About this paper:
This paper presentation proposes a basic framework for describing time in computer games.

For reasons that escape us, we know very little about games, both electronic and non-electronic. The presenter is of the conviction that we need a theory of games, and that an understanding of time in games is 1) an inevitable part of this theory-to-come and 2) may serve as a suitable starting point for future work.

This paper also works from the assumption that rather than simply retrofitting well-known theories, we need a relatively clean break: A reassessment of games that begins with observation of actual works and then moves to a more general theory of games and their relation to other media and genres.

Time in games often assumes a double character between the player's playing in normal, real time and the time of the events in the game world. This relation is what we might call the play-element of games. That you pretend to be doing something else than what you are doing, or pretend to be someone else. You click with your mouse, but you are also the mayor of a fictive city. To capture both this and the more simple time of abstract games, the terminology proposed has four key terms:

1.Play time: The time used by the player to play the game.
2.Event time: The time of the events in the game.
3.Mapping: The process of claiming that what the player does is also something in event time.
4.Narrative events: When the events in the game are told (by the game) rather than played. (I.e. cut-scenes.)

A brief history of time in games:
The history of time in games is easily constructed as one going from abstract sports and board games to the more elaborately crafted worlds & times of contemporary computer games. Many newer games are careful to craft a coherent event time, even in face of technological obstacles. Unreal or Half-Life work this way. You walk down a hallway, a loading screen appears, and you continue down the hallway.

On the other hand, many games continue to be quite imprecise with event time. This is probably related to games' basic root in the play time: Playing a game like Quake III on the net, the jump between different levels makes no sense in a game world, and the display refers to the machine time and the materiality of the game ("loading" / "awaiting gamestate").

This means that time in games has become increasingly complex, and that some computer games are getting better at crafting continuous and coherent event time. But this does not prevent other games from continuing to have very simple or very loosely defined event time.

Theory of games:
This paper thus attempts to describe the beginnings of a theory of game time, to explain why we need this theory, and to demonstrate how it can serve to describe game genres, historical developments in games, and games in relation to other phenomena.