Trigger Happy
327
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
_________________
47 I am not using this word in its technical musical sense, where a closer
analogy might be “rubato.”
