Pacing

Pacing is all about setting the tempo of your game and keeping the players engaged; it's the heartbeat of your game. Our ultimate goal is to utterly captivate our audience, to suspend their disbelief, and keep them in the state of flow.

The psychological concept of flow or the zone has been recognized and named by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and refers to the mental state of being fully immersed in the task at hand, even to the point of losing the sense of time and space:

The basic flow graph represents the relationship between difficulty and skill. As players grow more experienced and competent, they require more challenging tasks.

However, there's more to pacing than matching a player's skill and task difficulty! As you may remember, back in the midst of the chapter on level design, we mentioned that the pace of the game is often dictated by the intensity of the levels you create. The aforementioned intensity stems not only from task difficulty but also from mental and sensory...