Most official games released on the Atari 5200 were simply ports of Atari 2600 or arcade games, and as such there was no special functionality when pausing. Accordingly, the Atari 5200 released in 1982 was unique in that it featured a controller with a button specifically dedicated to pausing. Additionally, other technologies like the VCR and cassette player conditioned users to expect the ability to pause their media. A household’s demands on a player's attention was not always conducive to long unbroken play sessions, either, so pausing became integral to play in this new environment. However, as videogames found their way into players’ living rooms, play was no longer contingent on paying for playtime. Arcade cabinets of the 80s were designed to take as many quarters from players as possible, so a pause act would only diminish any cabinet’s return on investment by potentially extending players’ time on machine without inserting more coins.
Pausing has not always been a standard feature of videogames. Pause menus include menus that, when accessed, suspend most of the machine’s actions that directly affect the game world. In this paper I narrow my discussion of menus, if only slightly, to the pause menu.
Because of the wide variety of menus, it is impossible to talk about all instantiations generally. Shopping, crafting equipment, and completing quests are all often relegated to menus. Menus are used for dialogue and combat and managing inventories.
One of the first things a player sees when booting up a videogame is almost always a menu with options such as “new game” and “load game.” There are menus for settings that allow players to tweak the technical parameters of their game. They are designed with countless aesthetics, employ many navigational methods, and are used for a myriad of functions. This essay explores how both the act of pausing and navigating pause menus offer perceptions of temporality and space that situate videogame play as not simply explorations of game spaces they also reveal the computational modes of time and space that are always present in all aspects of videogame play. While menus proliferate in videogames, they are practically synonymous with the act of pausing, appearing whenever a game is suspended. This is especially true in videogames: To play videogames is to use menus. Play While Paused: Time and Space in Videogame Pause MenusĪlexander Galloway (2006) argued that “to live today is to know how to use menus” (p.
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