10 Reasons Video Games Are The Hardest Thing To Write
4. Pacing And Length
Theres an old rule of thumb about working with scripts one page equals one minute of screen time. It doesnt really stand up to scrutiny, but its symbolic of a world that has tried-and-tested rules for how long youll have to tell your story and ways to make best use of that time. Look to the gaming rulebook and youll find the pages mostly blank, or occasionally written in tears. Its hard to predict how long your game will take to complete; huge differences in playtime can and do occur because different players have differing levels of skill. As such, its almost impossible to try and impose a framework - even a simple three-act structure is tricky to map onto a game. Why does this matter? Well, no-one wants to write a story that drags on at a glacial pace or feels unsatisfyingly rushed, of course, but gamers also have the annoying habit of wandering off at random times to eat and sleep. As a TV writer, you can be fairly certain that your audience is advancing through the story at roughly an hour per week. If its a movie, you know theyre likely to see the whole thing in a single sitting. This lets you control your pacing; bringing back plot devices just when theyve slipped the audiences mind for an effective surprise and spacing your story arcs evenly across a season. Aiming for a similar level of control, games have experimented with the TV model - artificially chopping their stories into chapters and including recaps to help ease gamers back into the plot. Really, though, gamings a new medium and it needs to live by its own rules. Game writers are getting better at pacing, mostly by trial and error, but theyre a long way from filling the rulebook.
