Time and Space in Play

Transmitting in Space-Based Media

The Nintendo DS, which stands for “Dual Screen” is a portable video game system, which has, in one iteration or another, been manufactured by Nintendo Co Ltd since 2004. There are (so far) four versions of the Nintendo DS. They are, in order of release, the DS, the DS Lite, DSi, and DSi XL. The DS and DS Lite are quite similar, with the only changes of note being chiefly around size, the original DS is 2.9′′ × 5.2′′ × .85′′ while the DS Lite is 5.85′′ × 3.33′′ × 1.13′′. The DSi and DS I XL are in turn very similar in design; both feature a camera as well as increased sound capabilities, including a recorder. The DSi XL is larger than the DSi (hence XL) to accommodate larger dual screens, a change that may be an attempt to appeal to older would-be players. While four models make up the series, for the purpose of this article I will refer to them generically as a group “as the DS.” Although this approach runs the risk of glossing over details, it is common practice among the players as well as journalists and other video game commentators to use the term DS to refer to all models. More pragmatically, the differences between models (cameras, size, etc.) do not affect the behaviors and usages of players (saving, pausing, etc.) that are the focus of this article. The DS was (and still is) trumpeted for many features, one of which is its ability to connect, wirelessly, to other units via Wi-Fi, allowing partnered or team play, competition, and the sharing of games as well as the “picto chat” function. This online functionality is increasing and approximately a quarter of owners of the Nintendo DS have played at some point online. ¹ No doubt this trend will continue. And while the majority of DS players still do not use the Wi-Fi capabilities of their DSs, they are, in effect, still engaged (even in “off-line” mode) in transmission and storage, in playing with and through time and space. I approach this device in its off-line mode in order to explore in detail aspects of its use that its Nintendo Wi-Fi networked play options otherwise may occlude. To that end, my focus here is on another kind of connectivity offered by the DS, specifically on the kind of interactions and the manner of transmission in casual play with the DS. Even without using the “wireless” feature, DS players interact and communicate with others, who, whether they like it or not, share in some way in the play. When we bring our DSs out and about, when we play in public space, we perform our play for people who have varying degrees of interest, comprehension, and attention to our activity. To better understand this, I will draw on some Goffmanian work done on the dramaturgical and framing issues found in the use of mobile phones in public.

To invoke Bernard Suits (1978), what we share, what we show when we play in public with our DSs, is a lusory attitude; we announce with our bearing that we are bent on play (p. 49). While the DS’s design and use may overlap with many other portable electronic devices, particularly Palm Pilot-type organizers that have a stylus, the DS is recognized as a device used primarily for games and for play. With new iterations of the iPhone being more game-friendly and with Sony selling intellectual property or content through Universal Media Discs, this distinction between phones, game playing devices, and organizers is rapidly losing meaning. But for now, it is still clear that the user of a DS is a player and the use of the DS in public is therefore a performance of play, a display of a lusory attitude. What do we transmit when we play with the DS? First and most importantly, we convey with our public DS play that we are in fact playing and that the space we share with our onlookers is a space that whatever its other functions is now, at least for the moment, also a site for play. To appreciate the significance of this play, we need to blur the boundaries between who is playing and who is present, who is watching, merely tolerating, or not noticing at all. As James Newman (2002) writes, “(V)ideogames are not exclusively solitary experiences, regardless of what popular discourses might suggest about their inherent asociality” (¶ 12). Newman argues for a more expansive role of what he calls “off-line” players or second players, by which he means people who without a controller in their hands nevertheless watch, help, and play, which is a different level of engagement than that of onlookers, fellow travelers, and people in line who share, willing or not, the play space created by the public use of the DS. I am extending Newman’s concept to make a more elastic definition not just of whom a player is but what it means to engage with or have a relationship to video games. Just as Newman used the concept of “Off-Line ergodicity” to move beyond the controller-in-hand-pressing buttons as delimiting the definition of a game player, I want to move further to a kind of area-effect reading of public play, a reading in which there is no room for asociality or, in fact, where asociality is just a specific kind of sociality.

