Game Time Understanding Temporality in Video Games [Hardcover]

Preserving, pausing, slowing, rewinding, replaying, reactivating, reanimating. . . . Has the ability to manipulate video game timelines altered our cultural conceptions of time?

Video game scholar Christopher Hanson argues that the mechanics of time in digital games have presented a new model for understanding time in contemporary culture, a concept he calls game time. Multivalent in nature, game time is characterized by apparent malleability, navigability, and possibility while simultaneously being highly restrictive and requiring replay and repetition. Hanson demonstrates that compared to analog tabletop games, sports, film, television, and other forms of media, the temporal structures of digital games provide unique opportunities to engage players with liveness, causality, potentiality, and lived experience that create new ways of experiencing time.

Hanson's argument features comparative analysis of key video games titles includingBraid, Quantum Break, Battle of the Bulge, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time,Passage, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time,Lifeline, andA Dark Room.

Christopher Hanson is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University with a background in video game and software development.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. More than Live: Game A-liveness and Immediacy
2. Game Presence and Mediatization
3. Pausing and Resuming
4. Saving and Restoring
5. An Instinct towards Repetition: Replay Value, Mastery, and Re-Creation
6. Recursive Temporalities
7. Case Studies
Conclusion
Gameography
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

The text is well-researched, and the introduction is an excellent, focused overview of video game studies. . . . a compelling work. . . . Recommended.