![]() 7 Yet, these concerns remain relatively agnostic about duration and are portable across short films, two-hour features, and longform series-slow cinema as a quasi-genre category derives some uniqueness from its inordinate reliance on duration compared to most genre classifications. For example, in cinema studies Steve Neale suggests genre as a relational process between audience expectations and an historicized corpus of films dominated by specific aesthetic strategies such as spectacle, and Linda Williams has written of the embodied reactions that are implicated in classifying genres such as horror, pornography, and melodrama. 6 What is arguably specific to games, however, is how duration binds to questions of genre and the expectations that players have about game genre these questions tie to the protean status of game genre classification in general. The aesthetics of duration (along with intermittence and repetition) within specific reception contexts is not unique to video games investigations into the mode of binge-watching television series on streaming platforms, or the durational experience of slow cinema within theatrical and museum contexts, address similar questions about how formal-aesthetic properties of a work shape how it fits into one’s lifeworld. Murray’s insight, which links gameplay experience to everyday life, raises a key question for video game aesthetics: how do specific game design choices and gameplay forms address everyday temporalities? What kinds of lived experience do games envision, and how do they fit into that experience? Thus, the mechanics not only resemble task management, but also cohere into experiences that fit into the gaps of a player’s everyday schedule of real-life tasks the game itself takes on the temporality of a task by structuring and capturing otherwise unordered time. Those relatively straightforward mechanics also work well in short play sessions of a few minutes where the player starts from scratch each time. The core gameplay “loop” of Tetris, which involves placing a series of blocks into proper places in order to clear lines of blocks off the board until the accelerating inputs clutter the board too quickly and end the game, does more than evoke the feeling of task management through its assembly-line game mechanics. This specific configuration of everyday life is the ground against which Murray examines the game’s qualities those qualities, because of how they use and shape time, make a good fit (so to speak) for such a life. Her reading of the game does not assume an idealized abstract concept of a player but a specific playing subject: in this case, a worker inhabiting an ever-accelerating regime of labor that places increasing demands on the subject’s time and attention. However, the profound insight that Murray offers with this example is not solely contained in what Tetris is, but in delineating how, where, and when Tetris might be played. ![]() 4 This passage has been cited as a historical flashpoint for the so-called ludology-narratology debates and on related questions of the value of symptomatic readings of video games as texts-whether the audiovisual and gameplay elements that constitute Tetris signify a coherent critique, the importance of elaborating that critique, and other similar questions. For example, in Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray describes the iconic 1984 puzzle game Tetris as “a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s-of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught… Tetris allows us to symbolically experience agency over our lives.”. 3 Game aesthetics are strongly situated aesthetics: spatial and temporal contexts not only shape the meanings that players take away from gameplay experience, but they also determine the form and types of experience that unfold in play. They even extend beyond the feel and feelings produced by the cybernetic intersubjective assemblage of player and game at the threshold of the interface, which has become an important site of inquiry for game studies scholars. Video game aesthetics extend beyond the sights and sounds encoded into datasets for electronic processing into the audiovisual worlds of player experience. Game genre, duration, and the flow of the everyday “The Time Machine brings cookies from the past, before they were even eaten.” 2 “We do not say that we have learnt, and that anything is made new or beautiful by mere lapses of time for we regard time itself as destroying rather than producing, for what is counted in time is movement, and movement dislodges whatever it affects from its present state.” 1
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