Feeling Coded Time: Temporal Interruptions in Videogames

INTRODUCTION

Describing the tumultuous aftermath of the release of his company's 2016 game, No Man's Sky, SEAN MURRAY, managing director of Hello Games, stated, "I remember getting a death threat about the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer." He recalls, "you could see them as you walked past them, but there weren't any butterflies in the launch game."¹ Although MURRAY's chosen example here is exceptional in terms of its absurdity, player criticism in the wake of No Man's Sky's initial launch followed the same format, identifying a promise made in promotional material from interviews to trailers (the existence of in-game butterflies), and a subsequent sense of outrage or anger at the failure of the launch game to make good on those promises (egregious lack of in-game butterflies). Framed in terms of what is ethically owed to consumers, criticism of MURRAY and his game reveals not only how consumers expect to be served by game developers but how players expect to play videogames. The absence of butterflies, for instance, foregrounds the player's expectation to interact with butterflies upon the game's release; the interruption of this expectation is also an interruption of the player's in-game experience. And from this shifting interruption across consumer and player expectation, we can detect an interruption in the typical task orientation of videogame play.

It is precisely this twofold interruption (of consumer and player) that I'm interested in exploring. More specifically, this paper will examine two videogames, the aforementioned No Man's Sky (2016) as well as Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017). I will attend to the way that both games defer, displace, and interrupt the "flow" of task-oriented play, thereby drawing attention to competing temporal sensibilities endemic to network technology. "Flow," or "optimal experience," refers to an ideal state of task orientation, first developed by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wherein people manage to lose themselves in whatever activity in which they are engaged.² Flow is itself a temporally inflected argument about play that is inherently teleological and therefore inextricable from task orientation itself. As Patrick Jagoda argues, "We attain what [Csikszentmihalyi] calls 'optimal experience' when we develop a 'sense of mastery' over our actions. In enhancing a feeling of control, flow contrasts with 'psychic disorder.'"³ In this sense, flow comprises a teleological lurch toward sovereign mastery against what Jagoda goes on to refer to as a "flux (rather than a flow) between sovereignty and nonsovereignty, solitude and togetherness, task-orientation and chaos."⁴ However, as I will argue, videogames more often require analysis from the perspective of interruption, not just flux. Interruption here refers not only to the movement between sovereignty and nonsovereignty in Jagoda's concept of flux, but it is also a moment of reflection on this flux; in other words, I understand interruption as a retroactive apprehension of a differentiated temporal sensibility that is experienced during videogame play. This differentiation is what Mark B. N. Hansen refers to as a "microtemporal gap" between player and machine, which each comprise and inhabit differing temporalities.⁵ The result of interruption is an apprehension of a lack of control (or of the impossibility of sovereign mastery), both for consumers and players, the significance of which this paper seeks to investigate.

When thinking about the critical response to No Man's Sky at launch, we see a tension arise between task orientation (as well as its associated expectations) and the network technology operating in the background of task-oriented expectation. Both No Man's Sky and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy show an awareness of this tension and utilize mechanics that subvert their opposition. In No Man's Sky, a procedurally generated space-exploration game, the player is plunged into an incomprehensibly large universe (comprised of approximately eighteen quintillion playable, planet-sized planets), forcing the player to confront—and reconcile with—a universe that will never feel their effect. On the other hand, Bennett Foddy's Getting Over It situates itself within a tradition of internet...