In her work on how space and affect are managed and transformed by public use of cell phones, Chantal de Gournay (2002) suggests that cell phones allow users to draw in, announce, and otherwise signal something about their own emotional and social state and status. What is key here is the publicness of the use of the cell phone and the way this public use creates an overlapping of spaces. Public cell phone use communicates something about the state of the user to people who share public space with them. While it might at first seem a stretch to compare the communicative power of mobile phones, which after all are defined as communication devices, with the communicative power of the DS, which is defined as a personal game playing device, the comparison is useful. Signs warning against the use of music players and cell phones in travel spaces are an institutional acknowledgment of the potential of these devices to engage willing or unwilling others who share space with the caller, listener, or game player. There are many other forms of play, some nontechnological, that can be performed in public, engaging, annoying, signaling, and announcing contested versions of the meaning of “public” in public spaces as well as what kind of space they are. Playing in public announces that any given space, whatever its other uses, is now, and potentially always, one of play. There are, of course, also other portable media, both old and new, which can be played with in public places, including “travel-sized” board game and playing cards, perhaps one of the most evocative of ludic mobile technologies.

The Prisoners’ Ball

In this section I focus on the kinds of communication practices we participate in when we play in public, both communication with past and future versions of ourselves through saving, pausing, and loading games, and also the way we communicate and perform with these devices in the presence of others and proximity to others. Here, as throughout this article, the subway and its platform are key spaces, but also waiting rooms, and any room in which we wait.

The question is what is at stake in these situations? What kinds of habits and systems are we required or asked to cultivate, engage with, tolerate, and even enjoy in order to occupy and move through these spaces? Ultimately this might have less to do with games and more to do with what it means to live in and under cities and travel across and between them. What does it mean to experience time and space in this particular manner, one which we may either strive to make playful, recast, or transform, or one which we suffer through and under, as governed by regimens revolving around work, which we go to, return home from, and/or try to avoid? Is play in this situation merely a form of time-killing, a calmative measure, a way of coping? Erving Goffman (1961) suggests a more hopeful (and contradictory?) reading of play. Goffman’s reading is one that is important for my larger argument, one that is centered on a material practice, the social–technical power of tools or toys to change space and time. I am referring here to Goffman’s concept of irrelevancy (1961, p. 26).

For Goffman, irrelevancy is how in micro-social encounters certain aspects of an object, either material or social (or both), are flattened or made invisible (and thereby irrelevant) while others remain intact. Goffman uses games as his prime example. In games what disappears most often is the economic value of an object that in other situations would be highly or lowly valued. Gold chess pieces do not checkmate better than clay ones and the cost of purchasing play equipment does not affect the game play, though the value might matter to the players in their lives outside the frame of game play. For example, high-end sports equipment, such as well-known brands of golf clubs, from the club house to the golf course, move in and out of contexts that change their form and function. In Goffman’s concept of “irrelevance,” as determined by inclusion and exclusion from the game play, value ceases to be defined economically and instead is defined in terms of decisions, as in his description of the coin in coin games, as a “decision machine” rather than as currency (1967, p. 149).

I read Goffman’s concept of irrelevancy here a bit awry to expose a sharper edge. In the coin toss, while the exchange economy of the coin is made irrelevant, another kind of value is created, recovered, even saved. If we push this concept further, we can approach what is at stake in DS play not merely from the prospective of exploring the explicit potential opportunities of social game play, as for example through the DS’s wireless potential or from a reading of a DS game’s diegetic level, and instead look at how irrelevance flattens some material functions of the DS while transforming others. Consider how the irrelevance of materiality in game playing works not just to smooth over differences of wealth between the players but also to redefine space and circumstances, as can be seen in Goffman’s example of prisoners’ ability to play “wall games,” in which within the duration of the play the prison (or school, or mental hospital) wall becomes a game space rather than an imprisoning enclosure (1961, p. 20).

