This chapter develops postdigital play as a conceptual lens for understanding how contemporary video games organise and reconfigure time within everyday life. It begins with a foundational view of digital play—the structured interaction between player and system, governed by mechanics, rules, and interfaces—and extends this view by attending to the broader infrastructures, monetisation models, update cycles, and social routines that now shape play. From a postdigital perspective, play is not a bounded activity but an entangled practice woven into commutes, domestic tasks, and personal rhythms. To explore this entanglement, the chapter examines polychronicity as a temporal orientation in which multiple activities or demands can coexist across overlapping timescales—evident in mobile games, seasonal events, idle mechanics, hybrid toys, and community practices. While not exclusive to games or digital contexts, polychronicity offers a way of understanding how postdigital play operates across temporal layers and everyday routines. By tracing how these systems both shape and are shaped by player agency, the chapter highlights postdigital play as a valuable frame for examining how games have become sites where time is designed, experienced, negotiated—and, at times, reclaimed.

错误:搜索内容不能为空,请输入英文关键词
错误:关键词超出字数限制,请精简
高级检索

Play Against the Clock: Postdigital Play and Polychronicity

  • Thomas Byers

摘要

This chapter develops postdigital play as a conceptual lens for understanding how contemporary video games organise and reconfigure time within everyday life. It begins with a foundational view of digital play—the structured interaction between player and system, governed by mechanics, rules, and interfaces—and extends this view by attending to the broader infrastructures, monetisation models, update cycles, and social routines that now shape play. From a postdigital perspective, play is not a bounded activity but an entangled practice woven into commutes, domestic tasks, and personal rhythms. To explore this entanglement, the chapter examines polychronicity as a temporal orientation in which multiple activities or demands can coexist across overlapping timescales—evident in mobile games, seasonal events, idle mechanics, hybrid toys, and community practices. While not exclusive to games or digital contexts, polychronicity offers a way of understanding how postdigital play operates across temporal layers and everyday routines. By tracing how these systems both shape and are shaped by player agency, the chapter highlights postdigital play as a valuable frame for examining how games have become sites where time is designed, experienced, negotiated—and, at times, reclaimed.