Modern videogames have this issue of trying to balance a sizable world with speeding up the less enjoyable parts of having a sizable world (travel time). The results are painfully broken, cities feel like they're only a few blocks in size since the player is easily able to walk through the whole city fairly quickly (and of course the city is largely empty with fake buildings)... so games use this sped up clock to try and claim you're walking slowly but time is going faster.

Then when you're inside a building the clock keeps going at the same rate. With a 24 minute clock (each in game hour is 1 real world minute) and timed quests this begins getting absurd with combat involved. You mean to say that we spent 1 in game hour shooting at each other, or stopping to read some quest notes takes up an hour?

In the end, time ends up feeling cosmetic because it never actually fits with what goes on in game. Yet the player still ends up suffering from time effects (fatigue, hunger, quests, day night cycle) that happen at an accelerated rate to make up for how small the world actually is...

Is it me, or does in game time seem to have no balancing point? Adopt a 24 minute clock and have everything purely cosmetic (no in game time events) to which I ask why can't the player choose the time he wants it to be? Adopt a 24 minute clock and annoy the player with real world time requirements (8 minutes / 8 hours has passed, you are hungry)? Or stay in real time but be unable to explain why the player can walk from 1 corner of the map to the other corner in less than an ingame day.

Time acceleration can feel weird in many games though it depends on the game. Some games like Stardew Valley or Don't Starve are meant to be played as a large series of short days so time is supposed to run fast there. I always felt that time ran too fast in some Elder Scrolls games. You can actually change that though with the set timescale to x console command where the number is however many in-game minutes you want to pass per real-time minute (default is 30 for Morrowind & Oblivion and 20 for Skyrim).

In real life, a lot of going from one place to the other feels like a waste of time, to me. I don't care for games mimicking this menial aspect of real life (without alternative). I like to be given the choice between freely exploring and using the "Star Trek transporter" (because 'forced' travelling doesn't always add to my enjoyment of a game).

Maybe you like your games to be closer to "1:1 life simulator"... I don't. (obviously, I don't care for The Sims) Games also don't explain why characters never need pee breaks. Do you consider that an issue?

what clock? in which game?

and why modern videogames? as far as i know newer games city sizes are way larger than the older ones

I dont even see why skipping boring travel is a problem

Maybe don't ever play a business management sim like Railroad Tycoon then, where it can take a train half a year to get from Manchester to Liverpool. (IE: A mild 38 mile/61 km journey.)

Or Rollercoaster Tycoon where guests stay in the park for months on end, but spend only a couple of hours!

you realise to actually travel manchester to york, it does in fact take at least two years due to infrastructure, traffic and the UK medieval tech only zones implemented through austerity cuts?
so doing manc/liver like that is a feat!

Remember that in Rollercoaster Tycoon, guests can stay months, if not years in a park without ever leaving. RCT 2 had scenarios where guests have to pay only once for entering the park and not for individual rides, which makes sense in the real world where you have to leave in the evening and if you want to get in again the next day you have to pay again, but not if the park never closes and you can stay for as long as you want. I really hated these scenarios.

Also, four months of the year (from November to February) just don't exist, probably because the park is supposed to be closed during the winter, but they just don't happen and the time instantly switches from October to March. Then again, if you had to wait for everyone to leave the park at some point it would take forever, not just because of the guests' pathfinding.

Very poorly.
Joking aside: whenever there's some kind of time flow simulated in games, it's usually a huge pain in the ass.

Taking your example of [8 minutes IRL = 8 hours in game]:

let's say, on an average day, you eat three meals, drink about two to three liters of water throughout, and sleep for eight hours.

According to your system, that would take only 24 minutes IRL (of which the eight minutes(=hours) of sleep could be compressed to a few seconds in-game time).

That leaves 16 minutes IRL for the whole day, during which you (as the player) have to feed your character(s) three times, and need to let have them drink as least as often.

Now, in RL-time you wouldn't mind doing all this, simply because you would feel hungry and thirsty and tired at certain intervals, yourself.

But being forced to do all that every (ca.) five minutes, just to keep your character(s) alive and healthy (outside of any possible combat situations, that occur on top of that)...is simply annoying.

