Feeling Coded Time: Temporal Interruptions in Videogames

Christopher Cañete Rodriguez Kelly

ASAP/Journal, Volume 6, Number 1, January 2021, pp. 167-187 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/asa.2021.0011

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/785487

[ Access provided at 26 May 2021 02:15 GMT from Western Libraries ]

 Christopher Cañete Rodriguez Kelly

FEELING CODED TIME

TEMPORAL INTERRUPTIONS IN
VIDEOGAMES

INTRODUCTION

D
escribing the tumultuous aftermath of the release of his company’s
2016 game, No Man’s Sky, SEAN MURRAY, managing director
of Hello Games, stated, “I remember getting a death threat about
the fact that there were butterflies in our original trailer.” He recalls, “you
could see them as you walked past them, but there weren’t any butterflies in
the launch game.”1 Although MURRAY’s chosen example here is exceptional in
terms of its absurdity, player criticism in the wake of  No Man’s Sky’s initial
launch followed the same format, identifying a promise made in promotional
material from interviews to trailers (the existence of in-game butterflies), and
a subsequent sense of outrage or anger at the failure of the launch game to
make good on those promises (egregious lack of in-game butterflies). Framed
in terms of what is ethically owed to consumers, criticism of  MURRAY and
his game reveals not only how
consumers expect to be served by
CHRISTOPHER CAÑETE RODRIGUEZ KELLYis a
PhD student in literary studies at the University of Wisconsin- game developers but how players
Madison. Previously working in fields such as critical Indigenous
expect to play videogames. The
studies and critical game studies, Christopher’s current interests
include folklore, peripheral realism, armed struggle, and absence of butterflies, for instance,
indigeneity in the Philippines, particularly throughout the
twentieth century. Christopher has published an article on the foregrounds the player’s expectation
murder of Indigenous Honduran activist Berta Cáceres in the
to interact with butterflies upon the
University of Minnesota’s Hispanic Issues and has more
recently authored a piece of theory fiction for Alienocene. game’s release; the interruption of this

ASAP/Journal, Vol. 6.1 (2021): 167-188

© 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press.

expectation is also an interruption of the player’s in-game experience. And from
this shifting interruption across consumer and player expectation, we can detect
an interruption in the typical task orientation of videogame play.

It is precisely this twofold interruption (of consumer and player) that I’m inter-
ested in exploring. More specifically, this paper will examine two videogames,
the aforementioned No Man’s Sky (2016) as well as Getting Over It with Bennett
Foddy (2017). I will attend to the way that both games defer, displace, and inter-
rupt the “flow” of task-oriented play, thereby drawing attention to competing
temporal sensibilities endemic to network technology. “Flow,” or “optimal
experience,” refers to an ideal state of task orientation, first developed by psy-
chologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wherein people manage to lose themselves
in whatever activity in which they are engaged.2 Flow is itself a temporally
inflected argument about play that is inherently teleological and therefore inex-
tricable from task orientation itself. As Patrick Jagoda argues, “We attain what
[Csikszentmihalyi] calls ‘optimal experience’ when we develop a ‘sense of mas-
tery’ over our actions. In enhancing a feeling of control, flow contrasts with
‘psychic disorder.’ ”3 In this sense, flow comprises a teleological lurch toward
sovereign mastery against what Jagoda goes on to refer to as a “flux (rather than
a flow) between sovereignty and nonsovereignty, solitude and togetherness,
task-orientation and chaos.”4 However, as I will argue, videogames more often
require analysis from the perspective of interruption, not just flux. Interruption
here refers not only to the movement between sovereignty and nonsovereignty
in Jagoda’s concept of flux, but it is also a moment of reflection on this flux; in
other words, I understand interruption as a retroactive apprehension of a differ-
entiated temporal sensibility that is experienced during videogame play. This
differentiation is what Mark B. N. Hansen refers to as a “microtemporal gap”
between player and machine, which each comprise and inhabit differing tem-
poralities.5 The result of interruption is an apprehension of a lack of control (or
of the impossibility of sovereign mastery), both for consumers and players, the
significance of which this paper seeks to investigate.

When thinking about the critical response to No Man’s Sky at launch, we see
a tension arise between task orientation (as well as its associated expectations)
and the network technology operating in the background of task-oriented
expectation. Both No Man’s Sky and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy show an

ASAP/Journal  168 /
awareness of this tension and utilize mechanics that subvert their opposition.
In No Man’s Sky, a procedurally generated space-exploration game, the player
is plunged into an incomprehensibly large universe (comprised of approxi-
mately eighteen quintillion playable, planet-sized planets), forcing the player to
confront—­and reconcile with—a universe that will never feel their effect. On
the other hand, Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It situates itself within a tradition
of internet-centric “B-games” by foregrounding a relentlessly difficult learn-
ing curve that demands constant and shifting attunement to the challenging
control scheme. Although both titles pay lip

“
service to an apparent task orientation, the core
mechanics—and storylines—of each game
simultaneously undermine such an orientation,
. . . these videogames utilize the
either by drawing attention to the Sisyphean
reality of apparent tasks (No Man’s Sky) or
overall framing and structure of
through relentless frustration that instead their respective game worlds as
highlights the endless process of embodied a way to interrogate network
skill acquisition (Getting Over It). In this sense,
technologies and create new
these videogames utilize the overall framing
and structure of their respective game worlds
microtemporal sensory experiences;
as a way to interrogate network technologies they allow you to feel time.

