The Pacing Diagram: A Step Toward a Shared Player Experience Language for Game Design

Abstract: Pacing diagrams are used in game design practice to represent player experience as a temporal structure. However, the term currently refers to heterogeneous and informal artifacts, limiting both interdisciplinary communication and computational use. We propose a minimal formal reference description of pacing diagrams for linear player experience sequences. The contribution defines the core structural elements of the diagram and frames pacing diagrams as both communicative design artifacts and structured representations. This formalization provides a shared point of reference for design practice while enabling consistent interpretation by tools and computational systems. As a first step, it establishes a foundation for more comparable, interoperable, and analyzable representations of player experience in game design.

Reference: Daniel Dyrda, Julian Geheeb, Martin Schacherbauer, Johanna Pirker, and Gudrun Klinker. 2026. The Pacing Diagram: A Step Toward a Shared Player Experience Language for Game Design. In Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’26), August 10–13, 2026, Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3815598.3815683