And the alternative (having the RL clock ticking the in-game time away) is equally annoying (if only for the reason you already mentioned: being able to walk across a whole continent in four RL hours).

So, imho, best are those games that leave that flow of time completely out (though I do understand, of course, that there are games/genres that deliberately use that flow of time to give some structure and /or pressure to the player).

But overall, I'd say: better to leave flow of time out of games.

My two cents.

DISCLAIMER: Very very long post ahead. If you don't like to please move on to another post and don't waste your time on this one. Else please start and keep reading until the end.

There are several different ways time mechanics are used in games. Passage of time is one thing, artificially speeding up or slowing down the flow of time, playing real-time where 1 sec. == 1 sec. or based on a formula like 24 hrs./x == x mins. real time.

You mention lack of balance, which is true in some cases, while in general you will find time mechanics balance out something else, for instance the level of difficulty. Watch this short Prince of Persia video and you will see how it helps fighting enemies, keep making progress without dying unless and until your Sand of Time is running out &etc. Most of the time you are running around in real time, you might not even need to slowdown time, like sliding down that banner jumping on the mast and on to this wooden bridge, though you'd have to be very good to pull it off.

Another way to balance things out or making use of time mechanics is change of age at a certain rate based on a time formula. 1 year == 30 min. in game for instance, or 8 hrs. == 8 min. where you start getting hungry or thirsty or both. Either you eat or you suffer some artificial deduction of strength, stamina, speed, ability to run or even walk. In survival type games you may as well drop unconscious, being attacked by something while you're out, ending up dead. Stardew Valley and the like dropping and ending up in a hospital or your own bed is the most that can happen.

A very interesting way time is used was in Darklands. You will age, based on some formula, you can start off as baby and end up 80. When time passes you grow strong, gain wisdom and knowledge, all tasks are easy, you are able to carry heavy things around not including your clothes, armor, weapon(s), you can run for miles without so much as getting tired. Though once you will grow older your abilities start deteriorating and what once was easy could then become impossible. It conveys the feeling of passage of time as well as effects of time on your health, mental abilities and your body. You can't speed up time or reverse it (not that I remember that that's possible like it would in games like Might&Magic where it's possible to 'reset' your age.)

Then there are games like GTA or maybe Mafia and several ways time is used. In GTA you get the choice to travel on foot, car, ... from point A->B. You also get the choice to click on your map to get to where you want in a matter of seconds. They allow you to explore yet mind your time not forcing you to always travel to a place you've been to hundreds of times by whatever means. It is on you then to decide to use it or explore alternative routes to get from A->B in real time. Once you have seen most everything you will certainly appreciate the open to artificially travel in a very short amount of time versus 10 or 20 or 50 minutes because no matter how good a game looks it will get boring.

It is very much the same in adventure type games. Do you really appreciate a game where you have to walk slowly to an exit point to get to the next screen? Or having to walk through the same screen three times because you have to backtrack to find some item or solve some riddle? This isn't fun and another very good use of time to make it fun instead of a bother to keep playing. Keeping you walking only just stretches time artificially and for no good reason ...

In Per Aspera you get the option to play in real time, building or bots moving around, the overall passage of time in game, are x-times faster even at 1x speed and can be sped up by a factor of up to 16x. At the beginning you will enjoy playing at 1x speed but soon find to get you anywhere you would wish to speed the process up to finish buildings or having them torn down. In addition it is possible to prioritize building or tearing down buildings speeding the whole process up even more. Great use of time!

Loop Hero uses passage of time in several different ways and on several levels. Time spent in game is measured in real time, a loop can take longer or be shorter depending on its length, so when a short loop takes a little amount of time the enemies will grow stronger, while you on the other hand might still be some levels below in terms of weapon and armor or the ability to summon a greater number of strong skeletons, making it harder for you to progress quickly and sometimes impossible to beat a boss in a run because it has taken you 18, 19 or 20 loops to get to it. The boss will be incredibly overpowered by then and kill you in a matter of seconds.

