The Under Appreciated Mechanics of Games that Respect Your Time

 

In recent times, a lot of us might have heard some variation of the phrase “I wish this game respected my time” in online discussion. Time always seems to be a resource that we either have in abundance or are lacking, but we can all agree that it never feels good to feel like our time is being wasted. That’s why when people are discussing games, the idea that a good game respects their time comes up often.  People want their journey with a game to be as fulfilling as possible from the title screen to the end credits. Most games vary with their completion time, but no one wants to reach the end of something only to feel like they’ve had an underwhelming experience. But what does it really mean for a game to value a player's time, and how does it go about accomplishing that successfully? How does a game truly respect the player's time? People often zero in on concepts such as pacing and length as the main ways to gauge how well a game goes about accomplishing this, and while these ideas serve as a good basis, having them be the sole factors in measuring how well a game respects your time feels close-minded for a number of reasons. Personally, I argue that there are plenty of little practices that certain games and genres have put in place that often go under the radar when this conversation comes up, and those are what I want to bring attention to today.

When it comes to story driven games, having a narrative summary goes a really long way in keeping the player engaged with the story. An accessible way for players to re-read the events of the narrative up to the point they’ve played at means they can review any information that they might need clarification on, or they can take the time to get a better look at the story if a lot of major events occurred at once and they need to catch their breath. Many modern JRPGs have come to implement a feature like this as of late, with the summaries varying in terms of length. Recent Dragon Quest releases such as Dragon Quest XI and Dragon Quest VII Reimagined give the player a brief summary of the current story section their at upon loading up their save file. Persona 5 included a “story” option in its system menu that allowed players to re-read the events of each palace and each story beat. Every single Trails mainline entry has a “notebook” feature which contains extensive, labeled, bullet-pointed notes on every chapter and quest a player has taken up where they are in the story. Features and mechanics like these mean that players should never find themselves lost in the stories of these games. Should someone ever take an extensive break and come back, there are systems in place to put them back up to speed.

Trails' Notebook Feature As It Appears In Trails in the Sky First Chapter

Going hand in hand with a narrative summary is the inclusion of both a dialogue transcript and an in-game terminology dictionary. On the former, a dialogue transcript can allow players to review an entire conversation as it happens in real time should they find themselves getting lost in the details. This may sound similar to a narrative summary, but there are certain applications where being able to look back on the immediate conversation provides a better benefit for the player. An example would be with recent Ace Attorney collections. When you need to pinpoint a contradiction in a person's testimony, being able to see the previous conversations up to that point again can allow players to give what was said beforehand more scrutiny. Developers knowing that players can look back on conversations can also make them feel more comfortable with playing around with words and sentence structure to deceive readers on a first read through.

As for an in-game dictionary, if a game has a lot of unique words and terminology unique to its story and world, having a menu dedicated to letting them look over and read up on the definitions to these terms gives people a means to sharpen up their knowledge on a story’s lore. Blazblue Centralfiction has an incredibly extensive version of this readily available for players to read at any time on the main menu called the "Library". An encyclopedia filled to the brim with details on the cast, the setting, unique terms, and even summaries from previous games. While I don’t believe that every game needs to have a version of this idea that’s as extensive as Blazblue’s, having something akin to it to do wonders for saving players time from being confused on what characters are referring to in the story.

BBCF's "Library" Menu. Unlocked from the started and containes detailed information on just about everything you'd like to know about BB

Stepping away from purely story driven experiences, there are a lot of general features that any game could make use of that are considerate of someone’s time. The ability to save and reload at any point in time for example. Games can not possibly predict the schedule of each and everyone of its players, so the ability to save and put down the game on a moment's notice could prove invaluable to those who are extremely busy or find themselves in an emergency. Menu shortcuts are also a good feature that respects your time. Allowing players to pop up a specific section of the menu they frequent in an instant serves as a small but valuable time save. A detailed map feature could also be a great time relief in many ways. I recently took a chance with the demo for the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake, and found the detailed map to be a good tool. I’m not great with the horror genre as a whole, and having a map that labeled where future important puzzles and pick-ups were clearly labeled allowed me to have a set of goals in mind to work for while I focused on calming my nerves over the zombie threat. Most games with larger maps also feature some sort of way to fast travel between different landmarks in the blink of an eye, though most people already acknowledge this particular feature as a good way to respect a player's time.

