Högskolan i Skövde

As videogames become an increasingly dominant popular cultural form it is important to ask what it means to spend time at play in games today. Videogames have a contested reputation with respect to time. There is the archetypal figure of the time- divorced gamer, who proceeds to play for hours on end, disregarding even basic human needs. There is the notion of games as a waste of time, closely linked to the ideas of games as a pleasant way to pass time, as in the trend of casual games or games played on mobile phones. In contrast, there is the idea of games as a way to accelerate learning or save time, as opposed to more traditional forms of education or training. And then there are the more formal design values of flow and replayability in videogames, which are leveraged by designers seeking to harness time in ways perhaps unique to the digital games medium. What do these relationships between humans, machines, and gameplay have to say about how we live today? This chapter illuminates historical threads of game- time, including the histories of the clock and the computer, to better under- stand how we experience time as we play, and how this experience of game- time informs our understanding of what it means to have fun in the world today.