Threads of Time
Around two hundred and fifty years ago, the critic and playwright Gotthold Lessing drew an influential distinction between the spatial and the temporal arts. The idea was, roughly, that a visual art like painting was very good at representing objects in space and a strictly verbal art like poetry was very good at representing events in time. Colors and shapes are fundamentally arranged in space; words are fundamentally arranged in time. Beyond that, Lessing held that neither medium was all that great at doing what the other was best at. Lessing’s arguments were presented in his work Laocoon: An Essay on The Limits of Painting and Poetry. He held that those working within a medium should make the most of its strengths and not try too hard to work against the grain. Let the spatial arts be spatial and the temporal arts be temporal.
Setting aside whether or not that recommendation makes sense, the distinction between the spatial arts and the temporal arts has been something philosophers and critics return to occasionally. It seems somehow too intuitive to leave behind. But the distinction has become a little more complicated as the years have gone by. New forms of media made some things clear that might not have been quite so obvious otherwise. Some media are almost undeniably both spatial and temporal arts. It was clear immediately at its birth that film, as a moving image, works in space and time and can represent each. So the distinction between the spatial and temporal arts cannot be an exclusive one. (See the chapter on Time in the Arts in Sean Enda Power’s recent survey book Philosophy of Time: An Introduction for more on Lessing’s distinction and the kinds of questions contemporary philosophers talk about regarding time and the arts.)
And certain types of games just as clearly have elements of both the spatial and the temporal arts as well. Videogames can depict a space and even put us inside that space to let us explore the places it contains. And games can do something similar for time. They can depict a time and also let us act inside of that time— some even let us explore or manipulate time. In temporal artworks generally, we experience events arranged in time, vicariously live through a particular stretch of time, and experience the specific way that time passes in this work. But in a game the temporal aspects of the medium can be altered and experimented with in new ways. This is so for two reasons—first, games give us agency and; second, games can simulate a world. In a game we can experience events arranged in time and represented as being in time like in a film, but we can also act in time, decide how to use the time we have, explore branching time or different events occurring at a given time. What we do with our time and the things we experience can be up to us in a way they are not in passive media. In addition to temporal forms of agency, a game can contain a world that has its own time—and this might run independently of the narrative or the player’s actions. There are simply more layers of time in games than in traditional media. As a result, designers have more opportunities for temporal experimentation . Here I’d like to trace out the different types of time in games and some of the ways those different types of time get woven together.
The Ordinary Concept of Time:
Sequence, Now, Passage
But we have to get clear about what we’re talking about, so let’s start with our ordinary understanding of time. For simplicity, I’m going to focus on three aspects of the concept. First, a core component of the idea is that of a sequence of events—one thing after another. This happened and then that happened and so on. Any event at all must fit somewhere in the sequence. This is what might be called the sequential aspect of time. Second, we feel like we occupy a particular moment in time, the present moment. So in our experience of a sequence of events, we seem to ourselves to occupy a particular place within that sequence at any given moment. We call this privileged moment ‘now’. And we intuitively believe that all events in time are either before or after now. The now splits the sequence of events in two. The events that lie behind it are in the past and the events that lie after it are in the future. Beyond its special position in the sequence, the now also seems to be closely tied to the third aspect of time I will pick out here: the passage of time. The now seems to be passing by. It’s this moment and will be the next and the next and on and on. And so the present seems to us to fade into the past and the future slides into the present. Time seems to pass and it seems to do so in that specific direction.
There’s an arbitrarily large amount more that could be said, but these three aspects—sequence, now, and passage— provide us with enough of an orientation to start talking about the different threads of time in games.
(I’m entirely bracketing whether or not these aspects of our ordinary understanding of time accurately characterize the nature of time as it exists in our own world.)
Types of Time in Games:
Ludic Time, Narrative Time, World Time
We can conceptually distinguish between at least three types of events and three corresponding sequences of events in games. These are ludic time, narrative time, and world time. Each of these sequences typically have a current state or now and also a kind of passage from one event to the next. These different time sequences are like separate threads that can be woven together. They collectively shape the overall temporal character of a game. So what are they?