”
and create new microtemporal sensory experi-
ences; they allow you to feel time.

If flow is the teleological culmination of an individual time-consciousness, it

must be understood that this teleology is the time-consciousness of the capitalist
subject, and that a commensurate theoretical apprehension of the worldly tem-
poralization of videogame and network technologies crucially moves beyond
this individual time-consciousness. In other words, feeling time is important
because it reveals that our sensorium, expanded by network technology, is not
or is no longer capitalist, meaning that the capitalist workday exists in painful
opposition to our time-consciousness. If the capitalist eight-hour workday
and task orientation go hand in hand, for instance, requiring and assuming
a crucial separation of individual laborer and time (understood in this case as
an abstract, organizational framework), then experiences of interruption in
videogames retroactively apprehend the fact that network-technological time
stands in opposition to wage labor. This retroactive apprehension, by which we
can observe a movement from worldly temporality in videogame play to the

Kelly  169 /
capitalist abstraction of time and its necessary exploitation of the microtemporal
gap, sheds light on the possible dissolution of wage labor, which is premised on
spatiotemporal abstraction.

Given recent work on experiences of failure in videogames, this essay is

in part an attempt to explore failure from the perspective of time instead of
affect, understanding that failure itself can be understood as a departure from
the temporal construction of task-oriented play. In order to navigate the line
between affect and temporality, I will be foregrounding my first-person expe-
rience of playing each videogame with a close reading of this experience. This
is an attempt to move away from a prescriptive tenor of remediation while also
remaining critical of an approach that overly privileges representation in media.6
Building on work on videogames and affect, my approach necessitates moving
between different registers, foregrounding my own player experience of both
games and moving toward a more generalizable question of wage labor; for this
reason, I will be drawing not only on contemporary videogame scholarship but
on contemporary theories of network technology as well.

CASE STUDY 1: NO MAN’S SKY

SPIRALING IN THE DEEP

After roughly an hour or so, I am excited because I have finally harvested

enough plutonium to fuel my launch thruster, the last hurdle separating me
from getting off this planet. I hold the R2 button (bottom-right trigger on the
PlayStation 4 controller) and watch from the cockpit as my starship leaps off the
surface of the desert-type planet I’ve been trapped on and starts moving slowly
but steadily forward, closing in on the rounded, far-off horizon.

Moving the left and right thumbsticks on the controller, I maneuver my

starship upward toward the sky. Not moving fast enough yet, I engage a speed
boost (standard on the starship without requiring any resources to be fueled)
and increase my speed by a small amount. The screen becomes limned in red
smears, heat signatures announcing the atmospheric break of the ship moving
off-world. I keep going, unsure of whether I’m fully out of the atmosphere, and
then stop myself to get my bearings. I twist my starship around in a kind of stasis
and see that I’m caught in some liminal area of the atmosphere itself between

ASAP/Journal  170 /
Figure 1.
The horizon of the planet that I am stranded on shortly after beginning No Man’s Sky (2016).

the planet I just left and the greater swell of stars that characterizes the star-­
system of planets more generally. I’m confused and unsure of where to look, so
I point the ship toward the stars and keep pushing. I stop again, turning the ship
to gauge my distance from the planet—it now feels much more massive than
I realized earlier, forming an overwhelming presence and blocking my view
of other objects in the star-system. I don’t know which way is up and, eyeing
everything from the partial view of the cockpit, spin around aimlessly, starting
to dizzy myself. In actuality, I’m a little panicked because I’ve never experienced
this sense of scale, but I have experienced being caught in a large wave as a child,
and the heaviness in my gut is the same, except the area of entrapment is much,
much bigger. I’m trapped in a place with every

“
way out, which only makes it worse.

Continuing this maniacal roll-and-flip method, I’m trapped in a place with

I finally catch sight of an object floating far- every way out, which only
away. When I point the nose of my starship
makes it worse.
toward it, a blip of information appears and
announces the object as a space station.
”
Kelly  171 /
Figure 2.
View from the cockpit of my No Man’s Sky starship in the midst of an asteroid field. As is indicated on the HUD, it will take
twelve hours at my current cruising speed to reach the nearest space station.

