Playing with Game Time: Auto-Saves and Undoing Despite the ‘Magic Circle’

Typically the time of games played on computer systems is considered as linear and progressive. Those studying games talk this way and often linear time is the idiom by which players make sense of their experiences at play. This article focuses on some recent games that explicitly engage players with time, a practice that I argue highlights the complicated relationship between the player, game time, and clock time. It is common to treat videogames as exception from the world, bounded in a kind of “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1938/1955). This can be seen in the most ready explanation of time; the basically uninterrupted arrow of player progress through the space of the game, made canonical by Jesper Juul (2005). However, there are many other kinds of time in games, and how players use these times says something significant about a game. There is something more to the magic circle than a condition of pure interiority. The magic circle is play that situates a game and it hosts a special intensity opening to larger forces. This is often ignored in the contemporary use of the term in scholarly discussions of computer-based games. The overly respectful attitude that games are distinct from regular life results in the construction of a “pure” zone strictly internal to games, and time in this zone appears as a line. This article argues that such a vision is incomplete. Time in videogames need not be understood as a single line, or any diagram of lines at all. The complex and overlapping rhythms that crosscut everyday life do not stop at a magical barrier that contains and protects the game; these varied rhythms both influence how games are played, and describe the variety of times that games contain. By attending to other times than a line, we can recognize other patterns in gaming. I suggest that the act of undoing highlights this particular temporal intensity of videogames. In this paper, I argue that undoing is not simply the restoration of a previous state, but also constitutes another form of action taken in the course of play.