Ludic Time
Ludic time is the order of events occurring in play. All games have a sequence of events that structures play. It’s very clear in table top games and classic abstract games. First, white moves, then black. First, the cards are shuffled, then dealt, and then we take turns playing cards around the table. So ludic time can be thought of as an ordering of a particular type of event: our ludic actions. There is a right way and a wrong way things can go. We should take turns going clockwise around the table— and if we go in the opposite direction we are not doing it right. And the turns might have a more complex internal structure. They might be broken down into sub-components such as phases which are still essentially tied to specific actions the player takes in that phase of their turn. These ludic notions specify a sequence of play.
Explicit time limits might be tied to some elements in the sequence (or might not). And although some phases in the ludic sequence involve no time limit— the character of these sequences still affects our phenomenological perception of the passage of time as we play. Design choices can clearly affect the pace of play. And the way play is structured can clearly influence how much objective time a play session takes.
That description of ludic time carries over to many video games such as turn-based games and digital versions of table top games. Ludic time is often highly structured and that structure is typically accessible and clear to the player. The player is the one playing the game and their actions have to follow the order the game requires to the extent that it imposes an order at all. But ludic time still exists in video games where play takes place in real time. But the sequences of play are governed by something different from explicit rules. Instead of rules specifying the order of play conceptually and verbally to players, we have subterranean programming and laws of the virtual world being simulated which structure our play. The underlying logic enforces which sequences of actions can be performed and which cannot— and how long those sequences will take to complete. Instead of an abstract turn yielding an equally abstract action like we see in a board game; in video games, we often see a simulation of a physical action in virtual space. And the animations which represent this action take a certain amount of time—and this fact often provides the temporal structure of play. For example, in Dark Souls you cannot dodge roll immediately after you hit tbe button to swing your sword, there is a set of animations you have committed to and that you have to wait out. But in other games, similar actions and animations can be cancelled—so you can dodge right after attacking. And that give us two different possible sequences of actions—the cancellable and the non-cancellable. And this sort of difference is fundamentally a difference in the logic governing interactions in the game. These constraints determines which ludic sequences are possible. This sort of difference in the underlying logic of action can be found in so many genres of games and in different components of the way they play. Manipulating these types of constraints allows designers and developers to experiment with ludic time in a way analogous to the way table-top and turn-based designers can mess around the the flow of play by experimenting with turn-structure.
Narrative Time
Narrative time is the order of events occurring in the story/plot of the game if there is one. This is a complex notion. I have bundled two related ideas together under the heading of narrative time. There is an intuitive distinction between the order of events that ultimately occur in a narrative and the order in which those events are presented to the audience. This distinction goes by different names in different theories of narrative. I’m going to call the order of events in a narrative the ‘story’, as we colloquially say we tell each other stories, and the order that events ultimately happen in a story, the ‘plot’. Story is the order of presentation and plot is the order of occurrence. In literature and film, authors play with this distinction to generate a fascinating and confusing array of possibilities. In the most basic case, an author can choose to start telling a story at the beginning, then go on to the middle, and then wind up at the end. This is a case where the order of the story is told coincides with the order of the plot. The first thing we are told is the first thing that happens, the second thing told is the second thing that happens, and so on. Sometimes the orders might be inverted. The first thing that happens would be the last thing told; while the last thing that happens would be the first thing told. And skipping around in the telling of a plot seems to always have been around, for example, see what is labeled the ‘in medias res’ approach to openings. (Apparently starting somewhere in the middle warrants a Latin name for some reason.) The story begins by telling us about things occurring somewhere in the middle of the plot. The first thing we are told is, at the least, not the first significant thing that happened. Some stories begin with the ending or climactic event and then work backwards to show how things reached such a dramatic pitch. And this brief enumeration of the possibilities here does not scratch the surface.
So there are a vast number of ways that the sequence of the plot can be presented through the sequence of the story. And these presentational devices can be explored in games as well. But to start thinking about narrative time, let’s focus on the idea of plot (as a sequence of events.) And, to make getting started easier, let’s first consider games in which there is a single plot (pre-written and embedded in the game before play begins) which unfolds at different points of progress in play. Even with a single plot the way narrative time progresses can vary widely from game to game. For example, many games reward the player with narrative progress after the player has accomplished specific goals or completed a level or area. Narratives might also progress in light of what the player fails to do: narratives can depend on our failures as well as our successes. Or if the designer wants to create a sense of urgency or inevitability they can tie the narrative progress to a timer of some sort, making the flow of the narrative independent of the player’s ludic progress.
