Tempus Fugit
I’ve resumed this old draft for its pertinence with the previous post.
When I first played The Sims, I was upset by its time conception.
You play this simulation with little characters, hurry to carry out mundane activities in quarters that equals to real one hours.
The time compression is particularly common in games with small characters. The idea is to make the experience denser and bigger than the real life. You may put the whole playtime in a slider, where interesting tasks make the things bumpy: more the thinks per hour more the fun.
Implicitly, it’s said that those activities are too long to be enjoyable in a game. Cooking pasta takes 15 minutes? Let’s do 5 seconds. Running on the beach? Only 2 minutes, otherwise you starve. Travel from city to city? Just a click in the map.
Is always the destination more important than the voyage?
In The Sims I had the impression that time was my enemy: I couldn’t listen to music o play sports freely, because the game forced me to go to the bathroom! Obviously I wasn’t playing in the “right way”, as the game wanted me to do.
The Sims seemed to offer the possibility to play another me, but with that time pressure I wasn’t able to immerse myself in the role. I guess that this perfectly fit our modern life-style, full of tasks and dealings (…thanks to Numa Pompilio’s calendar), but it hinders the focus on the character.
The The Sims example well served me to criticize the general tendency to make recreative events efficient. It’s not by accident that you lose the knowledge of time during pleasant activities.
Lost in Blue for DS followed the same design practice. You are in a beautiful island wondering for a place to fish, but a constantly ticking clock reminds you to move forward. For me, this pressure is unsuitable and ditches the impetus to walk around and talk to people.
On surface Bully by Rockstar seems like a GTA-clone but its open world is regulated by a clock in the upper right of the screen. I’ve appreciated the whole system, unfortunately you have no ways to judge how much a task will take, nevertheless, if you’re yet around for 2 am, inevitably the character falls down exhausted (andthe active mission is aborted).
There’s a good reason why there’s no clock in casinos! Would you remind someone who’s giving you lots of money that it’s late to play?
