Bricks And Beats
Consider a wall of bricks. Isolate three ascending bricks, such that you wind up with this configuration:
This, roughly, is how successful beats in a Harold proceed. Here’s some labels, for reference’s sake:
Huzzah, Macpaint!
 Anyhow- on the bottom of the picture, the loose structure of a game-oriented scene is laid out. At first, the game is not established, and so it must be discovered (that having been said, strong premise initiators are more than capable of doing this first step internally, after taking a suggestion/doing an opening and prior to the initiation of the scene). Once the game is defined, it can be played. Pretty soon thereafter, once the rules of the scene have been established, the game can be heightened, and it is the drive to heighten which will propel the scene forward from there.
 In a Harold, when this process is divided across multiple beats, breaking down the structure of a scene helps to inform how to initiate further instances of its associated game. As the beats progress, recreating earlier portions of the scene serve no purpose. The discovery portion, though critical in the first beat, is all too often repeated at the top of analogous second beats by players who are trying too hard to simply replicate the successes of the first beat with simple Mad-Libs type substitution. Though this may very well lead to a playable second beat, in falsely recreating a portion of the scene where players act ignorant of the game they already know they will play it removes the ability of the player to react honestly and in the moment until they get back to the game.
Starting the scene further along, at the point where the game is already established, allows players to play responsively, and to heighten further in the second beat than they were able to in the first beat. Armed now with the knowledge not only of what the game is, but how it behaves when heightened, players can initiate third beats not only at the point at which the game is known, but at the point at which it is heightened. Whether or not a team is able to find satisfying third beat connections, initiating in this way will surely provide them with solid, game-based third beats that ought to lead to quick edits and rising momentum as the show draws to a close.

