And the way plot works in single plot games is somewhat similar to the way plot works in non-interactive fiction. In a book or film, we typically have a fixed and unique sequence of events that makes up the plot. The plot is just the one true sequence of events that happened in the fiction. And we read things under the assumption that the plot is there for us and is just patiently waiting for us to come to know it. And that plot is what it is. This novel has this one plot. We can reread the many times, but the plot stays the same. We may not understand the plot or fully comprehend it on our first or second or third readings, but the plot itself does not change—only our understanding of the plot changes. In a single plot game, we may fail to reveal the whole plot because we are not playing well and get stuck somewhere. But once we play well, we’ll play through the same plot everyone else winds up playing through.
This contrasts with the way that plots can work in a video game and other works that have interactive narratives (or at least non-deterministic narratives). Games can have multiple possible plots. They can have branching plots and open-ended plots. The plot in a game can be more or less fixed or it can be more a choose your adventure. From playthrough to playthrough, the plot can differ. There might be a fixed tree of possible branching plot lines, but which branches you go down is up to you. And some games allow us to affect plotlines in ways that are not captured by a series of discrete branching nodes for action that are presented to the player through dialogue or prompts or forced choices. Games also allow or forbid certain plot relevant events from occurring. Some games might allow for the arbitrary, accidental, unlucky deaths of main characters. They might be killed in act of random violence. They might walk off a cliff. They might run into the fires that you have light in order to protect them.
Others games don’t like so much randomness and choice messing up their intended narrative arcs— so these events are ruled out. Central NPCs have a plot armor that is truly invincible. I swing a hammer at the indispensable shopkeeper and the metal passes right through him. He is utterly unharmed. He does not notice my murderous intentions. He is apparently not disturbed. A game can protect its narratives or it can expose it to chance or give free hand to the player to construct a plot through their choices.
But whether a game has one plot or many possible plots— designers must still make interesting decisions to make about the way narrative time will pass or unfold. The key design choices here are whether narrative time will be conditional on the actions of the player or whether they will be tied to other systems the player has no control over.
World Time
This brings us to the last type of event and sequence: world time or diegetic time. World time is the order of events occurring in the game which are governed by a model of time in that virtual world. For example, some game worlds model day and night cycles or the seasons or have a calendar or clock. These are systems that determine how time passes in a world. Games can have more coarse or more fine-grained types of world time. Most games seem to have a very minimalistic sort of world time— in these worlds time is almost arrested, yet changes can still be observed and can occur due to our actions. It is like the world exists in an eternal present. There are games whose world seems to exist within a time that leaves few regular traces on the environment. There is no day, no night, no changes of seasons, no high tide or low. The sun might be stuck in the same point in the sky and so the light is always the same. There is still time—events occur one after the other, characters walk around, waves crash ceaselessly on a shore. But it’s almost as if the place is hung up in a single hour of a single day—and all the actions that occur are compressed into it. And it’s strange because you might play the game for days of real time. And the narrative actions within the game’s world seem like things that could never fit into a single day’s worth of time. The passage of time across wider stretches is not observed, but inferred. We must have lived through significant swathes of time in this world because we’ve been engaged in a project for so long or because so many things have happened in the narrative.
Then there are games with astronomical time— a time that is measured out in days, nights, and seasons. A sun and moon might be modeled in the world—we might witness the gradual changes in the sky and our surroundings. And often in such games there are fine-grained measures of time such as calendar and clock time. Many significant changes in the game can be tied to these. The seasons might bring unique events with them and limited-time offerings in the shops. We have such things in real life. We live through barrages of commercial items each season such as pumpkin spice lattes and decorative gourds and candy corn and eggnog. Some of these things persist in an untimely way in shadowy corners of supermarkets and dusty bargain bins . Peeps and candy corn and eggnog can be located with some effort outside of season. And we’re also still somewhat familiar with the slightly less commercial aspects of the seasons: changes in the weather, the look of the trees, seasonal fruits and vegetables. We know about the summer beach trip, trick-or-treating, skiing and outdoor ice-skating. Some activities are only available within the span of a particular season like skiing. And that can make them kind of scarce and the season very exciting for the people who love those activities. But some events are really tethered down to a particular date on the calendar. If you didn’t get to dress up and go trick or treating with your friends on Halloween night, you’ll have to wait till next year. Games with fine-grained measures of time and constant passage can mimic these types of phenomena.