Irrelevance shifts focus and meaning, recontextualizing and recasting time, space, and relationships. The rules of the game do not just proscribe what is permissible and what is not; they also allow new possibilities. Goffman’s use of game playing provides a nuanced understanding of situations and structures (social as well as in games) as both productive and restrictive. In this way he describes a relationship between play and regular life/reality in a way that is more complex than at first it might seem. In play (and in fun and in games), realities of everyday life are not ignored wholesale nor are they totally present in play; rather, as in his example of the prison wall-cum-baseline, they have a potential to be recast and radically changed, if only for the moment of game play, as relevant in ways they could not be otherwise.

Stylus Traces

Not only can play recast space through the evocation of alternative realities, play can rework time through pausing, saving, and recording evidence of play. Play on the DS toys with time through its very materiality. For instance, the DS’s touch screen bears a record of past play on its surface. Like many owners of the DS, I purchased a thin plastic transparent screen or slipcover to protect the bottom touch screen from enthusiastic use. If we remove the prophylactic screen and hold it up to the light, we can see a flurry of scratches, indentations, and loops and whorls made by the stylus as well as the smudges and the oily residue of our fingers and thumbs. Unlike the palimpsest of Archimedes, we can uncover here no written language, but that does not mean there is nothing here to be recovered. How should we think about a palimpsest that lacks words? We might usefully look to architectural theory and work done on the history of the book for profitable uses of palimpsests as metaphor. But this would be a digression and the task at hand is to see what is recorded by the DS’s stylus.

What are these smudges and scratches? Evidence? Information? Records of exertion, of use? Yes, but of what kind of use? Are these specifically evidence of play? The sweat stains and the grime are traces associated not with ludic activities but with activities belonging to the broader category of things we use with our hands, things that can become well worn through this use and attention. This reading emphasizes the materiality of not just the thing but also of the relation of the thing and its user. The blister on the user’s fingers testifies to just how hard it has been pushing against the surface and the interface of the thing; the sweat stains and scratches on the surface in turn show with what effort the thing has been marked by the user. The traces on the slip screen are like a tiny version of an ice rink after the skaters depart. What the scratches on the screen protector show is a digital record, not in the electronic sense of digital, but rather in the tactile sense, that someone was here and they did something here with a tool, in this case not with a skate, but with a stylus. This is a scribbled-over map of playtime.

The stylus, in concert with the touch screen, sets the DS apart from not only other handheld game systems but from games systems in general and is at the same time that which connects it with other handheld devices, such as some types of palm pilots. That the “touch screen” can be used without the stylus is also important as this is increasingly (post iPhone) an important model for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design. The stylus and the finger are both addressed by Walter Benjamin (1986) in a passage in which he discusses the typewriter and its relation to the hand and to the (receding) fountain pen (p. 79). While Benjamin is talking about writing, typing, or otherwise creating a text and not “merely” playing with these tools, the key here is his explicit description of the change in input device as being a tactile, manual issue and that different ways of interacting with mechanical systems can be both mimetic: performing/referencing the finger and hand while also innervative in Benjamin’s particular sense of the term, which is to incorporate these gestures as technologies.

Innervation, for Benjamin, was the incorporation of the world, often through bodily sensation, and usually with a salutatory effect. In the last lines of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin used this concept as way to explain the way in which a radical politicizing of film aesthetics might rehabilitate the collective body of society (1969, p. 252). In terms of play, innervation can be conceived of as a move in a game that has transformative effect, or as a play of images, such as the replacement of human faces for alarm clocks, in Benjamin’s “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of European Intelligentsia.” Here the image unites the artist’s body and his societal role with a clock’s face and its mechanical role. I use innervation here, following Benjamin and in turn Miriam Bratu Hansen, ² as a playful and critical relation between people and their world, enacted in nervous systems and expressed bodily.

