Speaking of pacing. If you have a story driven game, you want to control the pacing to make peaks and troughs of action to imitate a movie or book experience. One where the player knows now is a good time to take a break. When they come back to the game there would be no instantaneous rain of gunfire, or flying spiked balls that set them back 20 minutes.

On the other hand strenuous action games are known as the addictive types, so a hub world is reducing the stress, if only for 10 seconds.

The same goes for scary games. =)