Q+A: Time Limits in Games

LordDarius asks:

Thoughts on the value/function of time limits and why they seem to have gone out of fashion in mainstream gaming?

The simple answer is that time limits were popularized through arcade games, which needed them for practical reasons.¹ The arcade as a game distribution concept has diminished significantly in prevalence from its heyday, so the need for the technique has disappeared.

Time and space are the fundamental concepts we exist in and interact with on a daily basis; you’re not gonna read this article unless you know you have enough time to sit down with it, which will be one slice of your day that you’re planning and rearranging on the fly. And compared to space, time is constantly changing, keeping the player from directly manipulating it like they usually can with space. In those ways, it’s God’s perfect variable for mechanical depth: everyone understands it because they interact with it constantly, and it’s guaranteed to evolve dynamically² over the course of a play session. That first point is key because we’ve also developed a universal abstraction that divides time into discrete units (minutes, seconds, etc.), so it’s very easy to stage for the player.

The dire consequences of exceeding the time limit in Pikmin heightens fear of failure. [src]

In fact, this latter point and its intrinsic relation to reality give it a distinct psychological edge that other mechanics have to claw for using aesthetic obfuscation. For arcade games this was amplified by having money on the line per play, where botching a run and getting booted early could effectively “waste” your quarters. The dynamic seems to come up in discourse most often with the original Pikmin and its nearly seven hour time limit (30 “days” of 13 minutes and 30 seconds each makes for 6 hours and 45 minutes total). A full-game time limit that cannot be altered by the player and is obfuscated as days until your main character dies creates an experience that’s simply too much for a lot of people. This one’s interesting to me because the staging is so massive and present that it freaks people out continually, where for so much of the game the player has no idea what they might be up against later that could knock them off-pace. When I first played it, that manifested as incessant optimization and reset abuse that hurt my perception until I came back and chilled out; salvaging one piece of your ship a day isn’t that hard, and losing swaths of pikmin is expected and tolerable in the time limit. Still, it’s a good depiction of why this kind of time limit – full-game time limits – have fallen out of favor for those not interested in that kind of stress.³

I think this concept of presentation and staging helps us understand where time limits went: they didn’t leave completely, they just don’t look the same anymore. Obviously in multiplayer games these time limits have stuck around, whether in shrinking safe areas in Fortnite,⁴ round timers in fighting games, or fully bounded match lengths in competitive deathmatch shooters. Roguelikes have obfuscated their time limits as “hunger” from the beginning of the genre, and many modern games have brought this forward; Crypt of the Necrodancer had a tempo execution check that was really a strict turn timer, and it also brought forward the Mystery Dungeon concept of eventually kicking you out of a floor if you took too long (aka if the song ended before you descended). Regardless of your thoughts on it, Vampire Survivors succeeded far beyond expectations even with a time limit that cues endless bosses spawning. In all of these cases, the time limit is smaller and thus less of a grand mystery, or the player has the ability to alter it in some way, ceding them control in the process.

Of course, if your main interest is single-player games, then most of the modern crop doesn’t have major time limits, outside of small ones like “defend this area in this one mission for five minutes.” What has proliferated heavily are time trials and speedrun modes, which provide an alternative presentation for time limits. Instead of seeing the timer tick down, you’re seeing it tick up tracking your time spent, and you’re likely not going to be judged on it in casual play. Here you have positive reinforcement instead of negative, and with online leaderboards and ranking systems, you’re provided extrinsic motivation to avoid wasting time. The downside of this approach is that using time as the sole primary metric assigns it a weight that can sometimes downplay other parts of the experience… generally I prefer a time element that is cashed directly into a scoring system, or a time limit you can fight back against while trying to maximize score. Score has a human touch that can make it less than perfect when incorrectly balanced, but compared to pure time attack, it has the ability to push players into making decisions about time that I find meaningful.

Although Crypt of the Necrodancer advertises itself as a rhythm game, it’s really a strong tile-based roguelike with a strict turn timer. [src]

Which, if you’re wondering what exactly the mechanical value of time is, it’s just that: the player has to constantly make tradeoffs on the time they spend, because time is always being spent. If you start tying variables and rules back to it (pickups and actions that add time, optional tasks that take time but influence another variable like score positively), then those aspects instantly gain interplay with a constantly decreasing resource. Again, that’s about as perfect as you could ask for with mechanical design. Melee kills in Resident Evil Mercenaries, speedy dropoffs and pickups in Crazy Taxi, combo timers in shmups, the timeline cursor in Lumines, the style timer in Devil May Cry… all of these mechanics gain interplay with everything else happening on screen simply because time does not stop decreasing, and you can either maximize what time you have or tack on more time if the system allows.⁵

So what I said up-front is misleading: I think time limits have become less prevalent, but they certainly haven’t disappeared. Many of the console time limits of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras were pure cargo cult inclusions that slowly trickled out going into the late ’90s (especially with action platformers and the like), since if your score system was inscrutable and untracked, and players never exceeded your generous time limits, why bother? There’s plenty of games that favor contemplative play (whether strenuous or not) that don’t necessarily benefit from time limits. And the “overarching full-game time limit” pseudo-genre was never big to begin with; I’ve already mentioned Pikmin, Dead Rising, and Pathologic, and the only other ones that immediately come to mind are D, Unsighted, and Shenmue.⁶ The games that benefit from it have kept it in one way or another, even if the implementations are far removed from the classic arcade formulation of a literal timer on screen.