I move in that direction at the normal cruising speed, and the information on
the blip changes to announce that at my current speed, I’ll arrive at the space
station in roughly six hours. I feel overwhelmed again until another piece of
information appears on the Head-Up Display (HUD), suggesting that I engage
the Pulse Engine—I follow the suggestion. Holding two of the trigger buttons
together, the stars form lines of light not unlike those in Star Wars’s representa-
tion of  lightspeed; my speed greatly increases, and I hurtle through space in a
tunnel of sound and light. The station is fast approaching, and I realize I don’t
know how to stop. Thirty seconds until arrival . . . 23 . . . 15 . . . 8. Need­less
to say, I’m panicking again until my starship slows automatically, and I ineptly
careen toward the opening in the space-station’s façade. Once within range,
a tractor beam of sorts lands my starship within the station safely without my
having to do anything else. I wonder what would happen if I ran out of fuel for
my Pulse Engine, instead relying on the normal cruising speed and moving
for six hours.

With the presentation of each unfolding task described above, a relationship

surfaces between worldly temporality and individual temporality. This is due to
the game’s meticulous, ongoing disorientation that assumes a certain experience

ASAP/Journal  172 /
of space and time while also jettisoning the stability of that experience. In other
words, everything described above accords to a chaotic attuning, the uncom-
fortable jostling of my own ability with the videogame slowly incorporating me.
The tension didn’t recede in my disorienting catapult from planetary surface to
space station. It was all so new that it had an effect on my stomach; I felt nervous,
lost, confused, and panicked. More than anything, I was overwhelmed, which
is precisely what game developer Hello Games wanted. As was mentioned, No
Man’s Sky was developed through procedural generation and contains eighteen
quintillion algorithmically derived planets, all to be found within star-systems
not unlike the one I haphazardly navigated above.7 For any kind of human per-
ception, this game is infinite and therefore ironically unperceivable. No one
will ever catalog everything it has to show. When the popularity of the game
itself wanes and no one plays it anymore, so much of it will exist in shadow,
unknowable and unnameable. This is a game of pure duration in the sense that
it eliminates a perceivable metric space and instead presents a universe mappable
and conceivable only in terms of time.

From the outset, we can acknowledge that there is no straightforward or singular

representation of time being experienced here; for rhetorical purposes, we can
suggest that each piece of the machinic apparatus (not only the hard/software,
but myself as well), has its own perception of time. The hardware, as Alexander
Galloway has argued, remains dormant until powered up and enacted: “Begin
like this: If photographs are images, and films are moving images, then video
games are actions.”8 It takes a small amount of modification to suggest that time
does not exist for the hardware in the same way that it exists for me, as the
hardware isn’t engaged until I turn it on and start playing. In order to announce
estimated times of arrival while flying toward an element in the star-system,
the game does assume my basic understanding of seconds, minutes, hours, etc.
But the time represented in the videogame itself is different than how I experi-
ence time, because my sense of scale is warped. This is new time, a differently
articulated time, one that is distributive and deep and inextricable from spatial
apprehension itself, as each piece of hardware, including me, also takes up its
own space. Furthermore, this sense of time is inextricable from my body, pro-
ducing embodied sensations derived from the effect of being overwhelmed.

This retroactive apprehension of my difference from the videogame informs my

understanding of  interruption and is key to my argument regarding the split
temporality at work in videogames. “What exerts the pressure to perform in the

Kelly  173 /
microtemporal moment,” Hansen contends, “is not simply the player’s desire to
improve . . . but the machinic microtemporal operationality of the game engine,
the fact that the game keeps moving on, and that it does so beneath the thresh-
old of ordinary human perception.”9 In the case of No Man’s Sky, the game
experientially represents this difference between individual time-consciousness
and worldly sensibility by drawing attention to the surpassing of metric space
as a mode of apprehending distance. In the move from space-time (which orga-
nizes my individual perception) to only time or pure temporality, I am forced
to leap outside the boundaries of task-oriented play and labor. What is being
interrupted here is the experience of videogame play as understood through
the assumption of Csikszentmihalyi’s flow, which is premised on a culminating
alignment of perception and task orientation. Although tasks do continually
arise in No Man’s Sky, no sooner does a task announce itself than I am forced to
reckon with my inability to smoothly complete such a task.

When encountering signifiers of individually experienced time (in hours,

minutes, seconds, etc.), the dominance of this perception is undermined by
the vastness between on-screen objects (my starship and the distant space sta-
tion) so that my temporal limitation is continually confronted by a different
spatiotemporality altogether. My analysis of interruption, specific to video­
game play, offers a crucial moment of reflection in which the gap between
my time and game time makes itself uncannily apprehensible. By eschewing a
notion of individual or chronological space-time, the videogame undoes the
potential for sovereign mastery required for not only the attainment of flow
but also the assumption that we are entitled to the fulfillment of our expecta-
tions as consumers.

