by Christopher Hanson
about Christopher Hanson
Christopher Hanson is an associate professor in the English Department at Syracuse University, where he teaches courses in game studies, digital media, television, and film. His book Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games was published in 2018, and he is currently working on a book about video game designer Roberta Williams. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, and LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon.
Don’t Starve
Abstract: Among the many pleasures of digital games are how they often allow players to control time and experience temporality in new ways. By contrast, Christopher Hanson argues that Don’t Starve inverts these pleasures to greatly restrict the player’s control over temporality and foreground the function of time as an essential resource of its gameplay mechanics.