{"id":103,"date":"2004-08-04T17:54:00","date_gmt":"2004-08-04T15:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.dk\/ludologist\/?p=103"},"modified":"2004-08-05T12:48:16","modified_gmt":"2004-08-05T10:48:16","slug":"first-person-introduction-to-game-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2004\/08\/04\/first-person-introduction-to-game-time\/","title":{"rendered":"First Person: Introduction to Game Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

My essay Introduction to Game Time<\/a> from Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s First Person<\/a> is now online<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> (the time taken to play the game) and event time <\/em>(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:
\n\"Time<\/p>\n

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:
\n\"Time
\n… 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\n

\nPS. For various reasons, I sometimes refer to this essay as Time to Play<\/a>.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “First Person: Introduction to Game Time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}