Wasting my time

Burning my life.

The other day I mentioned how time is the most valuable resource that a player can have, which is why so many games go out of their way in order to convince a player that they are making some scant progress with theirs no matter what it is that they're commiting to. Only Dark Souls and it's ilk really have the true grit to pull out that last hour of gameplay from under the player's feet and tell them to deal with it without that decision being then lambasted as bad game design. (Probably because the general design of Soulslike games is so geared towards intrinsic progression as well as extrinsic, such that taking away all your 'Souls' is a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of 'gitting gud') But there are certain games out there that not only care little for respecting your time, but go out of their way to spit on it with systems called 'Time gates'. Let's talk about that.

Explaining a time gate is best done by examining the kings of this particular crop: Mobile Games. Who out there has played a mobile game and reached that point where they can't progress any further because they have to wait for a timer? Maybe it's a a bar of energy that refills 1 unit every 15 minutes. Maybe it's the building process of your barrack upgrade that's going to take several hours, or maybe even several days, to complete. These are time gates. And typically a mobile game will design itself to slowly introduce these inconveniences in order to slowly wring the patience of their free-to-play players just as they were starting to get hooked on the gameplay loop in order to manipulate them into spending money to skip the wait. That is the most cynical version of time gating, but it's not the only iteration that gaming has ever known.

In fact, MMOs have themselves been very familiar with Time Gates for a decently long time now, with the concept typically existing in conjunction with daily or even weekly activity limits. Here the reasoning is a lot less nefarious, you may run a certain dungeon and only be given full rewards the first time a day you complete it, or the first time a week if it's a raid. Most of the time this exists in order to expand out the lifespan of that content in order to stretch out player retention. Grinding for gear drops is the draw of these higher difficulty content patches anyway; and as that loot tends to drop randomly, if you limit the amount of 'pulls' a player is privvy to, you automatically give them a reason to keep coming back day after day or week after week in order to pull the exact right piece of gear with the right stats that they want. By the time that player rolls their ideal drop, they'll have already established the pattern of logging into that MMO everyday.

In a very similar vein, I've noticed that APRGs have begun following a very similar trajectory even with their much smaller grasp of online functionality. Games like Diablo are built around the thirst and hunger for loot drops, as the very gameplay loop from the get-go revolves around hunting after that 1% increase to that one special attack you can do every minute and a half. Sometimes you'll have special gates that unlock during a season of the game, which in itself is tied to a system of FOMO offering unique drops that can only be found in this season through these special dungeons you can only run once in a given time. This way there's an aura of excitement and pressure built around the time gate, where the player is hopped up on the desire not to fail and risk the chance of getting these limited time items.

And to take a more contemporary and specific approach, who played Hogwarts Legacy? Without going into any spoilers, there comes a point within the narrative where the player earns themselves a crafting space within the Room of Requirement. The only hang-up? Crafting, growing, brewing, rearing and breeding is all tied to the limitations of a time gate that ticks along as you play the game, but in real time; alongside the ingredients it takes to make any of this stuff to begin with. The time gates are typically miniscule, and if you set everything off before you leave by the next time you have enough free time to peek back in all the relevant stations will most definitely have popped; but that it even exists like that in the first place is surprisingly out-of-character for any modern open world RPG not on mobile phones or handhelds.

 

Time gates work by tying the interest and investment of the player to a location and activity without any active engagement to that particular point, allowing that pressure point to fester and nag at the player long after they've moved onto other things or, in the case of mobile games, other activities entirely. They work by dragging the player into a relationship of expectation where they are responsible for keeping up with something, which means the game needs to be in a position to remind the player of their timers in order for the mechanic to be effective. Mobile games typically demand notification space to spam you the next day whilst you're sitting on the toilet, and other styles of game either place visual timers in heavily trafficked areas of the UI or have the important pressure point present in a key hub that the player is going to visit often.

But the question I keep asking myself whenever it comes to these systems is thus: Should they even exist? In a world of modern design sensibilities, what actual gameplay value is built for the player through time gating? Nothing. In fact, it's often seen as a lazy way to pad out content, such to the extent that some developers, such as Bioware when they made Anthem, try to hide their gate by creating menial fetch-quests to at least create the impression of meaningful gameplay. But it's so often just an act, or an illusion. Smoke and mirrors to expand the narrow constraints of what the developers could develop for the player to experience. But then again, that's not always the whole story, now is it? It can't always be that nefarious.

I think that the very currency that time gates play with, the free time of the player, turns what sounds like a very simple concept into a much more complex dilemma by it's very nature. Some games have very sensible reasons for not wanting their players to grind through all available content as quickly as possible, and it is true that activities which take someone longer to complete do inherently feel more valuable. But I think there's a very important scale that can be easily tipped with systems like these, and a game that wants to ethically respect it's players time needs to know how to be exceedingly sparing with their usage of time gating as a mechanic lest they cross the very thin line from enriching small systems to annoying everyone with grating meandering.