The time of videogames is tenser and messier than individually perceived time,
dromological (to use Paul Virilio’s term) in the sense that there are shifting and
unanticipated moments when things click together—as I eventually learned
how to successfully orient my starship while navigating the cosmos—and other
moments when they don’t.10 Without the abstraction of time in terms of tasks
that have yet to be completed, chronological time is foreclosed as a possibility
of experience, which differentiates the discussion of No Man’s Sky from other
games that self-avowedly play with time. According to Jagoda, for example,
Blinx (2002) and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2003) “deploy their time
mechanics in the skeuomorphic idiom of home video.”11 Such games explicitly

ASAP/Journal  174 /
remediate their representations of temporality and play with an inherently linear
notion of time as it spools from a singular, semi-changeable reel of film. Jagoda
points out that other games, such as Braid (2008), notably deviate from these
kinds of time mechanics via temporal juxtaposition, simultaneously creating a
way to read and ruminate on the sociocultural history of the videogame while
nevertheless maintaining the tangled knot (or “braid”) at the heart of these
multiple and intersecting temporalities.12 Regardless, in Braid as well as these
other titles, time is still premised on a spatiotemporal abstraction that in some
sense assumes a spatial division between player and the task to be completed.
The vastness of No Man’s Sky, by contrast, eliminates the possibility of spatially
comprehending time, throwing into relief the way that task-oriented progress
in videogames ironically never leads anywhere different than where the player
starts. No Man’s Sky thereby displaces task orientation while maintaining such
an orientation as an organizing schema for play.

The apprehension of the game’s vastness alongside the differentiation of the

player from its temporality causes an interruption that reveals a passage from
worldly sensibility to individual time-consciousness; repeatedly, in other words,
the player experiences, through the feeling of time, the cutting subjectivation
of the individual from worldly sensibility, a cutting that capitalism requires in
order to function. In her own work, Aubrey Anable helpfully notes that mobile
games (and casual games more generally) are a part of a growing, post-1960
immaterialization of  labor significant for its erosion of the distinction between
labor and leisure. The result, Anable explains, is that “we can register an expe-
riential shift in labor time as an increasingly abstract temporality during which
a wide variety of concrete and abstract activities, outside of paid labor, generate
value.”13 Similarly, in No Man’s Sky, the proliferation of on-screen tasks risks
their conflation; however, the vastness of the game eliminates the spatiotem-
poral abstraction of task orientation and thereby interrupts this proliferation
by revealing that all tasks are functionally the same and are only differentiated
according to the time it takes to complete those tasks.

Instead of revealing everything as a potentially value-generating task, No Man’s

Sky organizes its infinite game world through a task orientation that can never
fundamentally alter or leave a mark on such an infinite playable area, enabling
the possibility for the player to feel time without perceiving time. The feeling-­
apprehension of time opposes task orientation because it eliminates time as an

Kelly  175 /
 “
Without the possibility of the sovereign mastery implied by
task-oriented play, players can feel a world that crucially isn’t
organized by task orientation and individual-subjective division.
In other words, we can feel an alternative to capitalism.

”
abstraction and instead focuses on the player’s shifting engagement with multiple,
ongoing tasks that are themselves never really completed. At the end of the game,
after all, should you decide to pursue the storyline that takes you to the “center
of the universe,” you simply warp to a new planet and start anew. There’s no sal-
vation or meaning, no butterflies to interact with, only an engagement with coded
depth. Without the possibility of the sovereign mastery implied by task-oriented
play, players can feel a world that crucially isn’t organized by task orientation
and individual-subjective division. In other words, we can feel an alternative to
capitalism. Turning toward Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy will clarify further
how videogames offer a corrective or supersession of wage labor.

CASE STUDY 2: GETTING OVER IT WITH BENNETT FODDY

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF GETTING OVER IT;

OR, GETTING OVER WAGE LABOR

Describing an experience with this game will be more difficult than describing
the disorientation I experienced while playing No Man’s Sky. Made by Bennett
Foddy, Getting Over It is an exercise in deliberate, unremitting frustration. As
Foddy himself notes at the beginning of the game’s ongoing voiceover, “Starting
over is harder than starting up. If you’re not ready for that, like if you’ve already
had a bad day, then what you’re about to go through might be too much. Feel
free to go away and come back. I’ll be here.”14 Regardless, I’ll describe my first
few minutes with the game, as the beginning is by far the most challenging in
terms of the learning curve, which never entirely recedes.

A shirtless man emerges from what is presumably a large, dark pot. He only
emerges enough for his upper body to be visible, still submerged from the
waist down.

ASAP/Journal  176 /
Figure 3.
Diogenes, the man in the pot, emerges at the starting area of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017).

In his hands he holds a sizeable Yosemite hammer, which I slowly realize can be
controlled (albeit ineptly) by my MacBook’s trackpad. When I realize this, I move
the mouse too fast and quickly understand the difficulty of what is being asked
of me: using only the mouse and this Yosemite hammer, I am meant to move
Diogenes (the man in the pot) forward. But the mouse is incredibly sensitive
sometimes, and not at others. I feel inaccurate as I drag Diogenes toward the first
obstacle, a tree with branches tauntingly insinuating a necessary hammer-climb.
I make several attempts over the course of a few minutes. I’m not getting any-
where—not getting over it. The controls are too finicky, and the sensitivity of the
mouse doesn’t feel like it directly corresponds to the pressure or speed of my own
movements. Diogenes never ends up where I want him, and I can’t seem to make
any progress. As soon as I nail down one method for reliably gaining access to the
first few branches of the tree, I can’t seem to make it over the top and down to the
other side. At one point, my hammer even gets trapped under a branch and I can’t
seem to move at all for at least thirty seconds. Finally, I make it over the tree and
continue toward the right side of the screen, finding more obstacles, only this time
in the form of  boulders and barrels precariously stacked.

