Time Trial: Advancing an Understanding of Temporality in Play and Games
Whether it is made an explicit mechanic via countdown clocks and quick-time events, or is simply a natural part of the narrative, games are always already inherently concerned with the passage of time. While it is easy to think of mechanics as being about player control, the relationship of input to output, and how a game’s particular physics engine is encoded, every game has a unique relationship with temporality that players must learn to navigate in order to play successfully, whether that is perfecting the timing of their jumps in a platformer or remembering to log in to complete daily tasks in an MMO.