The Clock Ain’t Ticking
So last night, I’m playing Grand Theft Auto IV and I get a call from Elizabeta. She’s in a screaming match with my buddy Little Jacob over some missing coke, and can’t understand his thick Rasta accent. (Neither can I – lucky I get subtitles.) She tells me to come over and straighten him out pronto.
So I do. But not right away. First, I finish driving down to Battery Park (or whatever the game calls it) to meet up with a new contact, who sends me on a mission on the Upper East Side. After that, I take my tenth run at a mission that calls for me to gun down three sleezeballs in a strip club – and yet again, I blow it and get shot in the head, sending me to the hospital, where hours later I step out again into the street, jack a new car, and finally get over to Elizabeta’s place, where she’s still standing there having it out with Little Jacob.
I’m sensitive about time. When I have to be somewhere, I’m rarely late. I get anxious about missing things. So I have a giant pet peeve with games that can’t consistently handle a perception of time – when they act like the clock’s ticking, but it ain’t.
This bugged me in the 24 game, where we’re supposed to think that we’re running out of time on every single mission – but in fact, you can spin around doing wheelies or running around at the back of the level for as long as you like, and the timer only started when you were in the final stretch of your objective and the game decided it was time to apply some pressure.
But it bothered me more in Baldur’s Gate II. Early on in that game, your half-sister Imoen is captured by the main villain in the game. You know she’s in prison, probably being tortured, maybe close to death; you feel like you should rush over to where she’s being held and rescue her. But in fact, this is the part of the game where you should be building up strength, gaining experience, chasing down every little side quest to get as buffed up as possible for the chapters to come. There is no ticking clock, and no sword hanging over Imoen’s head. You can lounge around and get old, and it doesn’t matter to her, or the villain, or anybody at all.
Usually, a game will explicitly tell you if you have a time limit. So much is going on in modern games that if a given mission needs a timer, you’ll see it flashing right there on the screen, usually with some helpful voiceover prompts (“You’re almost out of time! Step on it!”). But it bothers me that this doesn’t always jibe with the storytelling.
Every medium has to struggle with this – I’m still confused about the section of the recent Casino Royale, where James Bond seems to leave the Caribbean, fly to Miami, go to an art opening, and have a giant shoot out on on an airport runway during a night that by my back-of-the-napkin estimate must have lasted at least 20 hours. But with games, it matters a little more because you’re not dealing with the audience’s feeling that something’s wrong; you’re misrepresenting the pressure the player should be under. Because if I’d been too smart for my own good, let Elizabeta stew for a couple of days, and shown up only to find her and Little Jacob dead of mutual gunshots? Boy, would I feel stupid.
Oh, see, time limits freak me out (couldn’t rest until I’d finished Shift in under 500 seconds), so I’m always relieved when a time limit turns out to be fake.
I had to pause the last level of Halo to relax before continuing when I saw there was an actual time limit.
Jessica
May 12, 2008 at 11:50 am
I’m with you, I hate deadlines …
My worst experience with a timer was in Quake II (or maybe III). At the end of one of the levels you start a rocket and you have 30-some seconds to get back out to the hanger and escape before the whole place blows up. I kept trying and trying to make it in time and I always just barely missed it.
And then I figured out that if you hold down the shift key, you can run …
savetherobot
May 12, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Later there are missions that use the datebook in your phone. If you miss an appointment you get a phone call bitching you out and they reschedule.
Gus Mastrapa
May 12, 2008 at 5:35 pm
That’s true. And to go with what Jessica said, I actually showed up three hours early for my date with French Tom. I guess I looked desparate.
savetherobot
May 12, 2008 at 6:18 pm
OMG, Gus, as much as I hate deadlines, that’s hilariously awesome.
Jessica
May 13, 2008 at 12:21 am
I kept getting bitched out by the other characters (Roman, Little Jacob, etc) for showing up for our dinner/bowling/darts or whatever dates late. It seems they’ll call up when I’m geographically the farthest from them as possible . I know I can blow them off but I feel guilty (yes, really). I’d drive like a maniac to get to them only to end up being late. I only recently discovered that a cab ride to them makes me on time. Hmph.
Mark
May 13, 2008 at 7:23 am
That’s a good tip! I can’t get across town in less than an hour either.
savetherobot
May 13, 2008 at 8:22 am
You can also call them up to cancel after accepting and they won’t get annoyed the way they do when you decline their invitation outright.
I think extreme consequences to an implied but not explicit time limit would just make the player feel that they’d been tricked, especially in games with a faster-than-reality clock or one which allows you to chew up hours of in-game time in seconds. I missed my date with French Tom because I stopped in at the spray shop to fix up the car I’d smashed beforehand.
I hamstrung my mages for a bunch of the beginning of Baldur’s Gate 2 by refusing to rest, since a lot of quests stated that there was a time limit for getting them done. I don’t think there were any consequences beyond having to re-accept those later, but it left a lingering and unsettling feeling that I was playing it “wrong” in a game where the open-endedness was supposed to be a virtue.
I think the discontiguous treatment of time and urgency, especially in open-world games, has become basically as invisible to the player as a cross-cut or fade, or the convention of walking over an object to obtain it. On its face it’s kind of absurd, but it’s a representational shorthand that’s immensely more satisfying than the alternatives we’ve seen so far.
Charles MacMullen
May 13, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I think with GTA it’s good the time limits for these missions aren’t exact. If you’re one of those people who has a real perception of time issue, you’ll rush over to Elizabeta’s to rescue Little Jacob because you enjoy pretending GTA’s time is real. And if you don’t want to deal with that, then you can feel free to ignore the mission calls and meander around making trouble without feeling that you’re missing anything.
And yeah, I’ve started taking a cab to see my friends. I’ve even tried calling them to make plans when I’m nearby them and they won’t be around, oh no. It’s only when I’m in a whole ‘nother borough that they wanna hang out.
Leigh
May 14, 2008 at 2:32 pm