Trigger Happy
reactions are subordinated to the intelligent deployment of resources over time.
The third way in which time and rhythm operate in videogames is at a high structural level, where I’ll call it “tempo.”47 This describes, for instance, the ebb and flow of anxiety and satisfaction through the gameplaying experience. As games have become more complex and longer experiences, tempo plays an ever more important role in their pleasure. A game of Robotron or Defender, for example, induces a reasonably constant high level of stress for the ten or twenty minutes that it lasts. However, Tomb Raider III or Zelda 64, which can be played without restarting for hours on end, need to afford the player some breathing space at intervals, where there is no immediate danger, just as much as they need to invoke moments of extreme anxiety. This concept also involves Richard Darling’s comments in the last chapter about the distribution of rewards throughout a videogame. They can’t be constant (continuous reinforcement gets boring); they can’t be spaced out too far (not enough reinforcement). And neither rewards nor periods of relative relaxation must be spaced regularly, or they
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47 I am not using this word in its technical musical sense, where a closer analogy might be “rubato.”