Some may point out that some of the features I discussed here are pretty obvious ways games respect your time in hindsight, and I’d agree. But I call them under-appreciated because oftentimes when the topic of games “respecting your time” comes up, the conversation completely zeroes in on length and pacing specifically, leaving all discussion about the other mechanics that developers implement to take consideration for a player’s daily life to rot. While I understand why length and pacing are often the first ideas to come up with this conversation, laser-focusing on them alone I don’t believe prompts good discussion. There’s no way to universally pin down a definitive length and pace for games to operate at that guarantees it works for everyone’s schedule. Each individual game aims for a specific experience, and developers aim for a playtime that they feel best suits that experience. For example, Katana Zero is an indie action platformer while the original Sakura Wars is a VN/SRPG hybrid. The differences in genre and the expectations for each genre means that these two can run at different lengths and paces and still respect your time in different ways. One can’t possibly assign some definitive time that each should last that’s universal, because they’re two distinct experiences that have different goals in mind.

Vastly Different Games with Vastly Different Lengths. Both Are Valid

Even for games within the same genre though, they could aim for a completely different experience from one another and thus go on for various lengths. Final Fantasy VI often gets praised for having wonderful pacing, and that’s a take I fully agree with. But sometimes people feel that every single JRPG needs to strive for the length and pace of FFVI and other SNES JRPGs of the era, and if they don’t then they’re unnecessarily bloated. To return to the Trails series, one of the most common complaints thrown at the series is that the stories and runtime can be bloated and because of that the series asks too much time of the player. While I do feel certain entries can be a bit long-winded, the idea that the games have absolutely no systems in place to assist people on a tight schedule doesn’t ring true to me. In fact, the series has a lot of the features I brought up today. An extensive summary of each chapter, the ability to save and load anywhere on the map, a map with notable locations and objectives clearly marked, etc. You could put down any entry for a lengthy period of time and return to it rather easily. I know this because I experienced it myself. I started Trails of Cold Steel III around September of 2024, but found myself wrapped up in college work and decided to put the game down. Over a year later in 2025, I was able to return to the game and pick the story back up where it left off with little issue, because Falcom set multiple systems in place to ensure I could take a break and return without worry. The average Trails game runs for a much longer time than FFVI, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the average Trails game always wastes more of your time than FFVI. They just aim for a longer narrative, and implement systems to accommodate those who might not have a lot of time on their hands.

 Sometimes, I can’t help but feel like the discussion around games respecting player’s time comes less from the idea that games are taking too much time to sit through for no good reason, and more from a belief from players that each game needs to operate at a speed that’s specifically tailored to what their daily lives and how fast they want the game to operate at. I notice this a lot with genres that tend to have longer playtimes with their releases, such as JRPGs. I predominantly focused on those games throughout this blog post for this reason. Having preferences is perfectly fine, but at some point you have to acknowledge that not every game can be designed exactly to your specifications. While this doesn’t apply to everybody of course, it can feel like a good chunk of people treat the hobby as a second job and play a game just to say they played it rather than to enjoy it. Inevitably, this ends with a player brute forcing their way through something they don’t like and slogging through it complaining that it doesn’t work well with their time, when in reality the game just never intended to be the type of experience they wanted in the first place.

To piggyback off that last idea,  just because a game doesn’t include any or all of these features doesn’t automatically mean that it doesn’t value a player's time or that it’s poorly designed. In fact, a game being honest about the fact that it's commitment that wants as much of your attention as possible can actually be one of the best ways to respect a person’s time. Developers being upfront about their game being a commitment that demands your attention whenever you boot it up sets expectations and could be all a player needs to know to gauge if something will appeal to them or not. How well a game plays with the inclusion or exclusion of these mechanics will ultimately be decided by each individual player, but developers should not be afraid of making a game without them if they’re aiming for a certain type of engagement from players. Classic Resident Evil games were notorious for placing a finite limit on the number of times a player can save to enhance the resource management aspect of each game. Player's can't save as they please, they need to gauge how much progress they've made in relation to how many ink ribbons they have left. Not everyone will like that and that's ok, but the decision was deliberate for what Shinji Mikami and his team wanted those games to be.

Only So Many To Go Around

Ultimately, I think that a lot of people tend to take for granted a lot of the little things that developers add to their games to try and accommodate a players schedule. A game respecting your time doesn’t just boil down to how fast the story moves or how long it takes to beat on paper. The systems developers put in place that give the players avenues to keep themselves engaged while leading a busy life are where we can truly see how a game keeps someone's daily life in mind. There are plenty of little practices that certain games and genres have put in place that often go under the radar when this conversation comes up, and I feel that we should discuss and appreciate them more.