Time and Its Manifestations

September 18, 2026 Spring 2026

Lawra Suits Clark’s Time and Its Manifestations class ran for five weeks. For students, that was 15 hours total. From my perspective as their assistant teacher, that was 30 hours: three hours, twice a week, for five weeks. 30 hours as an expression of measurement doesn’t quite encapsulate the feeling of time spent. At 6:00 PM on a workday, three hours feels like forever; by 8:55 PM, three hours feels inadequate.

Capturing that time became my ritual: starting the zoom call, opening my notes file, building up digital material as evidence of our scant 15 hours together. Games, the class contends, make use of that malleable sense of time.

In the class, we explored how time manifests in games. Weaving game history and design, Lawra presented categories of game-time: turns, frames, movement, experience, and sediment. We played games, discussed them and at the start of every meeting students shared work exploring the previous week’s theme.

WEEK 1: TURNS GAMES PLAYED: Chess, Rogue, Diablo

Week 1 was devoted to turns or time as a method of play. A good place to start! Any kid on a playground can speak on the importance of knowing when it’s your turn.

Lawra articulated the typical turn dynamic as “action moment <> reflection moment”. I make a move which changes the game environment. My opponent gets their turn, which doubles as a moment of reflection for me. What will my next move be? What will my opponent do? Once they make their move, it’s my chance to act and theirs to wait.

We played chess, Rogue, and Diablo. Chess is a game with a turn structure as clear cut as its black and white pieces. But the subsequent games complicated that binary.

In Rogue, your opponent is the computer. I take a turn and the computer responds, though the computer doesn’t need reflection time. Its turn, to our perception, is instantaneous. Diablo threw us for a loop. Despite feeling like a real-time action game, it is functionally turn-based.

The rhythm of back-and-forth play collapsed. What even is a turn?

In the next class, it was the students’ chance to share their thinking, through game prototypes, writing, and more. One student wrote a reflection on the gift of pausing in games (and its absence in Dark Souls or real life). Another told us about the card game Touring which had a turn-based approach to simulating car racing via cards. Derek Miranda made crossnoughts, applying a continuum-like turn structure to tic-tac-toe.

The week passed. We moved on. We continued to complicate time and its manifestations in games. However, I’m not sure we ever stopped talking about turns.

WEEK 2: FRAMES GAME PLAYED: 2XKO

Week 2’s theme was frames or time as a governing system, the machinery of computers and the machinery of our minds slotting together to create sublime experiences. We got a bit technical.

Digital games create an illusion of movement based on a similar principle to film: a series of rapidly changing static images appear to come alive. In a computer, Lawra pointed out, each static image is a result of a game’s code being read top-to-bottom, collapsed into the rendered image or ‘frame’. The computer does this over and over and over again, often 60 frames per second.

This is especially evident in 2D fighting games, which make an art of strategizing based on frames. We watched "Frame Data Basics" to better understand the genre’s mechanics. In a fighting game, moves have three parts which occur in a handful of frames. If you punch me and I block, the whole interaction took a few seconds from our perspective. Thus, action resolution is determined at the frame level.

Getting good at fighting games to be able to observe this, though, would take more time than we had. Training mode in 2XKO gave us the chance to play with the component parts of a fighting game exposed. Hit boxes and the frame meter visualized the relationship between time and space, a hint as to how a bout might play out.

These tools were helpful because of how humans perceive time. For one, Lawra shared "Unraveling the Batter’s Brain", which attempts to explain how our minds can sense a baseball moving faster than our eye can see. Through all our senses our brain collapses that data into a response: hit the ball or duck. To bring us full circle, we watched Experiments Hint on Time Being an Illusion, a framing of time that resembles the very same principles that allow the illusion of movement in games.

Students’ responses to that week’s time tangle ranged from card games to poetry. Gus Boehling created a conversation card game. Each response card has a set number of frames, the mechanics operating similarly to the attack and block dynamics of a fighting game.

Yolanda Bie, working through the intersection of time and text in games, wrote several poems toying with structure. She described the text as atemporal and that the “sequence of reading/formation of information doesn’t necessarily correspond with sequence of temporal emergence.”

Yolanda’s play of time and space flowed into our next theme. Frames, though hard to catch by eye, give us discrete units to measure time. But can the design of a game’s visual space alter our perception of time?

WEEK 3: MOVEMENT GAMES PLAYED: Super Metroid, Age of Empires II, BABBDI

Halfway through the class, we were moving from systems to aesthetics. We were less concerned with the so-called reality of time, the binaries of turns or the sequence of frames, but how time can contract or dilate in response to spatial composition. The theme was for week 3 was movement or time as a function of spatial ratios.

