Some Time Mechanics In Video Games And What Playing With Time Can Make You Feel
One of the main staples of game design that can be displayed across every genre is a passive element in game play that has you manage time. Whether time is something that the game is constantly reminding you about or something that is happening in the background and always changing content even if it is just changing from day to night. In this essay, I want to highlight some ways that time has been implemented into game play and how the inclusion of these systems make games more than what they seem at first.
The Life Simulation Time System
This method was made famous by titles such as Harvest Moon and Rune Factory, this being that you take the role of a main character that has some manner of responsibility thrust upon him (typically a farm) and must make use of every day as they pass by doing things like taking care of animals and crops. The time mechanic added has its biggest inhibitor being that you MUST go to sleep at the end of each in game day. It is very clear immediately that time is your biggest restraint in these games given that whatever you are doing has to eventually take a pause so that you can go to sleep or take care of your plants or animals. Time is always ticking and you feel a constant need to perform every day, at least at first. When you are beginning, you can feel overwhelmed by the days passing by, this is because you feel like you may be missing opportunities or falling behind. And while you may be a bit slow, as you progress through these life simulation games you start to notice that the inclusion of time actually grants you the feeling of having unlimited time.
Let’s take an example in Stardew Valley. The day starts and you have about 10–12 real life minutes to do what you need to do depending on how late you like your character to stay up. You are limited in any activity to these time parameters and start to learn how to get your chores done faster to maximize your time doing alternate projects. After this, you may take on a larger goal like saving up to buy a kitchen for your house. Now that you are used to balancing day to day goals and are most likely googling “fastest way to get money” you come to the great realization that you have unlimited days to accomplish this task. Nobody is poking and prodding you to build a kitchen and your little farmer is literally not getting any older. Stardew Valley succeeds in its attempt to give the player a peaceful respite in its town by offering you as much time as you need to get away from what it entails as being crushed by the burden of modern life.
However, not always do you feel this relief by this type of system. In Rune Factory 4 there are long sections of story where your town members are sick or even missing, and to advance past these portions of story you have to go out and complete dungeons that you may not even be ready for. The way that these events unfold disrupts your cycle of unlimited-day long-term goals and replaces them with wondering what you can do today to get stronger or if you have time that day to go save these townsfolk. This is an effective way to get the player to focus on a quest that technically has no time limit, but has the downside of making the the game feel unevenly paced. The day to day time cycle found in life simulation games still remains an engaging way to get the player to manage long and short term goals and allows the game to offer longevity without becoming repetitive.
Action-Based Time Systems
One of the most noticeable time systems is actually one that doesn’t time you (technically). This measure of time that only moves as you do has become somewhat of a time management chess, allowing you to carefully plan out your day and make the most of every decision. This most likely made famous by the extremely popular Shin Megami Tensei spin-off series Persona has you move from day to day in an almost turn-based fashion, choosing specific tasks that allow you to become stronger and build your character or team in personal ways.
So speaking of Persona. we can use that as an example as to how this time system makes the player feel. Before, we were talking about how Stardew Valley is very stressful at first but eases up the more invested you get. Persona is the exact opposite. As you progress through the first few months in Persona you are told that you have one year, that’s a long time. So you are starting all of these projects and making every day count up until you have 2 months left and you suddenly notice that you do not have time to do everything and a dread passes over you as you are now have to pick very carefully who you will forge bonds with and which activities will prepare you to fight the final boss. This intensity drives home a very long role playing game in ways that not a lot of games can replicate.
I know that some other games imply the action based method in order to create emphasis on strategy. Some really interesting takes being that most isometric role playing games like Pillars of Eternity have a wait mode in combat that allow you to plan actions more carefully in the middle of an intense fight. Even action combat focused games can have this too like Final Fantasy XV. An extreme version of this being Superhot where time literally only moves as you do which is an incredible use of the mechanic, especially in VR.
The action based time system’s main draw is that it allows the player to feel control over the one thing that nobody has control over, their time. And it’s incredibly appealing, if I sat in front of my Steam library page for an hour (as one does) deciding what I want to play only to have wasted my afternoon staring at a Steam library, I would gladly sell a vital organ to be able to pause time until I have decided what I wanted to do with my evening. Games like Persona using this method to create intensity in its final act and games like Pillars of Eternity using it to give the player precision timing in decision making show how powerful this use of time can be and how time can become a valuable tool in integral game design.
Your Real Time
Technically all games require your time, however specifically I mean the games that interact with your real time. The best example of this is daily interactions in games. This is a common practice in mobile games and MMO’s. This comes in two flavors, a daily activity and a daily reward. The first is an offering that games as a service use to entice players to play at least a little bit every day (or as often as they can) while allowing them to build up the rewards from those daily activities to achieve some goal, usually to buy or craft an item or gear. This allows the game to extend its content by trying to add a fun element to the games replayability. The daily reward is usually added to mobile games to try to get their players to come back and find a routine of at least opening the app on their phone once a day.
A master of the daily activity continues to be Animal Crossing. A game that has more in common with a pet than a software. Animal Crossing itches that part of you that wants nothing more than to have a responsibility that you can continually accomplish in 30–60 minutes each day like doing your chores or remembering to eat breakfast (which you should also do, I am not implying that you should replace breakfast time with Animal Crossing). If you have ever played an MMO then you know the feeling all too well and have possibly even held yourself to a strict regiment of completing certain in game activities as if you were clocking into a job. This so much so that the main reason that players retire from these games is that it really does start to feel like a job if you aren’t taking breaks from the daily grind to get distracted by other portions of the game.
So to answer the original question, the daily activity succeeds in creating routine in players that are looking for that type of stimulus. Players are feeling a relief upon completion of their Final Fantasy XIV leveling queue and World of Warcraft world quests as if their day has suddenly become more productive. And I can personally testify to this because until I picked up some other hobbies I played Final Fantasy XIV every single day for about two years. I was in a place where I was lost in my hobbies and needed an outlet to stay productive and MMO’s helped me keep a feeling of daily accomplishment.
The Intensity and Relief of a Moment
Video Games are a unique medium that can give a player a special type of experience by letting them interact in fun and novel ways with things that they normally couldn’t. The freedom I can feel playing a life sim, the satisfaction I can get while incorporating an MMO into my schedule, and the insight I can gain by living a brief year in another persons shoes are how incorporating time into game play has been a positive force in my own gaming. These things that you may be missing in your own life can interestingly enough be simulated to an insane degree in video games, and that’s pretty incredible.
