Game Time

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

While such a combination of viewpoints seems inherent to video game studies,it nevertheless makes this book an equally rich and engaging reading for academics, students, and gamers.

Hanson cleverly explores how seemingly mundane concepts like the ability to pause, save, or suspend gameplay radically changes our relationship to games and what we are allowed to do with them; however, these technological advancements also lead to the creation of more complex game design in which temporal manipulation becomes part of the player's challenges (or their toolset). Hanson naturally explores speedrunning in Game Time, suggesting that the desire to repeatedly play games in order to find ways to complete them faster or experiment with glitches to "break" the internal programming to do things players are not supposed to do is a means of demonstrating human mastery over the game, turning the act into performance as much as play. Through these and other examples, Hanson's work explores how video games are unique in terms of entertainment media and how interactivity intersects with our very concept of time and space-as Animal Crossing players learned, all it takes is to adjust a clock in the menu to turn today into tomorrow, or three weeks from now