The Confirmation Reveal
In stories, the most common pairing of information beats is the question and reveal. A question beat makes us, the audience, want to know something. A reveal gives us an answer to a previous question.
Horatio investigates a ghostly visitation on the battlements of Elsinore.
Question: What's going on?
Reveal: He sees that it resembles the late King Hamlet.
Horatio and the audience discover the information at the same time.
As is often the case, one reveal leads to another question: why has the king returned in ghostly form?
Questions create audience anxiety; answers relieve them. Questions are usually downbeats; reveals are often upbeats—or a mix of up and down, when the answer points us more toward fear than hope.
However, sometimes we feel relief when a character learns something we already know.
Dramatic irony exists in a story when the audience knows what the characters do not. From an omniscient narrator, or inherently objective camera, we might know that:
* the new girl Jack is wooing is actually his half-sister
* Remy is really the killer
* there's a bomb in a car
Dramatic irony is the hallmark of Hitchcockian suspense: fearing upcoming bad consequences is more powerful than being surprised by them.
The question for the audience in these situations is: when will the characters we identify with learn what they need to know? When they do learn, we feel relief—we have been released from the exquisite grasp of suspense.
In RPGs, the old school style was to maintain character subjectivity. You learned things only as your PCs did. Dramatic irony came in later, in games that allowed the separation of player and character knowledge. These beats happen all the time under this latter style. We feel anxiety when our characters know less than we do, and relief when our knowledge harmonizes back with theirs. Separation of player and character knowledge is thus usually a down beat, with harmonization its relieving up beat.