The object of the game clarifies—I’m meant to climb a mountain that at each
successive level goes from being comprised of natural, earthlike materials

Kelly  177 /
Figure 4.
A stack of patio furniture (and what appears to be a doghouse) forms the next level of Getting Over It’s
mountain.

(boulders, trees, etc.) to being comprised of household objects in trash-like,

haphazard formations.

In fact, the environment increasingly looks like a garbage dump. And at every
new level of the climb, there’s always the possibility of making a mistake and
being returned all the way to the beginning, because the mountain is con-
structed in such a way that one fall can sometimes lead to where you began.
Every time you lose a lot of progress, Foddy never fails to chime in with a quip,
utilizing the voiceover narration to offer commentary on your playthrough. For
example, he’ll vocally acknowledge your failure, and sometimes read famous
quotes on failure. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot
now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to
be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it will make you less miserable
now?”15 I do now.

At other points during the game’s narration, Foddy chimes in to give context
to the game and explain its strangeness. This ensures that network technology
and its related subcultures form the necessary backdrop to gameplay. Getting
Over It is situated within a tradition of games created by smalltime individual

ASAP/Journal  178 /
developers, referred to as “B-games,” comprising their own genre distinct from
the typical casual/hardcore game divide. Foddy elaborates, “B-Games are rough
assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and
freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following.
They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.”16
The genre’s emphasis on found objects explains how the game takes on the
increasing resemblance of a garbage dump. There’s something being built
out of recycled parts, which are recycled pieces of code, aggregating quietly
in their dark corners of the internet. In the process of making something like
a B-game, the difficulty of the game itself ramps up, precisely because of the
emphasis on the building more than the playing. Foddy goes on, “Most obsta-
cles in videogame worlds are fake—you can be completely confident in your
ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct
equipment, or just by spending enough time.”17 To progress in Foddy’s game,
the only option is to attune to the rigorous difficulty of the gameplay and teach
yourself  how to act anew.

Obstacles in most other videogames are fake in the sense that they have noth-
ing to do with actually learning a new, physical way to be in the world, with
“the world” understood here according to the constitutive materiality of player
and hard/software. Submitting to the game’s action echoes Brendan Keogh’s
argument about videogames in general: “Videogames require a competency
that is at once a learned physical behavior and a means of ‘reading’ and engag-
ing with the videogame’s semiotics.”18 The difference here is that while Keogh
emphasizes the way in which this newly “learned physical behavior” soon fades
into the background of the player’s embodied experience, Bennett Foddy’s
upward-moving gauntlet depends upon the total impossibility of immersion;
Getting Over It cannot be played at all without a constant awareness of your
distance from the game. But Bennett Foddy is aware of the unremitting inac-
cessibility, which explains why obstacles in his game are real as opposed to
fake; they can’t be overcome solely through button combinations or specialized
in-game equipment.

Increasingly, Foddy’s preoccupation with B-game trash, both on-screen and in

narration, becomes the centerpiece to his understanding of network technology
more generally. I quote at length because Foddy’s explanation is strikingly rel-
evant here:

Kelly  179 /
 Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and
once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context
of technology, those moments pass by in seconds. Over time we’ve
poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call
the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that
are fresh and untainted and unused. When everything around us is cul-
tural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua franca of the
digital age. You can build culture out of trash, but only trash culture:
B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy. Maybe this is what dig-
ital culture is: a monstrous mountain of trash, the ash-heap of creativ-
ity’s fountain.19

Conjoined to the earlier remark made about real and fake obstacles, this argu-
ment is necessarily physical. When describing this culture of trash alongside
the player’s physical acquisition of Getting Over It’s difficult climbing mechanic,
Foddy constructs the high-octane temporal rate of intellectual turnover that
he argues is endemic to network technology. The moment that is passed is
the moment that the “thing” becomes garbage, forgotten, refuse(d). Because
the game, by way of difficulty, constantly draws attention to the player’s total
impossibility of entering a state of flow, Foddy is rendering his philosophical
argument feelingly. The continuous, physical frustration of the player and the
staccato rhythm of play create a physical reproduction of how quickly ideas
fade and trends change on the internet. As with No Man’s Sky, Getting Over
It vacillates between microtemporalities, so that the player can feel time’s con-
stant turnover without perceiving it. The physical backdrop of Getting Over It
similarly reinforces this trouble. There’s so much trash on screen, you’ll never
be able to apprehend it all at once, but only in part at any given time. It’s all
trash, but the trade-off is a broader, more deeply distributed sensibility that itself
implicates, or “prehends,” the entire universe.20 You can feel time here, just as
you could with No Man’s Sky. And the feeling-apprehension of time as a new
sensory experience undoes the distinction between space and time.

