DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play
DiGRA/Utrecht School of the Arts, January, 2011
Volume: 6
ISBN / ISNN: ISSN 2342-9666
Playing social network games involves a lot of waiting time; time where you can do nothing meaningful in the game and have to wait for certain things to grow, friends to send you gifts, or energy to refill. This paper addresses whether we the notion of dead time as introduced by Juul (2004) can be helpful in theorizing about this waiting time in social network games. It starts with a discussion of game time in general and continues with a discussion on how time works in social network games. Then it will address the notion of dead time. It is concluded that waiting time can indeed be seen as similar to dead time and that especially the playing time layer and perceived time layer from Tychsen & Hitchens (2008;2009) are helpful in understanding waiting in social network games.