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16.
PAUSE AND REBOOT
The recursive nature
of gameplay poses a problem within a realm bound in real-time.
What are we to make of the temporal paradoxes, loopholes, loose
ends, and partial chronologies enacted by simulation? For one,
the ability to control instantaneity, to suspend events and the
natural order of things, provides a buffer - a temporal holding
area that inspires pre-emptive self-assessment. Through depressing
the "pause" button, we are given the liberty to put
things off (a direct affront to the postmodern ideologies of time-space
compression) and consider our next move. In addition, the "reload"
or "reboot" features of video games afford us the opportunity
to review causality at will. Mistakes can be repealed, and we
may distance ourselves from the inevitable consequences of our
ill actions. Such measures of protection allow for human error,
or better yet sanction the impossible dream of correcting the
past. Gamers thus revel in the fantasy of time-travel; the ability
to maneuver through different temporal dimensions within the virtual.
This whimsical journey, however, replaces (or erases) real-time.
Lived experiences in the present must be traded off for the virtues
of flexi-temporality; when rapt in a virtual mission, the gamer
relinquishes her attention and potential to the digital world,
and nothing really happens. The intimate connection with time,
in other words the obsession with punctuality professed by industrialism,
is forsaken during gameplay. Players instead become addicted to
the convenience of a malleable past, refusing (for hours on end)
the return to a reality that remains untimely.
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