On the other hand, some games have a world-time that passes and leaves it’s traces on the places we see—but do not have clock time or a calendar. They have a vague time. A passing of time that must happen by exact rules, but this is not always apparent or obvious to the player. We know that night will fall eventually. We know that day wil come eventually. And unique events are tied to these temporal conditions. But the world time is never described to the player in terms of to explicit fine-grained measures of time such as 1:24 P.M. on Nov 22 2022 A.D.
Other games make world time conditional upon ludic or narrative events— so the world only shifts when certain events are triggered By the player. These worlds have a strange, halting time. The temporal phases the world goes through are sensitive to your actions in a way that time in our own actual world rarely is.
Bloodborne offers a good example of a kind of conditional world-time. The sky in the city of Yharnam (along with some other environmental features) will change as you progress through the narrative by performing specific actions. When you inspect an old skull, sunset turns to night and the moon is full and bright white. When you kill a giant ancient spider in a misty void under a lake—the moon turns into a bloodmoon. The player does something and the world-time gets pushed along.
Before moving on, it’s worth noting that world-time can be present in many different formats or media. It’s commonly implemented in video games, but some table-top games possess a world-time as well. It can be done, but it can be difficult for players to track and model any changes the passage of world-time entails so is often omitted by designers for ease of play.
The way world time is designed in a game can deeply affect the atmosphere and how the player interacts in that world.
Weaving Times Together (And Apart)
So there are at least three types of time in games: ludic time, narrative time, and world time. And these distinct times are like threads that can be woven together. We can get a better grip on them if we pay attention to where they come apart and where they converge. Ludic time is the order in which game events and actions occur. Narrative time is the order in which events constituting the plot occur. A simple example can illustrate the distinction between ludic time and narrative time. A ttrpg might ask me the player to roll the dice at a particular point. This dice roll determines what will happen in the narrative. But the dice roll is part of ludic time and not part of narrative time. I roll the dice and my character makes a contribution to the story. In video games, cutscenes often exist within narrative time, but not really within ludic time. It’s true that sometimes the narrative content of a cutscene might alter the ludic background—it might alter the state of the game and change which actions are possible. Things we could do before the cutscene, we can’t do anymore, and vice versa. Even so, cutscenes are frequently skippable and could often be excised from the complex artifact that is the video game without really affecting how the player interacts with the game, how play proceeds. By contrast, cutting out something like dice rolls or antes or a response phase of a turn in a card game could drastically alter how play proceeds and feels. Dice rolls and cutscenes are examples that show how ludic time and narrative time can come apart.
But there’s more. Here’s another point of separation: we can speed up ludic time without affecting narrative time at all. Many remasters of older turn-based or slower paced games (such as the mainline Final Fantasy games) are now including a fast-forward option that allows the player to speed up the gameplay—but leaves the narrative and cutscenes all in place.
Another point of separation is bit more common—the pause function (and menus). Which time do we pause when we hit the pause button (or go into a menu)? It depends. Sometimes you pause all the time-sequences. Sometimes only world time. Think about real-time with pause combat: the combat is ongoing and then stops when you pause— but you can still take all kinds of ludic actions such as changing gear, queuing up attacks, even using items and so ludic time continues. It’s interesting because games frequently use pause in a similar way —even if they don’t explicitly have what we call real-time with pause systems. Pause is a kind of time-out that advantages the player. The player gets to act, but the world doesn’t. Open a menu, threats get suspended, and we get an opportunity to think and do a few helpful things. Pausing world time while the player is in the menu is so common that we can be surprised when a game doesn’t do that. The first time you open up your menu in Dark Souls, you probably feel perfectly safe all of a sudden. And that’s because you assume the world is frozen—that the enemies are no powerless. But then you start trying to change your clothes and your probably get killed. And you eventually realize that the world didn’t stop when you were in your menu. There is no pause. Time runs on whether we want it to or not. The contrasting case is a game with a total pause. Many games render everything inaccessible to the player when paused. Everything on screen is frozen, nothing can be done by me or by the world. And so world time and ludic time are both stopped.
