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Temporality can be studied using the same abstract categories as those used for narratives in narratology, since the categories are neither narrative nor game-like in themselves: order, speed, frequency, duration, simultaneity, and time of the action. These are specifications of both the actions of the player and the events the player encounters and is perhaps able to modify in the course of a game (10).

 

Janet Murray's approach to Tetris (Murray 1997, 143-144) is an ultimate counterexample to this. She's quite content to interpret this Soviet game as "a perfect enactment of the over tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught." It would be equally far beside the point if someone interpreted chess as a perfect American game because there's a constant struggle between hierarchically organized white and black communities, genders are not equal, and there's no health care for the stricken pieces. Of course, there's one crucial difference: after this kind of analysis you'd have no intellectual future in the chess-playing community.

 

Instead of studying the actual game Murray tries to interpret its supposed content, or better yet, project her favourite content on it; consequently we don't learn anything of the features that make Tetris a game. The explanation for this interpretative violence seems to be equally horrid: the determination to find or forge a story at any cost, as games can't be games because if they were, they apparently couldn't be studied at all. In contrast, here's a provisional attempt to apply some key temporal concepts to Tetris, probably the most successful abstract computer game ever (Figure 4).