Time travel on your phone? Mobile games, time, and history

Video games are often described as providing access to the past at the click of a button, and thus as a kind of time travel. The increasing number of mobile games (now the largest sector of the gaming industry) means that this access is available to even more people than before; without the need for a console or gaming PC, many more players can access historical worlds on their smartphones. At the same time, however, many of these games develop unusual relationships with time and time travel, through particular mobile gaming mechanics. Many mobile games also add in complicating elements to the relationships between times, in the form of microtransactions which affect play time or fictive time. These transactions offer players the opportunity to manipulate time, often either by paying to continue ‘play time’ (and thus to continue the historical time of a represented narrative), or to speed up time in, for example, city-building games. This article explores the different relationships between real-world time, play time, and historical time generated by mobile game mechanics to examine how mobile games’ capacity to manipulate historical time perhaps demonstrates the clearest example of a form of ‘time travel’ in modern games.