My essay Introduction to Game Time from Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First Person is now online.
As the title suggests, the essay is an attempt at describing how time works in games: I propose that we should see game time as a combination of play time (the time taken to play the game) and event time (the time taken in the game world). I then use this simple description for examining the history of computer games and a number of different game types. For example, the standard contemporary single player game looks like this in diagram form:
While writing the essay (in 2001), I realized that in the classic arcade game, the jump between different levels is temporally unexplained: Level 2 is simply replaced by level 3, and it is often unclear what happened – the levels in the arcade game often seem to be disconnected worlds rather than events that occur on a coherent timeline:
… and actually, one of the reasons why Half-life was so great was that it consisted on one coherent world, rather than a string of levels with cheesy titles.
At the end of the day, this essay was a major turning point for me: I refrained from controversy, and simply tried to say something meaningful about games.
PS. For various reasons, I sometimes refer to this essay as Time to Play.