Interruption in Foddy’s game is thus attributable to the arrhythmic control

scheme that is its core mechanic. By continually failing, Foddy allows play-
ers to feel the moments of constant internet consumption, apprehending the
infinite trash-like background that premises individual engagement with net-
work technology. Foddy’s project, however, is unlike Anable’s discussion of

ASAP/Journal  180 /
games that “ask us to feel failure differently—not quite to sit and accept failure,
but more to flail with failure: to move our bodies nonproductively in relation
to machines designed for the more orderly and smooth operations of immate-
rial labor.”21 Nothing is being felt differently in Foddy’s game per se; however,
the game opens up the possibility of feeling the internet’s exchange of ideas, a
distribution otherwise inaccessible to human cognition. In Foddy’s game, this
cognitive inaccessibility is still the case. The difference here is that the constant
interruption caused by the unremitting difficulty throws into relief Hansen’s
microtemporal gap, begging the question of what came prior to the interrup-
tion, prior to the retroactive reflection. Foddy’s game, then, utilizes difficulty
to articulate the material ambivalence of network technology and the micro-
temporal gap between player and technology itself. Moments when the player
crests a particularly difficult part of the map without perceiving the on-screen
backdrop of refuse are constantly attended by moments of profound frustration.
As Foddy himself contends, “We have the same taste, you and I. It’s not ambi-
tion—it’s ambition’s opposite. An obdurate mission to taste defeat.”22  While
failure could be understood here as a failure to meet and complete tasks in the
game, it is also equally important to see how frustration works to reorient the
player sensibly within the network’s scope of distribution and the constant
turnover of ideas that it entails. While No Man’s Sky puts on display a spatially
represented area of network play that far exceeds human perception and cog-
nition, Foddy’s game utilizes an endless difficulty that allows for the player to
be both endlessly rebuffed while also being incorporated, with skill acquisition
mediating this material ambivalence. Both games operate through a kind of
interruption, understood as the retroactive mechanism by which the material
ambivalence between the player’s temporality

“
and the network-­technological machine’s tem-
porality is made apprehensible; interruption
is the movement of the player from a worldly . . . videogames, via interruption,
temporality of the network to the sense-per-
open up the possibility of
ception of the individual and back again.
experiencing unalienated labor,
Instead of contending that failure allows us to and that it is this interruption
move nonproductively against comparatively that structures the unalienated/
smooth technologies of immaterial labor, as
alienated divide.
is the case with Anable, I want to argue that
videogames, via interruption, open up the
”
Kelly  181 /
possibility of experiencing unalienated labor, and that it is this interruption
that structures the unalienated/alienated divide. I am suggesting that with the
possible erosion of the division between time and space in videogames (and
network technology more generally), wage labor itself is called into ques-
tion. No Man’s Sky and Getting Over It both allow the player to experience an
unalienated labor, as the player’s in-game efforts cannot possibly be extracted
from the player, precisely because there is no spatiotemporal abstraction at
play. While this system of videogame play is still premised on—and imbri-
cated in—various forms of alienated labor, primarily in the Global South,
it doesn’t necessarily negate the material existence of the possibility of an
unalienated labor within videogames. There is, after all, a noted antagonism
between videogames and labor, recently pointed out by several mainstream
news publications.23

Returning to the opening example of interrupted consumer expectation in

relation to the launch version of No Man’s Sky, we can read the subsequent
outrage of this interruption as an apprehension of the market’s existence out-
side of the individual consumer’s (and player’s) control. The interruption of
consumer expectation is an interruption in the capitalist fantasy that we can
actually own anything under capitalism, be it games, gameplay, leisure, or
labor. Our expectation of ownership, however, is itself premised on the same
spatiotemporal abstraction that Karl Marx argues is central to the capitalist
construction of wage labor: products we wish to consume are always already
somewhere out there, the materiality of our money being totally inconse-
quential except as a potential claim on products.24 Far beyond the realm of
wage labor, we can see how task orientation organizes our interaction with
the everyday world, depending on a fantasy of control and ownership that
glorifies the individual as sovereign master over their own world of prod-
ucts. Moments like No Man’s Sky’s disappointing launch throw into relief the
fantasy of sovereign mastery as a fantasy, as does its gameplay, further con-
tributing to the game’s initial backlash. No Man’s Sky and Getting Over It,
utilizing interruption as a moment of reflection on the gap between individual
and network-technological time-consciousness, allow us to labor on our own
terms, drawing attention to this fantasy of control and ownership and allowing
us to continue playing without their abstraction, even while the continuation
of play is regulated by outrage or frustration.