And some events that seem to be represented as taking place in the narrative, or at least in the game world, are probably not. In a turn-based strategy game like Final Fantasy Tactics the characters in a battle often dutifully march in place while I slowly think through my decision and select which actions I want to perform. I assume that the fact such and such character marched in place for three minutes is not a component of the narrative. It’s not canon. It’s represented on screen, but narrative time and world time have both been paused until the turn is carried out.
Still, one and the same event can be part of both ludic time and narrative time. When I’m in control of my character and have him take his sword and swing away until he kills a giant wolf who is a significant figure in the plot— that action unfolds in ludic time. It takes up space there. It was constrained by the actions that can before and affects which actions can come after it. And that killing blow also exists in narrative time— it makes a contribution there. The wolf is slain and was killed by that particular action and it was killed at a particular point in the narrative which has been unfolding over the course of my playthrough.
In some games, every type of event is submerged in world time. There is no event occurring in the game that does not occur in the time of the game world. So consider an action game that has no menus and/or no pause. The world just keeps running and all my actions have to take place in the world time. By contrast, consider the real- time with pause and turn-based systems we talked about earlier. These systems allow ludic actions to occur outside of the flow of time in the world.
But even when every event is submerged in world time, that doesn’t mean that world time itself makes everything happen. Maybe the clearest illustration is in games that have an eternal now standing in as the world time. There are no seasons, calendars, and clock. No events are scheduled to occur by such and such a time. The only events that occur are brought about through the ludic actions of the player and the narrative scripted to follow from those actions. World time is there, but it exists as a barely noticeable backdrop for our actions. Further, a games’ world can have a world time that brings about visible changes in scenery, but the designers might have chosen to hang nothing of ludic or narrative significance on it. So we might have a world full of cosmetic visual changes that track day/night cycles or the seasons—-but no ludic or narrative events which depend upon these changes. Or designers can make world time critical for our play. World time can set the pace our actions must follow in ludic time. We can see this in life simulators like Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing. Different models of world times can change the way these games feel to play. The world time in these games can run in sync or out of sync with our own. In-game days can be as long our or they can run for about 10 minutes often the days, months, and years are highly compressed so time and the gameplay feel very accelerated. When the time is so compressed, it can almost feel like playing a montage—the fruits of your labor start to show up very quickly. When the time is in sync with our own, the eventual effects of our actions take a bit more patience to see (and even become peripheral to the experience of just inhabiting the space).
On the narrative side, world time can trigger events in narrative time: on a certain calendar day such and such important event will happen. And even when the world time has little impact on the way the game is played or the narrative— the way world time interacts with the environments in the game often enriches the place in a game world. A familiar place can take on a new aspect as the seasons change. This might or might not matter for the game’s core narrative or gameplay, but it can strongly affect the atmosphere evoked by a particular place.
So all that illustrated a few of the ways the threads of time can be woven together. And designers can combine and experiment with these time-sequences and the way they overlap and interact. Designers can be just as experimental with narrative time as an avant-garde film or modernist novel. Similar types of experimentation can happen when they starting messing around with ludic time and world time. The sequences or proper order of ludic events in otherwise similar games can be reordered in different ways to alter the way the game plays out and the types of decisions the player is making, what information they have when making the decisions, and what the consequences will be. Experimenting with world-time can give play a distinctive tempo, open up certain narrative possibilities, and create unique aesthetic effects.
[For a more comprehensive look at the topic of time in games, I strongly recommend Chris Hanson’s monograph Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games. It’s a very insightful analysis and looks at time in games from many different angles. Unfortunately, I did not know about Hanson’s book when I wrote this piece. I hope to come back and rework this a bit to note where Hanson says similar (or different) things about the topic.]