The stylus of the DS works in a number of ways. Much of the loading and game selection screens that a player must go through when the unit is first turned on are operated by the touch screen. ³ These activities can be done with the stylus, but in my experience, particularly when used in short bursts of casual play, it is much more likely that one would use a thumb than pull out the stylus for these tasks. ⁴

The stylus also works in the save capacity in more than one way. First, prosaically but importantly, in some DS games there is a function by which a player’s avatar can open a notebook, in which she can, using the stylus, write notes about the game, often a hint or another piece of information that must be remembered for later use; for example, a location of a hidden item in Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass (Nintendo, 2007) or a code in Retro Game Challenge (Indieszero, 2009). Of course, a pen and paper can work in much the same way (an interface that was “built in” via blank “note” pages at the back of many old Nintendo Entertainment System [NES] manuals); it is important to remember that the use of a pen and paper is less likely when playing with a DS in transit. In this situation we are unlikely to pause, close, and store the DS in a pocket or purse and to pull out a notepad on which to write down by hand where the key to the dungeon is hidden.

At another, more abstract level, the DS stylus allows players to save. What is it that the stylus stores or saves, if not the data on its attendant cartridges? The fact that these data, the files of our game play, are saved to the game cartridge and not to the (operating) system suggests that we need to look for other ways in which we save with the DS. The stylus, though not the only interface option, works as both an index and symbol of this potential toward a more open-ended perspective and treatment of saving or storage could be/could mean in video games and in game studies. ⁵ Is it useful to expand our conception of recording to include signs of use? If these marks are readable, what can we read in them beyond proof of labor and struggle? The computer memory records in-game achievement, but not the sweat and muscle invested. It is a question of digital actions or residue versus digital recording. The physical version of digitally inscribed memory does not seem capable of transmission. It is recorded not in the center of the machine, but rather on its surface, in the accrual of bruises and scratches produced by physically effortful and even damaging palimpsestic play, leaving a patina which links the DS to that range of artifacts which achieve the status of “well used.”

I focus in this section on the stylus, but we could just as easily look at such issues as screen burn, screen cracks, damaged or missing buttons, and cracked casings. We could also note the wide range of minor but persistent aches and pains the video gamer and especially the player of portable games suffers: the blisters, the tired eyes, the sore neck, and the dull ache in the wrist that both supports the unit and functions as the fulcrum for the operation of the buttons. The stylus is important because it presents us with its own host of associations, both laterally into the world of Wacom-tablets and Palm Pilots, but also vertically through a genealogy of media and technologies of writing and of script.

However, this stylus and its tablet do not bear language; rather all they can say is “here something happened; here someone did something.” My point is not to suggest that one could read the screen’s marks as evidence of a particular sequence of game play, but that there is a way we can read this residue and markings on the DS as evidence of labor or other productive effort. Play is as often the source of these (and perhaps all markings) as is work or any other drive that motivates the activities of humans and other beings.

This evidence of use, a proof of the reality and materiality of game play, while interesting to theorists (or it least this theorist), is usually a headache for players. After all, we would not purchase slip screens if scratches on the touch screen were good for the DS. Here Stallybrass’s and his colleagues’ article, “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England” provides historical resonance. Early modern users apparently traded information and tips on how to keep these writing tablets fresh and ready for new notes, transcriptions, and whatever else they wanted to inscribe on them with their stylus (2004). This was a form of ancient FAQ for how to clean and, if need be, to “reset” these fragile tablets, what sort of compound of gum and milk might be painted over stubborn stains, how to maintain and thus prolong the uses of these expensive and important handheld devices. We find a very similar discourse online about maintaining handheld video games and cell phones in contemporary FAQs, Youtube videos, and discussion boards. ⁶

What the modern user has in common with users in the Renaissance is an interest in the restoration or renewal of their systems. These were and are recipes for the recovery not of text but of potential, that is of blankness, a return to a clean slate, that is ready to play, like fresh snow for skis or an empty football pitch, or a fresh Role Playing Game (RPG PC) sheet ready to be filled in with paladins, vampires, or cyborgs. While this desire to create a clean slate might seem to be at odds with my reading of the screen’s accrual of scars and imperfections as a trace of the effort put into play; in fact, both displaying scars of use and restoring the screen reflect the player’s desire to prove agency.