ASAP/Journal  182 /
(IN)CONCLUSION

Differing experiences of interruption can lead to shifts in perceptual conscious-

ness, or the reorganization of that consciousness. It is this perception that is
displaced in our engagement with network-technological machines. At the risk
of losing a perception of time that is coherent and apprehensible, time itself is
added to a dimension of feeling that is notably distinct from sense perception and
therefore human consciousness. Much of this essay was motivated by my own,
very personal relationship with videogames and how extended videogame play
can often feel lonely and sad once that extended period has ended. This is in part
an attempt to explain that movement, from a lack of self-­acknowledgement to a
somewhat violent recognition of a lack of real-world productivity and therefore
of an alienated self. Despite the imbrication of the videogame industry within
structures of capitalist violence, the material implications of videogame play on
the overall socioeconomic organization of our world seems equally important to
cogently think through.

In other words, videogames are important and

comforting to me in spite of  their sociohistorical
“
. . . videogames are important and
violence; the apprehension of a microtemporal
gap via experiences of interruption seems one
comforting to me in spite of their
way to approach this conundrum. Thought sociohistorical violence.

”
differently, my recognition of loneliness and
alienation after an extended play session, as
with the subsequent outrage experienced in
the interruption of consumer expectation, is experienced negatively precisely
because it is an interruption of the fantasies of capitalist organization. I am
forced to confront the fact that my individual sense perception is necessarily
fantastic; underneath and prior to this individuation and subjectivation is the
worldly sensibility of network technology, the organization of which is opposed
to the individual and therefore to some part of capitalist sense perception. Not
only is the organization of network technology inherently opposed to individ-
uality, it also reveals that our sensorium is not capitalist, precisely as a result of
this opposition to individuality. We might continue thinking about how the
recognition of this differentiation and paradox at the heart of our experiences
with network technology can critically engage the violent history of that same

Kelly  183 /
technology while enabling the dissolution of wage labor. What we need is the
outrage of interruption, so long as we can surpass that outrage to recognize that
every time we boot up our PlayStation, we’re feeling time and thus feeling the
whole world.

Notes

1
Quoted in Keza MacDonald, “No Man’s Sky Developer Sean Murray: ‘It Was as
Bad as Things Can Get,’ ” The Guardian, July 20, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/
games/2018/jul/20/no-mans-sky-next-hello-games-sean-murray-harassment-interview.
2
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The
Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (New York: Springer, 2014). For an overview
of “flow” in relation to videogame study, see Alison Harvey, “Seeking the Embodied
Mind in Video Game Theory: Embodiment in Cybernetics, Flow, and Rule Structures,”
Loading  .  .  .  Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 3, no. 4 (2009), https://
journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/57/54. See also Ben Cowley, et al.,
“Toward an Understanding of Flow in Video Games,” Computers in Entertainment 6, no. 2
(July 2008), doi: 10.1145/1371216.1371223.
3
Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016),
161, Kindle edition.
4
Ibid., 162; emphasis added.
5
Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 189. Alongside Hansen, I understand
network-technological machines such as videogames to be comprised of a split between
an individual, sense-perception of time and the “worldly sensibility” that network
technology renders materially accessible (though imperceptible). Hansen explains that
this is a phenomenological argument stemming from Husserl that “announces the end of
the phenomenological project proper,” suggesting instead “that worldly temporalization
happens beneath, if not in some sense prior to, the (temporal) experience of individual
time-consciousness.” Hansen, Feed-Forward, 26.
6
Videogame scholarship has historically navigated a tension between remediation
and proceduralism while overlooking player representation. As Aubrey Anable elaborates,
“The early history of game studies was dominated by a debate that pitted approaches that
focused on how video games remediate the conventions of literature and film against
approaches that highlighted the ludic properties of video games.” Aubrey Anable, Playing
with Feelings: Video Games and Affect (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018),
xiv. In response, proceduralism was developed as a way of articulating the relationship
between code and rule-based play that entails a specific mode of expression hitherto