Lawra kicked off with a video on 0.5 A presses in Super Mario 64. The key concept is hyperspeed walking, a technique of walking backward on slopes in shallow water to build up speed with no upper limit in order to speedrun SM64. Time, speed, movement, and the physical play space are intertwined.

Can we apply similar principles to other games? Lawra presented Super Metroid, Shadow of the Colossus, and Animal Crossing as comparisons. In the screenshots, the characters were roughly the same size, but their relational size to the overall space created vastly different senses of scale. Even if you replaced the sprites/models with generic shapes, you’d still be able to feel a difference between them.

We played Super Metroid as an example of the viewable area - total area axis. The space presses on you. The camera is tight on Samus in a low ceiling cave structure. The close space never impedes your movement, yet still feels like the walls are closing in on you. Moving through time feels more deliberate than what we might expect of a platformer.

Age of Empires and BABBDI contrasted in their spatial ratios. The little figures and fixtures of AoE are set in a vast deserted space. In wide angles on that utilitarian map, walking from point to point feels plodding, slow, a journey. BABBDI felt like a combination of the two, containing tight inner spaces within an urban landscape. But the myriad ways you can move in that space explodes the experience outside the otherwise dull, grey walls.

After this class session, the creative possibilities expanded in tandem with our evolving sense of time. Derek created a prototype, playspace, that allows the player to experiment with the environment's time-space. Natasha Khanyola described a game idea of playing children’s games through the apocalypse that she would go on to prototype.

As we entered week 4, it felt like we had gotten into a rhythm. On Thursday evenings or Sunday afternoons we gathered, we discussed, we played. We spent time together; the class had become a part of our lives.

WEEK 4: EXPERIENTIAL GAMES PLAYED: The Longing, Frog Game, Stardew Valley, Cart Life

Game time and life time merged. Our theme was experiential or game time as a part of real life time. Lawra broke down this manifestation into sub categories: “long” games, idle and semi-idle games, and labor fantasy and time management games.

In The Longing, the player-character’s king goes to sleep for 400 (real time) days. As a good servant, you must wait for him. We played for 20 minutes or so, yet everyone seemed to have done something different. Some saw the ending because they instantly woke the king. One group leaned into the slow vibes, just taking it all in. One fiddled with hobbies you can pass the time by: reading Moby Dick, drawing, hanging up their picture. You do, afterall, have 400 days of waiting. The Longing mindfully occupies the days and weeks and months required to play it.

Blake Andrews’ Frog Game is a singular example of a semi-idle game: you can only play it at Wonderville in Brooklyn. In the arcade cabinet, there’s a button which releases the frog’s tongue. The tongue grows and grows in want of the fly, but the player has no control beyond releasing the button which vanishes the tongue. If the fly is caught, the tongue retracts. The tongue’s length is your score. From that minimalist interaction, Lawra has observed a range of player types: the exhibitionist, who casually plays and shares the experience with those around them; the believer, who locks in despite the lack of decisions; the cynic, who knows there’s little strategy to the game and multitasks while playing; and control, who approaches it as a game of skill. Each player type fits Frog Game into their life based on their perception rather than as a mandated consequence of the game’s system as in The Longing.

The last duo of games we played, Stardew Valley and Cart Life, make mechanical metaphors of real life time. Stardew is a fantasy of time spent laboring. Night may fall in the valley, but you always have the next day. Cart Life contextualizes labor within different human lives and you never seem to have enough time.

Our final open mic session was full of last minute experiments, reflections, treatises. Mengna Da created a prototype about the luxury of slowness. Moving quickly contracts the visible space while slow movement gives you room to breathe. Zach Hammer posed a game idea for real-time Pong that plays at the speed of the original pong but from the players’ actual locations.

Alvin Bitok prototyped a platformer inspired by Tales of Kenzera: ZAU. You must flee your home - what will you take with you? The artifacts you collect change how you can move in the world. Eureka, strapped for time due to a malfunctioning dishwasher, shared a sliver of a philosophical dialogue made in Twine. 

Of course, there was so much more. Worldbuilding documents, a snail care toy, memories of childhood games. But I can’t highlight all the fascinating artifacts students made; I’m running out of time.

WEEK 5: SEDIMENTARY

In our final meeting, it seemed we were wringing the fabric of space-time for every last drop of a second. Half the class was spent sharing student creations and reviewing each week’s theme. In closing, Lawra left us with a final way of thinking about time in games: as sediment or the various archival material left from playing them.

Lawra pointed to save files and gameplay recordings. Save files are the incomplete detritus of the work of play. They are snapshots of achievement for the sake of achievement, the accumulation of time spent grinding. Gameplay recordings of racing games and the like are moment-to-moment recreations of actions, not video recordings. The vector transformations are etched like footprints in concrete.

This blog post is my attempt at something similar. Screenshot sediments and half remembered quotes are my records. 30 hours in 2,000 words. Time well spent.