Storage and Time-Based Play

The Nintendo DS, like practically all modern portable video game systems (excepting the classic/primitive Nintendo Game & Watch series and other dedicated one game systems), allows a player to save a game and then to continue it later, or else to try a tricky part of the game again. However, what is interesting about the DS use in this regard is how saving in the diegetic in-game mode, which writes directly to the cartridge, is not as important in general as the ability to pause, which is practically universal in portable video game play.

It is not merely by code and program that we find our play saved. Surely our progress through a game space or narrative or procedure is saved and stored at the level of data. However, we do save when we use the DS in other ways as well. Certainly we also save something in the form of experience, memory, and acquired skills but my focus is on how we save these experiences materially, in and on the device itself, the object, not the code, as well as in our own bodies.

Effort, work, and bodily activity are all stored, but not in data, but rather in the material aspects of the DS and the DS assemblage. This kind of conceptualizing of storage forces us to reevaluate what it is that is stored or saved. I will finish my exploration by arguing that we need to account for the evidence of interactions and uses that can be read through traces, strains, and wear and tear across the assemblage from palimpsestic scratches to worn buttons and callused thumbs. By animating this kind of storage and saving and in attending to it, I hope to map out not only a more robust conception of what playing with these things is like but also what is at stake, raising larger questions about media, storage, and transmission.

We should also consider that players at times stop playing without formally pausing, which would require closing the DS or pressing “start” in the middle of a game. This kind of action is risky in terms of preserving play because in most games there are only a few instances open to such moments of respite and relaxation. Wolf (2001) discusses these events, conceptualizing them as part of the game but extradiegetic in that they are not moments when the player is actively engaged in game play. He calls these moments “interludes,” and “moments in which the game’s interactive potential is briefly suspended” which he attributes to the mechanics of the device, as for example moments of stillness that occur when the program’s code is loading new information or refreshing a screen, or moments designed to provide a modulation of tension and a sense of “pace” to the game, or “breathers” for the player as well as scripted death animation sequences or avatars’ victory dances (Wolf, 2001, p. 83).

Load screens, pause buttons, item inventories, and other non-deigetic moments allow the player to sit back, stretch, and otherwise withdraw from the game posture and from the demands of time and speed. The controller works differently in these nondiegetic contexts. In the innovatory or “settings” screen, the controller becomes mouse-like. The game play pauses (literally) for data management; the interface owes much to a Windows or Mac desktop as well as to the old high-score screen of the arcade. The setting screens may not be part of the play, but they are still part of the game. The “load” screen works differently. With the “load,” or between moments, the screen comes into play (or not) as the system brings up the next stage, “level,” or area of the game. In these moments, the controller as the interface between the player and the game is nervous, even superstitious. A and B buttons are worked like worry beads. This is the game play version of flicking your fingers under the faucet waiting for the cold water to get hot. The commands given here go nowhere (they go where the typing between active windows goes). Something happens but nothing registers; you are talking to yourself.

Harrison Gish (2009) suggests that these moments, which usually come at the beginning or end of a level of play, are usefully charged with information, and therefore are part of playing the game well if not actually what most would call “game play.” My interest, however, is in what the player can do in these moments beyond this kind of game-space reconnaissance, and this is where Wolf’s “breather” is particularly useful (2001, p. 83). We use these moments in any kind of game play situation to attend to things, our person (can one ever need to scratch one’s nose more than in the mid of heated game play?), and otherwise take care of something else, but briefly. If we think about situations of public portable play (as opposed to the more relaxed domestic arrangement of the couch and console), particularly in transit as in a subway, we also may need a second or two to let someone by or to shift our weight. While these kinds of pauses are outside of the game, they are all about our relation to the play we are trying, however precariously, to inhabit. These pauses merit our critical attention as they can help us to see that we pause in order to save play.

