“Putting into play” originates from the site Narrative Construction, whose goal is to offer a hands-on approach to the design of an engaging and dynamic game system from a narrative and cognitive perspective. The series illuminates how our thinking, learning, and emotions interplay when the designer proceeds from scratch to reach the desired goal of a meaningful and motivating experience.
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.
In an attempt to bridge the gap between conventional writing and game design, I started to strip the dramatic story structure from its familiar features in the previous chapter to trace back to the heart of where the engaging and motivating forces reside.
To unveil the core to how you are pacing and balancing plot and style to engage and motivate the receiver's meaning making, I replaced the story structure's standard features with an engagement and duration axis.
To show how the narrative systems of plot and style coexist when triggering the engaging forces by how the receiver interprets the causal, spatial, and temporal links, I turned the conflicts and turning points into cause and effect.
The change to cause and effect amplifies how contrasts and cause and effect provide you with an opportunity to trigger and propel the dynamics of causal, spatial, and temporal networks. The dynamic network opens up the possibilities to differ between the engaging and motivating forces in regard to the receiver's learning, feelings, and meaning making.
Since contrasts are the drive-state to curiosity (see Putting into play, Part 5 and Part 6), in relation to the engagement axis
- contrasts work as triggers (calls).
In relation to the duration axis,
- contrasts turn cause and effect into a propeller.
What is experienced as speed and intensity from the pacing of engaging and motivating experiences is how the trigger (call) conveys engagement, and the propeller incites motivation in relation to the receiver's understanding and learning.
Accessing the technique of plotting a pattern that engages and motivates the receiver's understanding and meaning making, it can be worth getting acquainted with the narrative principles of logic, time, and space that rule the plot's structuring:
- Logic addresses how plot and style convey causal, spatial, and temporal links.
- Time is about the duration and frequency of plot and style.
- Space concerns the information of surroundings, positions, and paths through plot and style.
The principles concern the basis for understanding, which is the first step to motivate by enabling the receiver to navigate and orientate through time and space. And to engage someone's meaning making you need to make sense of causal, spatial, and temporal links so the receiver will ask - Who? Why? When? Where? What? How? - because they are curious and not because they are confused.
Making sense
Being said, your opportunity to engage the receiver's senses and meaning making through plot and style can be found in the drive behind our desire to understand and learn. To demonstrate how balance and control are accessed during the pacing of motivation by making sense of the meanings presented before the receiver's senses, I will again use the example of the horse and the carrot. The image was introduced in Part 6 to illustrate how you employ the dynamic forces behind the desire to understand and learn from how you provide and withhold information.
The carrot symbolizes how information is presented before the receiver’s senses, triggering meaning making, illustrated by the horse’s movement. Since the horse represents how our mind is processing information, rule number one is to clarify the causal, spatial, and temporal links when putting the motivating forces behind our desire to learn into play.
Referring to the horse's condition above as harmony by how you are making sense of the meanings that generate flow based on how the receiver understands and learns. In that case, you can call the condition below dissonance.
Harmony is a musical term that expresses a blend of tunes that is appreciated for its pleasing sound. Dissonance is the contrast of harmony. The terms can be used as metaphors of sense-making, describing how rhythm, tempo, and volume flow through every single element in the pacing and balancing of plot and style, bringing cohesiveness to the receiver's experiences and feelings. In the example from the last part of the slow movement of the old wooden carriage that takes people to their execution in The Elder Scroll V. The slow movement of the wheel makes sense as a part of a whole. Accelerating the rotation speed could cause dissonance to the overall rhythm of flow as the behavior of the wheel adds meaning to all the other elements whose causal, temporal, and spatial networks build experiences and feelings.
From a perspective of pacing, harmony and dissonance can describe engagement and motivation in regards to the receiver's sense- and meaning making. For example, if the meaning doesn't make sense, reduced speed in the receiver's information processing will result in dissonance. When dissonance occurs, it can be hard to engage/encourage the receiver as the dissonance impacts motivation.
Keeping the terms harmony and dissonance in mind, you can distinguish the differences between engaging and motivating the receiver. As you want the experiences and the expectations, the receiver builds to be in balance. Based on the goal of what you want the receiver to experience or feel: harmony is your control value to the flow by how you present the plot and style before the receiver's senses.
Since the condition of flow and the engagement from systems that lack consistency can both generate a scream, it is the control value of harmony that helps you to differentiate between a flow brought by plot and style or inconsistency from a system, which causal, spatial and temporal networks don't make sense.
Harmony is often balanced with the help of your gut feeling, having a strong sensitivity to inconsistencies and discontinuity of causal, spatial, and temporal links. Within game development, feeling good can be seen as a translation of harmony, which captures the engaging and motivating forces' balancing. Another statement of harmony is the condition of feeling fun, which is more related to the style of the theme. As the expressions are used mixed, you could say that when the game designer Fumito Ueda creates a mood, it doesn't have to be fun, but it can feel good. This doesn't mean that the player can't have fun when interacting with the feathered creature Trico in The Last Guardian. The flow can contain a scale of feelings and moods from the dynamic changes between laughs and tears, despair, and hope.
Among the multitude of terms that expresses the balance of flow, harmony as a metaphor clearly reflects the opposite of dissonance, which will help you pace and balance the overall feeling flow. So, in short, the formula of harmony is achieved...
...when cause and effect are elaborated by the constructor towards a set premise and adapted to the media at hand, and when the effect of the composition supports the set goals for the receiver.
Regarding the formula of a premise, see Part 4 and Part 6
Tracing harmony through the narrative systems
When stripping the dramatic story structure in the previous part, I left the standard features of the rising and falling actions to be dealt with later. To illuminate how you obtain harmony in structuring engaging and motivating experiences, we need to add the last narrative system concerning the receiver's meaning-making. Seen from the receiver's interpretation of causal, spatial, and temporal links, it is easier to discern the uniting and dividing forces in the structuring of a story and gameplay.
The reason why converting a story structure from a movie to a game can be a mind-bending process is due to the fact that the canonical story format (exposition, complication, outcome) only displays logic and time. The absence of space that encompasses information of surroundings, positions, and paths explain why the dramatic story structure easily leads to advancing the characters' actions and the fictionalized world, anticipating them to automatically engage the receiver's desire to participate. But to trace the motivating forces of the receiver's sense- and meaning making you need to unveil the spatial networks.
Attaining harmony by how you make sense of the causal, temporal and spatial networks that motivate the receiver's meaning making, spatiality refers to how the receiver learns (conceive information) about an environment and makes use of knowing where he or she is and how to move forward. To illuminate how the narrative systems of plot and style give access to the navigation through time and space in regard to the receiver's understanding and learning, I will replace the standards of the rising and falling actions with rising and falling learning.
By shifting our focus towards the learning curve, I will return to the plot pattern of The Lord of the Rings from the previous section, to trace where the receiver's sense- and meaning making within the dramatic story structure resides.
Since the canonical story format only displays logic and time, which explains why the predefined structure entices the focus on creating the character's motivation, I will start showing with a green dotted line how the hobbits' motivation evolves along the duration axis.
As there were no hobbits in the store, I hope you don't mind the stand-in.
&nbs