ASAP/Journal  184 /
absent from previous media forms. For Anable and critics like her, the player ends up
displaced in the swing from remediation to proceduralism.
More recent work has tried to reconcile earlier approaches with player
representation. Developing a theory of videogame phenomenology, Brendan Keogh, for
example, argues for an approach that encompasses code and player, noting, “I work toward
a phenomenology of videogame experience that is concerned primarily not with what players
do to videogames but with how the lived bodily experience of players is augmented by
and part of videogame play.” By taking an experiential approach, Keogh emphasizes the
body as a locus of importance that organizes access and perception in relation to network-
technological machines. Brendan Keogh, A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), Kindle; emphasis in original.
7
To experience the imperceptibly large galactic map for yourself, see “No Man’s
Sky—Galactic Map Zoomed All The Way Out!!,” YouTube video, 9:01, posted by “Kyle
Reid,” August 11, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vhmqA46k5c&t=41s.
Bear in mind that every point of light you see represents a findable star-system, each
containing numerous planets.
8
Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 2; emphasis in original.
9
Hansen’s formulation here is derived from watching speed runs of the game
Quake, suggesting that speed runs require players to make decisions without conscious
deliberation. See Hansen, Feed-Forward, 57.
10
Virilio uses the term “dromological” in order to articulate a similar rupture in a
space and time that cannot be understood as geometric or circadian. Extrapolating on the
(presumably 1985) discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, Virilio argues that this event
was a perceptual shift outside the earthly boundaries of Euclidean geometry toward outer
space. As Virilio gleefully announces, “And this is all in preparation for astrophysics’ great
surprise: beyond earth’s pull, there is no space worthy of the name, but only time!”  Shifting emphasis
from space to time, Virilio attempts to displace time-as-succession with a notion of time-
as-light, referring not only to the speed at which information is increasingly apprehensible
but also to light in its literal sense, connected to a new theme of “exposure.” He goes on
later to contend, while discussing telecommunication more specifically for its ability to
operate simultaneously in two metrically distinct places, “Hence my repeatedly reiterated
proposal to round off the chronological (before, during, after) with the dromological
or, if  you like, the chronoscopic (underexposed, exposed, overexposed).” Paul Virilio,
Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (1997; New York: Verso, 2008), 3, 15; emphasis in original.
11
Patrick Jagoda, “Fabulously Procedural: Braid, Historical Processing, and the
Videogame Sensorium,” in “New Media and American Literature,” ed. Tara McPherson,
Patrick Jagoda, and Wendy H. K. Chun, special issue, American Literature 85, no. 4
(December 2013): 749, doi: 10.1215/00029831-2367346.

Kelly  185 /
 12
For instance, in the final level of the game, after rescuing the princess from a
monster, the player must rewind the entire level and watch their actions in reverse,
revealing that the player is actually the villain pursuing the Princess who is running away.
See Jagoda, “Fabulously Procedural,” 763.
13
Aubrey Anable, “Labor / Leisure,” in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. Joel
Burges and Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 193–94.
14
Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (Bennett Foddy, 2017).
15
Quoted in Bennett Foddy, Getting Over It. For a video of what the game
is like, which might produce a better understanding of what I am describing, see
“Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy #1 (No Commentary),” YouTube video,
21:30, posted by “Tomasz Agurczuk,” October 10, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=umnQnrCMp4s&t=95s.
16
Foddy, Getting Over It.
17
Ibid.
18
Keogh, A Play of Bodies.
19
Foddy, Getting Over It.
20
“Prehension” is a concept that Hansen takes—and modifies—from Whitehead’s
work. In the first chapter of Feed-Forward, Hansen “explicate[s] Whitehead’s wonderful
notion that every actuality prehends the entirety of the universe (or, alternatively, that the
entirety of the universe informs each new actuality), and [fleshes] out how it facilitates
the development of a radically environmental perspective of worldly sensibility that, in
turn, provides some pharmacological recompense for the loss of the centrality of human
perceptual consciousness.” Hansen, Feed-Forward, 29.
21
Anable, Playing with Feelings, 116; emphasis in original.
22
Foddy, Getting Over It.
23
Significantly, the following articles all posit this antagonism as specific to
(assumedly) cisgender men, a question that is not the basis of this study but is surely
worth pursuing further. See Alexia Fernández Campbell, “The Unexpected Economic
Consequences of Video Games,” Vox, July 7, 2017, https://www.vox.com/policy-and
-politics/2017/7/7/15933674/video-games-job-supply. See also Quoctrung Bui, “Why
Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good,” New York Times,
July 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/upshot/why-some-men-dont-work
-video-games-have-gotten-really-good.html; David Z. Morris, “Young American Men
Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers,” Fortune, July 16, 2017,
http://fortune.com/2017/07/16/video-games-users-men/.
24
As noted by Marx in his Grundrisse, capital exists in terms of spatiotemporal
abstraction: “Money, then, in so far as it now already in itself exists as capital, is therefore
simply a claim on future (new) labour. . . . Surplus value, the new growth of objectified labour,
to the extent that it exists for itself, is money; but now, it is money which in itself is already
capital; and, as such, it is a claim on new labour.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the

ASAP/Journal  186 /
Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin
Classics, 1993), 367; emphasis in original. The extraction of surplus value—that portion
of value produced by the laborer for the capitalist “free of charge”—is necessarily
exempted from circulation in order to become this possible claim on new labor. Capital is
thus posited in relation to that which it might become, at some point, in the future, that
is to say, a claim. The material existence of capital as always already money is irrelevant;
its future possibility is situated at such a distance that this materiality is endlessly deferred
in a spatial imaginary. In this formulation, it is not only assumed that capital constitutes
a possible claim in the future; there’s a commensurate assumption on the existence of
new labor that itself will manifest in the future, necessitating both spatial and temporal
abstraction to be understood at all. From the perspective of the consumer, our money’s
materiality is similarly deferred as a potential claim on new products.

Kelly  187 /