Temporal Agency and Timeplay in Video Games

"Temporal Agency and Timeplay in Video Games" argues that the player's capacity to manipulate in-game time, through rewinds, loops, pauses, and branching narratives, constitutes a distinct and underexamined form of ludic agency. Drawing on historical precedents in divination and games of chance, and on theories of ludic agency from Nguyen, Galloway, and Mukherjee, the authors contend that existing frameworks, particularly Zagal and Mateas's four temporal frames and Hanson's account of recursion and save mechanics, do not adequately explain how time manipulation reshapes a player's sense of control. To address this gap, the paper proposes a typology of four forms of "Timeplay": Adaptive, Strategic, Ethical, and Reflective.

The methodology rests on analytical formalism, combining gameplay analysis, Let's Play videos, and critical reviews to examine twelve games in which time manipulation is foregrounded. Detailed case studies, including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, SUPERHOT, The Forgotten City, Undertale, Slay the Princess, The Stanley Parable, and The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante, illustrate how these mechanics operate. The central finding is that such mechanics grant players distinct forms of control over time, ranging from refining skills and optimizing actions to confronting the moral weight of repeated choices.

Across the Timeplay categories, the authors conclude that these designs transform trial-and-error into experimentation, convert moral choice into sustained reflection, and turn philosophical questions about free will into lived gameplay experience. A consolidating table maps each game's foregrounded temporal device, defamiliarized gameplay aspect, and resulting aesthetic experience, positioning the framework as an extension of existing scholarship on temporal frames and recursion.

The paper ultimately urges that time be treated as a central design element shaping narrative, choice, and agency rather than as a background system. It proposes future research directions drawing on phenomenology, Predictive Processing, and Sicart's ethics framework, supported by a 43-title ludography mapping time manipulation mechanics across the medium.