To pause is to save play from the specter of labor, from completionism, from instrumentality, and, taking a term from RPGs (a popular genre for the DS), to save us from the dubious pleasures of “grinding.” The play that pausing saves is casual play. The save function in contrast has more to do with the kind of play that starts to feel more and more like work. Connecting these practices back to Innis’s ideas about time and space based or biased media, saving is concerned with permanence, pausing with flexibility. Saving (Innis’s time bias) is a matter of building and accrual, of options, paths, tricks, and best practices as well as of progression through a game narrative, points, or levels. As Wolf puts it, “with the save function, players could . . . save a game at a point where a decision was required, and then play the game out multiple times from the saved game, making a different choice each time” (Wolf, 2001, p. 87). Play oriented toward saving ought to be worth saving and play in this sense tends to be careful. ⁷ Pausing (Innis’s space) is orientated toward the casual and its play is fast and loose. The pause act stretches play, give it breathing room (Wolf, 2001, p. 83), a hesitation rather than a restart. Pausing is for when we do not know for how long we can play. Pausing is associated with movement even if it is only anticipated movement, while saving oriented play is associated with stability and having the time and space for a good game session worth storing.

Pausing has no promised history like saving does, no potential outside of play itself and play’s ability to fill up the wait of the waiting room, to make more bearable the coach seat, the lecture, and the train platform. Given the contingent nature of the kind of play I examine here, it is a matter of minutes not hours, or if hours, then hours made of one more minute at a time. In this casual play, nothing is promised, and what is stored is not meant to be archived. While the high score exists, and it may be reached in this sort play, that would be incidental, at best a happy surprise but not the inspiration to open the DS. The difference is one of duration, intent, and lusory attitude. Playing for high scores, beating the game, and wanting to complete it are ways of playing for keeps, having more in common with the kind of playing that we plan for, work toward, and, to quote David Sudnow, about which we must “care.” ⁸ We save this play to build off of later. ⁹ This kind of play is certainly important with the DS, the popularity and success of the RPG genre is testament to that. It is important, however, that we not only account for what the device affords vis-à-vis what is possible in terms of technical specifics of memory, storage, and power, but also how the DS affords and makes possible an alternative kind of management of time, and along with this, a different kind of play style or ludic attitude, one that is based not on the capabilities of the device to store and retrieve data permanently but of a player, either by shutting the DS’s case, hitting pause button, or even just waiting for a lull in diegetic action to hesitate, wait, or pause. What the DS and its pause feature allow is a kind of redemption of play as category of action, that is, in Goffman’s sense of term, irrelevant (1961, p. 26).

Play Time

I have endeavored to keep my focus on the almost toy-like character of the DS and to offer a material and embodied as opposed to a game-oriented reading of play on and with the DS. Thus far, my focus has been on the DS’s life in our hands: how we touch it, open and close it, and carry it around with us. In combination with this attention to the material aspects of DS play, I need to address the workings of time, an aspect of play with the DS that goes beyond my discussion of pausing.

In Goffman’s example, prisoners’ playing with their bouncing balls transforms the prison wall into a goal, net, or backboard, and in this way we see how play works to redefine, recover, and recuperate space. However, the other key dynamic in Goffman’s ballgame is that the play situation is temporary, lasting only as long as the prisoners are playing; as soon as play stops, the backboard reverts to being a prison wall. The other time-based dilemma that the prisoners face is the time they spend in confinement—the duration of their play occurs against the backdrop of the much larger time frame of their prison sentence. At the risk of being overly dramatic, I would suggest that this is the situation in which we play with our DSs, a situation not of a prison but of empty time spent in depot waiting rooms, airport boarding areas, subway platforms, and in transit. The ethical and political problem we face when we describe play this way, as transformative, even liberating, but only temporarily, is that no real freedom can be contingent, and yet this is where we are left. If we need to kill time, it is because that time is arduous and oppressive. Maybe there is possibility for a more lasting, freer, transformative play. But the situation I describe here, in which the DS functions as a stopgap, a time filler and time killer, as a palliative technology, is not to say that DS play is not legitimate, germane, or important. The prisoners would admit that the ball was not going to free them, but that does not mean that they did not want or need it.

