Game time

BMML’s RTM is also remarkable insofar as it makes what is typically considered a cardinal sin in digital game design – wilfully obscuring ‘player tasking’. Commercial video games are typically designed with an eye to the attention economy: particularly on mobile, it is very easy to lose player interest, and there is always another game to play in a saturated market. Nour’s pseudo real-time communications combine with her wilful characterisation to push back against designs which work to keep players continuously stimulated, engaged, and clear about what their time investment in the game will achieve.

One way of reckoning with this complex temporality can be found in Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Playland, published in the collection of early work Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Drawing on anthropological theory, here Agamben outlines two temporal tendencies. The first is synchrony: cyclical, rhythmic, or recurrent time that helps to structure time and the calendar. It can be perceived in the representations of unchanging heavens. Synchrony is most powerfully experienced in ritual and ceremony, where significant events from the past are re-enacted or memorialised. This is equally prevalent in secular societies: ‘It gets earlier every year’ we roll our eyes seeing Christmas decorations on the high street.

The correlated tendency is diachrony, which importantly in this context, is identified by Agamben with play. Diachrony is experienced where time is out of joint, where it seems to rush past. Agamben’s literary exemplar of this is Pinnocchio and the adventure to Playland. Here, the structuring principles of the calendar are swept away in the bedlam of an eternal weekend, and everything a kid could possibly want is readily at hand. At first glance this may seem like paradise, but the truth of Playland is revealed in the transformation of its inhabitants into beasts (which many will recall from its childhood-ruining animated treatment in the Disney film). There is something diabolical about play.

Given Agamben’s association of diachrony with play, it may be assumed that video games are aligned with that pole – and indeed, games are associated with the din of virtual gunfire, ever-advancing technical standards, and breathless futurism. The breakneck pace of technological progress means that no sooner is a new console generation or graphics card released that gamers start thinking of the one to follow. However, computers are very good at repetition, and on close analysis many synchronic elements can be discerned in gaming. The idea of the ‘gameplay loop’ is a core idea in game design. Every game of Fortnite will start out with players flying above a map with known characteristics. Characters are liable to cycle through a set of animations or repeat lines from a set number of recordings. Sequels and remakes are common.

Here it is important to recall that diachrony and synchrony are tendencies, not absolutes – for Agamben, they are poles of a differential system. These intensive temporal poles are also liable to flip over into one another, noting the presence of toys and miniatures in traditional grave sites, and funerary games. In recent experience, we may think of the synchronic feeling of interminable time for those in lockdown; and the contrasting diachronic crunch of front line and essential workers dealing with the pandemic.

Processes which separate, distinguish or distend timeframes, making them more distal with respect to one another, can be termed diachronic. Processes which converge or superimpose timeframes, making them more proximal, can be termed synchronic. This yields a versatile and efficient terminology for thinking about the weft and warp of temporal experience in games. We cannot have a full synchronic view of a video game – seeing all of its possibilities at once (neither for that matter can a computer, which requires time in which to run its programming). Similarly, a game state that changes too rapidly risks leaving players confused and frustrated – much like the bedlam of Pinnocchio’s Playland.

Games that feature many branching paths, timelines and possibilities for players to explore (including those utilising procedural techniques) can be said to have highly diachronic narratives. Those in which the experiences of players are more standardised through cutscenes, character arcs and story structures – most resembling the stories we are familiar with from cinema and novels – are more synchronic in style.

This can help explain some of the narrative structures we observe in games. Mainstream games are often sold on the promise of highly responsive narrative diachrony: players are told that ‘their choices matter’ and will meaningfully affect narrative outcomes. However, developing such diachrony in a game can be difficult: the more diachronic possibilities there are, the fewer players will encounter them in any one playthrough. Given the resources and specialist labour required for game development, producers may balk at developing features that only a small number of players will ever experience. In practice many narrative designs are tree-like, with a central ‘trunk’ tying the narrative branches together, or a ‘golden path’ or ‘critical path’ of key story beats and scenes. These synchronic elements most resemble the ‘logline’ of film and TV production.

Synchrony and diachrony can also help to understand more unusual designs, such as BMML’s RTM. Here, the diachronic real time delays between communications from Nour, and their incorporation into the interface of players’ mobile phones, the game pushes back against players’ ludic tendency to see the game synchronically as a set of systems to be played. This is combined with Nour’s relative autonomy as a character, as the systems determining her behaviour are not revealed to players.

Beyond the ‘Pixel Hunt’ developer, Florent Maurin, has described BMML as a ‘reality-inspired’ game. The game draws on a real report by Lucie Soullier in Le Monde that utilised an interactive presentation to convey the online communications of a young Syrian, Dana, in her attempt to find refuge in Germany.

Our two main characters, Nour and Majd, are fictional. They do not exist, or rather, they exist collectively. They are a multitude of men, women and children: Dana, her mother, her brother-in-law… as well as thousands of others who flee their country – or watch their relatives flee – all in hopes of finding a better life in Europe. (Bury Me, My Love)

Neither Majd nor Nour are real people so much as amalgamations of many tales told be those who have made the crossing being depicted. This synchronising of fictional and systemic elements contributes to BMML’s striking rendition of the refugee crisis.