Time and Precariousness in One Hour, One Life

As Jagoda mentions in Network Aesthetics, Caroline Pelletier describes games as "enacted as objects of meaning" that must be understood as "ways of construing ideas, beliefs, and experiences, emerging from particular social relations" (146). It is interesting to think about how these social relations and themes change when playing games that approach networks differently. When thinking of games as networks, one of the most intuitively obvious examples that come to my mind are MMORPGs, of which I’ve played a couple, the ones that stick out the most being RuneScape and World of Warcraft. In those games, the networked aspect presents itself through the formation of relatively stable relationships, because time is smooth and continuous. You inhabit a virtual world that is constantly changing and being updated, but players engage in the same stories and lore (through things like quests) and generally, dying does not mean permanent death, but rather some form of ‘restarting’ in the same world. obviously, players can be divided geographically, through worlds/servers/realms, and different versions of the game (old school, etc.). players are both atomized in that the primary investment is in your character/avatar, and cooperation is circumstantial—taking place in the form of things like raids, guilds, dungeons, quests, etc. However, playing One Hour, One Life was a completely different experience, and the gameplay and social networks through which meaning was created by virtue of limited temporality and precariousness of the “lives” and civilizations that inhabit it. Firstly, there is the fact that your character begins as a helpless baby and then ages over the course of 60 minutes, having to constantly eat in order to stay alive. I found myself constantly dying, never being able to satisfactorily live a full life, and thus not achieving the level of cooperation needed to help ensure the game and its “civilizations’” continuity. It was an interesting display of failure in which i was essentially living a stream of multiple short-lived lives and contributing nothing to ‘society’. i think the difference between this type of gameplay and games like WoW and RS, where players have free reign to focus on developing their own skills, levels, and plot lines or working with others reveals One Hour, One Life’s ability to communicate the tradeoffs present in building a civilization (and really just, living in one) and the complexity involved in aiding and educating the younger and less experienced while simultaneously growing old and attempting to define your own story/impact on the world before you're dead and gone.