Super Nerd Sundays Presents: On Pacing!

When we talk about games we like to discuss the number of hours we get out of our purchases. We compare them, considering the overall cost of a product to the amount of time we can spend on it without repeating ourselves endlessly. For some games these comparisons are completely insignificant. Multiplayer games, 4X games, rhythm games, all of these games break the model. But action games and role playing games can, more or less, be fairly assessed by how much bang they offer for their buck. But something we rarely discuss is how well these action experiences are paced.

In any other medium pacing is a critical part of a narrative experience. A poorly paced film will drag on endlessly to its viewers. A poorly paced novel will be unreadable. But we’ll frequently let poor pacing in video games slide, so long as the game is long enough. Final Fantasy games, for example, are notoriously poorly paced, with long dragging sequences broken up by frenetic action and vivid exploration. In the context of an eighty hour experience this sort of thing is totally justified, since people playing a Final Fantasy game expect such traditionalist measures imbedded in their game play. They expect to see lots and lots of gameplay, much of it chaff but some of it delightful nutritious wheat, and they’re willing to put up with that bullshit because they bought the game largely to eat up time.

On the flip side, many action games are almost criminally short. Heavenly Sword, for example, was supposed to be a platform exclusive that launched the PS3 into stardom. Instead the marketing machine behind the enterprise collapsed due, in large part, to the brevity of the game. Trine is a measly eight hours, Dead Space close to a lean twelve, and the ambitious failure Mirror’s Edge clocks in at nine with time trials. Of course, historically the worst case of quality and time to dollars spent was the Timeline video game which, historians claim, clocked in at around forty minutes and consisted of a segment where stationary players just threw spears. So criticism can come down harshly on games for being too quick.

But many of these short games are brilliant in the manner in which they pace. Dead Space, for example, rips off all the best parts of System Shock 2, including its masterful grasp of pacing and moving the character through stages. Mirror’s Edge is literally a game about pacing, and it thrives and fails based on how well it realizes this. And Trine, the bite sized adventure game it is, is clearly designed to be taken down piece by piece in multiple sittings. It’s paced so that players are encouraged to take breakers in a way that the Half-Life 2 Episodes or Portal fight wholesale – these are games that are designed around allowing players to remain immersed as long as possible whenever possible.

Which bring me to the centerpiece of this discussion: the Ghostbusters game.

I bought the Ghostbusters game because it was five dollars and I like Ghostbusters a lot. It’s a fucking fantastic movie, and if you disagree we’re going to have to fight. I warn you, I will go for the balls.

I bought the Ghostbusters game knowing it was short, expecting it to have the same excellent qualities that the movies presented so expertly: a well told story that mixed actual danger, humor and blithe sarcasm in perfect quantities. I thought, if nothing else, it would be an amusing diversion from other games that sucked me in constantly and took themselves incredibly seriously, games like Fallout and Alpha Protocol which I literally cannot alt-tab from.

I was not disappointed. But I’d like to discuss why, and to do that I have to bring up Jericho.

Jericho is that ex-girlfriend I keep coming back to on this blog even though I know she’s bad for me. It’s not even that we have so much fun together or that any single element of the relationship is particularly good, it’s just that there’s something about her that I can’t put my finger on, something that keeps me coming back. Maybe it’s the fact that, if I keep pushing her hard enough, I think I could get her to do anal. Sorry, were we talking about video games?

Anyhow, I’m not sure why I find my thoughts drawn to Jericho quite so often. It is very much a B-movie of games. It does so many things wrong, so ham-handedly, that it can be brought up without fail as an example of how not to execute a particular concept. It awkwardly gates gameplay, it spontaneously introduces new skills and tools without explanation, simply because it’s time for you to solve a puzzle with them, it has some of the most patently repetitive combat I’ve ever experienced and the writing is appalling. The one original character, the only character I liked, is killed off without ceremony or reason, except to give the final boss some degree of weight. And the pacing. Ugh, the pacing.

I’ve played through Jericho twice now, and my second playtthrough was around 5 hours. This was on Hard, after beating the game on normal in around 12 hours. That should speak volumes about the way Jericho is constructed: you will spend, at times, thirty to forty minutes banging your head against a puzzle not because the puzzle is hard, but because it is poorly designed. You will go through long stretches of gameplay that could easily be truncated, repetitive combat sessions that drag on and on unless you’ve learned the trick to dispatching this band of enemies faster than the last.

All of these factors combine to make a five hour real-time game that feels closer to twenty hours in a single playthrough. Despite there not being a lot there Jericho made me feel like it was sprawling and dramatic, like it had a lot to say. Which is really upsetting, because it doesn’t. It’s just terribly paced. A few very long early stages open up into some impressively brief end-game stages where puzzles fall away in favor of “puzzle battles with one solution,” the bane of any competent first-person shooter. The poor writing and poor level construction combine to make that twenty minutes I spent hunting down cultists in the Pixar feel like an hour and a half. It’s enough to make me play games on my DS instead.

However Ghostbusters is similar in length. I spent around eight hours on my first playthrough of Ghostbusters, taking lots of time to explore levels fully and get as many of those special artifacts as I could. I looked around for Easter Eggs, I’d occasionally get stuck on an especially rough battle, that required some extra TLC and I think I was once lost in a hedge maze for fifteen minutes while being attacked by spiders. But I never really noticed any of these issues, because Ghostbusters is such an incredibly well paced game. The moment I started playing it in earnest I found myself ignoring titles like Fallout 3 and Alpha Protocol, titles I’d been laboring over for a while by this point. I ignored them because I actually wanted to see how the story of Ghostbusters was going to resolve.

And I wasn’t disappointed. It wasn’t a twist ending per sec. It wasn’t an earned ending or anything so dramatic, either, it was just a fun ending to a fun game that balanced its story very well. It was a game I never felt fatigued with, a game where I never tired of playing with my new toys and learning how to abuse ghosts in new and exciting ways. I’m already excited to play it a second time and see if it holds up as well without those distracting little extras to stretch the pacing a little more. Because the pacing was almost perfect. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any game quite as well paced as Ghosbutsters.

Some of the credit is certainly due to the professional writing of Akroyd and Ramis, who make most video game writers look like douchebags. Not that video game writers need a lot of help to look that way, Ramis and Akroyd are just on the ball in every respect. But a lot of it is also owed to Threewave Studio’s remarkable design acumen. Most people would’ve tried to load their game down to make sure it sat alright with a pre-establish set of rules, but Threewave wove the action of Ghostbusters into a game intended to immerse players in their internal fiction rather than distracting them with it, and a result they succeeded impressively. Even though the play of Ghostbusters should’ve been repetitive and annoying, even though it should’ve had all the problems that Jericho had, I didn’t notice a single one of the glaring flaws that made Jericho so intriguingly shitty to me.

So to say nothing of the quality of writing, of the originality of the gameplay and the deftness of craft that went into building the Ghostbusters game I would say that it is worth playing if only for its remarkable pacing. If you’re interested in making games or if you spend a lot of time thinking about games Ghostbusters has more to teach you than most triple-A titles coming out this holiday season, and while it’s sort of a shame that its such a small game, when it’s so well apportioned and executed it seems more than a little petty to complain.