On the other hand you may have a very long loop and speeding up progress and time can have you face a boss in no time. This, then, may lead to another problem, where you might be able to beat the boss but can't, because again you lack weapon(s) and armor protecting you and allowing you to do some serious damage. Waste time and fail, place to many cards spawning enemies, or additional/special enemies from normal cards, or additional monsters with monster-support-cards, some of which will protect your enemies, granting them additional abilities or stats, fail. So you have to make as good use of passage of time as you can to make your run a success.

Then you can speed up your character and speed of time by placing support-cards like towers. You will find items granting you a +% to up your attack speed, you will have cards accelerating the passage of time during a loop, which will both help and hinder your progress. A new day both heals a certain amount of damage while at the same time monsters will spawn. I could go on and on how brilliantly developers implemented time mechanics in Loop Hero and how well balanced it all is ... Suffice to say the most important time is amount you spend playing it which for me amounted to +500 hrs. and that's probably on the very low end.

Some games might make use of time mechanics, let's say Terraria, in which you can do lots of things and make progress in a short amount of time. On the other hand it is up to you what you do with your time and its passage. It is totally possible to spend 1000 hours doing nothing but digging tunnels and not building a single house. Leaving you with nothing to show for your time. Passage of time in game at whatever speed doesn't matter then.

Pathfinder or PoE will put you into a situation where its game mechanics and speed of passage of time will put you into a situation where you don't have the luxury of wasting time. You will have to make progress, you will have to be in a certain place (POE) with a certain number of NPC in your party, else you can't take on a side-quest. In Kingmaker you might fail solving a quest. Very much the same in Sea of Thieves, you either make it and finish a deed or fail and you wasted time trying. In all those cases you can try again, which means loading a save game, or go back to an NPC and collect the same quest again (SoT). Not really anything to do with time mechanics in a game just saying.

There is Order of Battle where time is measured in turns. It is more like a chess type game where once you find out what troops to use you could finish it in < 15 turns taking you a certain amount of time versus 30 moves. Sometimes you get a set of main- and side missions and you have to decide how to spend your time. Will you try to solve all missions and eventually risk failing, because 'time' has run out, or will you try because there's rewards helping you later on? This is both a question of time as well as taking time to figure out how to solve all missions and reap the rewards. Since it is possible you either take the time and try or don't and just keep progressing through a set of scenarios.

Imagine playing a game like Hearts of Iron in real time where 1 min. == 1 min. == 1 min. Imagine playing the whole war as Allies/Axis, slowly building up your forces, finishing building a panzer or diver bomber, a submarine or ship, doing diplomacy where you will not get the answer in a second but in weeks or months. Thanks to a mod it is possible. Would it be worth your time to change the time mechanic to do it? Same question for other games like Gary Grigsby's games or any other war game at all really. Your time your choice.

One final example where real time is part of the game is a game called The Longing. You play for 400 days (or don't). Once you start it time keeps ticking down and you can check back on it 400 days later or you play and slowly explore, collect things and solve puzzles, it is up to you.

In almost all games with time mechanics there is also a balance in place, and then there are others wasting your time with time mechanics as you say, making it feel artificial and not at all fun to play. For me the game I hated most for a time-limited mission was Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silver Earring. While most of it is point&click, all very relaxed, there is one point where you got to get through a labyrinth, a timed mission, you failing means game over. The worst kind of time-mechanic in a game like this. There is an old who-dun-it game where you have to be at certain places at certain times, everything you do you got to measure time, you must memorize the whole game basically and what to do where when and how long it takes, otherwise you fail or miss a person. That's again one of the worst way of using a time mechanic.

So whether a game makes good use of your time and time mechanics and which is worth your time playing and finishing should be rather easy. I could go on and on because this is such a fascinating topic with lots of very good and very bad examples but i will leave it at that as it is already to long of a post which I don't suspect many will read. If you do more power to you! ;-)

Yeah, Bethesda games allow you to create mods to fix some of the time issues, particularly in that you could make time faster outdoors (usually just walking around) and slower indoors (usually fighting or something that should consume time). That was pretty much my idea too, Time never feels quite right in videogames... it always has this cosmetic feel that seems like it should be something you should be able to turn off. You pair it with annoying things like "Eye adaptation" nights (where your eyes never adapt to it being night and you have to turn up the brightness on your monitor to see, and using flashlights only makes it harder to see of course), or eat / rest cycles and it quickly wears out the novelty.