With this article, my intention has been to contribute to the evolving critical discussion of play as a concept, category, activity, and ideal, a discussion that is still as yet under theorized. People are playing a lot, and a lot of what they are playing with are handheld devices. Over 330 million games were sold in the past year for the Nintendo DS, and while raw masses of numbers are not reason enough to study something, they do point toward a gap between what gets written about in game studies and what is actually played. ¹⁰ By focusing on a new reading of play attuned to such key concepts as time, experience, and space, we can open up fundamental questions about pleasure, bodies, technology, interface, and the subject.

I have tried to account for and unpack how users of the Nintendo DS save and pause their play by examining such practices through frameworks of time- and space-based media and the materiality of that play. I have reworked Innis’s concepts of storage and transmission in a number of ways. First, by showing how the DS allows us to transmit not just through explicit networked connectivity but also in the sharing of lusory and ludic attitudes and social transformation of space. Second, by arguing that we save and store with the DS not just at the level of data and files but also on the surfaces of the object itself. Finally, I have shown that using the pause function of the DS is often in response to the exigencies of the space the player is in rather than some event in the game they are playing.

By examining pausing and saving in the context of the DS, we expand and sharpen our understanding of what constitutes play with these handheld game systems. I have argued that we need to define video game play as including these extra-diegetic yet still ludic practices of saving and pausing, of dealing with time- and space-based constraints and affordances. These play practices, despite their minute scale (mere moments really), are filled with tensions, decisions, and interventions into fundamental issues of space and time, storage, and transmission. Players play with these moments of hesitation, adjustment, fresh starts, and failures. These practices allow play to happen and to continue but also are themselves play acts; they are part of and constituent of play, especially play that, like mobile DS play, is shaped by and dependent on larger social, spatial, and temporal contexts that are in flux.

Portable play is contingent: the DS player reworks gaps in time, exploits spaces more or less open to play, and deals with other issues of context that can define and delimit their play activity as much as any code, game mechanics, or miniboss. Many of the ways in which players use the DS have to do with management of time and space in order to protect play or even just the possibility of play. We can see this in the cleaning and renewal of the touch screen, the charging and rationing of a unit’s power supply, or in the negotiations of tensions in and outside of the game through pausing, shutting the unit, or trying to save at just the right time.

What we might get from a careful reworking of some of the issues of the relation between play and nonplay and between player and plaything is something like Benjamin’s “innervation,” a kind of contact with, in, and through games, like the “dynamite of the tenth of a second” that he saw in cinema that could illuminate otherwise ignored or hidden aspects of our own lives (Benjamin, 1969). The promise of cinema for Benjamin (only ever a promise) was that cinema could literally show us things that we could not otherwise see or that we would fail to notice, revealing to us something about our lives that would help us attain a new consciousness, even a revolutionary one. ¹¹ I am not suggesting that we will achieve such a conciseness through mobile gaming, nor am I arguing that such mobile gaming offers us the fantasy of escape via play but rather provides the possibility of illuminating the conditions of play in our current milieu, highlighting the way in which we deal with space and time that are not our own.

In exploring the details of how we share our mobile play or how we save games, and in pausing them, save play, we, scholars, critics, and players alike, can learn something about the stakes and contexts for this medial situation we play and live in. We learn something about not just games, mobile or other wise, when we examine the details of their management and usage. We can also learn about contingency and context by looking at how we play with the temporal and spatial dynamics of media. We can learn something about mobility, impermanence, social spaces, and the communicative possibilities of those spaces by playing with and thinking about playing with these kinds of portable systems. Reading play into save and pause functions connects these affordances to larger issues involving the management of space and time, and although making this connection does not fundamentally change what it is we do with the DS and mobile video game systems, it enables us to play with the constraints and contingencies of space and time.