The Formation of Temporal Sovereignty in Video Games: A Prehistory of Instant-Reward Design through Repetition, Skipping, Strategy Information, and Experiential Granularity

This preprint examines the historical formation of what it calls temporal sovereignty in video games: the range of discretion players have over how much time and attention they devote to particular game events, at what speed and in what order they experience them, and whether some processes must be experienced directly at all. Rather than treating contemporary instant-reward design as a sudden response to declining patience or shortened attention spans, the paper traces a longer history of player practices and design responses. It considers message-speed control, synchronized performance, meaningful waiting, encounter avoidance, rare-enemy optimization, strategy-guide and wiki culture, event-flag management, encyclopedias and completion rates, combat skipping, visual-novel replay systems, branching narratives, remaster speed-up functions, and contemporary skip-ticket systems. These cases are interpreted as part of a broader movement from player-managed optimization toward the formal incorporation of temporal and cognitive compression into game interfaces. The paper develops three related concepts: temporal sovereignty, experiential granularity, and selective retention of experience. Experiential granularity describes the degree to which an in-game event is experienced through step-by-step interaction, acceleration, automation, or only through its outcome. Selective retention of experience refers to the way players may compress repetitive or low-value intermediate processes while still retaining meaningful experiential histories such as having completed a game, overcome a challenge, or developed attachment to a character. The central argument is that contemporary instant-reward design is not simply a cultural rupture. It can also be understood as the historical result of a feedback loop in which players developed informal strategies for saving time and reducing uncertainty, developers incorporated those practices into formal systems, and players subsequently came to expect such forms of discretion as standard features. This Zenodo record contains both the Japanese original and the English version of the paper.