I've done a few roleplays, but I often find that in game systems for hunger sleep or whatever are simply awful. If you want time to mean something, double clicking a food item in your inventory hardly seems like it is the simulation you're looking for. So in the end, the player can always roleplay a better system of hiking across a map, pretending to go scavanging for food, and take more rests than the system is designed for... but trying to make a system that does this while not getting in the way of the combat often breaks one or the other.

How have I not posted in this topic yet?

I actually did make a topic about different types of time limits recently, in which I was thinking of time limits from the context of troll mario levels, or more generally troll games.

In these sort of games, you might have these type of time limits:
* Hidden timers: You have a limited amount of time to get past a certain point, but the game doesn't tell you until it's too late. If you wait (and often there will be bait to encourage waiting), you lose and have to try again.
* Reverse hidden timers: Like above, except that waiting is the right choice. Perhaps the game scares the player into going quickly, but then punishes the player for doing so. (Example: An enemy is encroaching on the player, but if you wait, the enemy dies on its own and a path opens up; if you were to dodge it, you would go past a one-way obstacle and not be able to go through the opened path.)

As you implied in the first post the reason games like Skyrim have a "fast clock" is to further imply the world is actually much bigger than you're seeing, and you see a scaled down view of it. So when you walk for a minute you actually walked for an hour or whatever.

Is there a better way to handle this? Well for me the best way is to have zones instead of one huge world, so you don't need to scale down anything. From Baldur's Gate to Deus Ex to Dragon Age Inquisition games have used zones you travel between which still had strong exploration elements and yet didn't need to feel scaled down as you were only seeing part of the city/region. For games with survival meters you could have travel time be the main focus there, like Pathfinder did.

Mainstream gamers love their open worlds though, so it is what it is. I doubt there's a better way to do it without changing that.

I agree with this in quite a few situations:
* In some games, like Ultima 7, food does not really serve any real purpose except for "realism", but it's something the player has to engage with, and it also forces the player to interact with the horrendous inventory system. Ultima 6 handeled this better; food is only used when you sleep, and it's automatically removed from your inventory.
* I think I prefer the way JRPGs handle sleep (only rest at certain points or use some common consumable) to the WRPG approach (can rest almost everywhere (often excluding safe places like towns, which feels backwards to me), but either not when the game thinks there's an enemy nearby, or you have to wait a sizeable amount of real time (Wizardry 6-7 suffer from the latter problem).
* (Another issue is that, at minimum, it needs to be possible to heal to full in a reasonable amount of real-time; games that violate this include Wizardry 1-7 (except 4) and Pool of Radicance (there's a reason later games in the series added the "FIX" command).) There's also fast travel.

By the way, one thing that's worth looking into is the Die Hard (NES) speedrun. Thing is, in this game a certain amount of time needs to pass before you can reach the final level. If your feet are damaged, you go more slowly, and it takes longer to go up and down stairs. Thing is, the increased time for stair usage is strictly in-game time, not real time, so if you want to beat the game quickly (in real time), the best strategy is to injure your feet on purpose.

Just thought of the best solution to hunger for most games; instead of punishing the player for not eating, reward the player for eating.

I think of Civilization 3'd development; instead of Dark Ages, give the players Golden Ages. A reward is more fun than a punishment, so if you can replace punishments with rewards, do so.

I mean there's always Desert Bus.

Time will forever be an issue in visual mediums and I think different genres and stories will need to handle it differently depending on how important the actual passage of time is to what's being conveyed. I find Scott McClouds Understanding Comics extremely interesting with a lot of the concepts being similar to issues in other mediums, but highly recommend the chapter on time.

Think about game design and philosophy too. A simulation can be accurate but boring or even not fun. Game designers have to work around how to let you have a wild west shootout you enjoy and not making you ride and camp four real time days to get those few minutes of fun. A large open world != a fun one if there's nothing to do.