Friday 20 June 2008

Things Learned From Videogames: Balance Pt. 2

Yesterday we established that books need to be balanced, much like videogames. A book that is too hard risks losing readers, as does a book that is too easy. You want to hit a sweet spot right in the middle---complex enough to get people thinking, but not so dense that they can't get at what you're saying.

How to do that, of course, is one of the keys to writing well, and there are many different approaches. One that I've learned from videogames is to introduce concepts one at a time, give people time to get used to them, and then move on to introduce a new one.

In videogames this tends to work with skills or moves--different tricks you use to beat the computer (and later, in some games, other players). As you level up you unlock new abilities that each have their own learning curve. In a perfectly balanced game, you get a new ability just as you start to get tired of the last one, so you're always adjusting your strategy, always thinking on your feet, and always excited about the cool new thing you've just discovered.

You can do this in books with themes, characters, ideas, plot threads---you name it. The trick is to neither let the book stagnate nor flood it with too many different concepts too quickly. A smooth movement from idea to idea, character to character, subplot to subplot, is, in my opinion, ideal.

But I'd love to hear from others on this one. Tell me about your favorite books, and how they dealt with this. Did the central themes, characters, and plots of the book unroll one at a time, or were they tossed out all at once?

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