the shapes that interactive media can take. It’s not to say that one shape is better than another. 

The only general overriding prescriptive note I’ll offer in this series is that it’s always best to use a given technique or structure in a purposeful way. There might be an aspect of one game I critique, only to praise that same thing when it shows up in a different game—because, in the second game, there was a sense of purposeful deployment to a meaningful aesthetic end. 

So for instance: as a general rule, it’s annoying to get lost in a game. But also, getting geographically lost is an experience that’s unique to games when compared to a lot of other narrative media. So it’s possible to imagine a game in which the experience of getting lost is leveraged in an interesting way. There can be value in frustration, if it’s purposefully deployed in controlled amounts. 

Similarly, slow pacing and a lack of sense of progress is something that will often have me scrambling to external references, to figure out how long a game is. But it can also be an aesthetically valid choice—a deliberate rejection of the Skinner-Box-style scheduled reinforcement that’s so dominant in the industry. 

Structural strategies aren’t good or bad in a vacuum. What matters is if they’re used coherently and purposefully.

So with all of that in-mind, let’s embark on this new series. Let’s Shape Up!