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1This deals with the issue of GameplayAndStorySegregation in video games where two actions that are meant to have vastly different timescales in real life occur at the same rate. So imagine you are playing a RealTimeStrategy game which tries to have a world map and global strategy. The problem is that a single war is being put on the same timescale as the rise and fall of a civilization. A city is expected to be built in the same time as you can deploy and engage with a single regiment.
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3Ultimately this is down to the fact that your city isn't a city and your regiment isn't a regiment. If you called them a smeep and a smerp and had them represented by geometric shapes, then there'd be no problem. But the game wants to give you a story, and wants several elements of the gameplay to merge in.
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5Another common version is one "day" cycle is standing in for a whole month's worth of actual days. As long as the timescales involved aren't too wildly different (for example, the "building a city in the same time it takes to fight a battle"), the FridgeLogic isn't too bad.
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7Compare to ComicBookTime. That page deals with the problem of having long series with hundreds of issues lasting for decades but having no accurate reflection of the change for the characters. Essentially it is a conflict between the work and real life with inconsistencies creeping into the work when they try to update it piecemeal. See also NarniaTime, when timescales of two different locations/settings seem to have no correlation - 1 minute can equate to an hour, or a week, or 5 seconds.
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9Supertrope of RidiculouslyFastConstruction. In RTS games specifically, this would clearly be related to UnitsNotToScale and Distances Not To Scale -- here time isn't, either. May overlap with InUniverseGameClock. Typically, this trope [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality has come to be expected since it allows the player to advance the game on their own time.]]
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11'''Note: ''' This trope does not involve times [[{{Pun}} (heh)]] where days in the game equate to only minutes in real life. YearInsideHourOutside is what you're looking at.
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13----
14!! Examples:
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16[[foldercontrol]]
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18[[folder: Real Time Strategy]]
19* ''VideoGame/AgeOfEmpires'' is a series of RealTimeStrategy games within which commanding an army and constructing a civilization are both very important aspects of gameplay. However, since the game is entirely in real-time, there are some peculiarities that pop up with how the different types of gameplay mesh. For example, a single person can build a church in the amount of time it takes for someone to walk from point A to point B. Also, the "Build a Wonder" gameplay mode focuses around defending a structure for "2,000 years", but a single year goes by in a second, implying that it can take a peasant hundreds of years to walk from one end of town to another (and that each unit has a ridiculously long life span). One could argue that the action on the field is just supposed to be a representation of more intricate actions that are occurring behind the scenes, but it's easier to just consider it Gameplay and Story Segregation.
20* Averted for the most part in the grand strategy games by ''Creator/ParadoxInteractive'' as most actions and events play out in a realistic time frame, with one notable exception: Individual battles between armies can last days, months, or in extreme cases even ''years'', all the while the world continues to turn around them. This means there's often enough time for one army to march halfway across a country to reinforce their comrades who engaged an enemy in battle several weeks prior and are still in the thick of it.
21* The ''VideoGame/TotalWar'' series would at points explain each turn as a season. So four turns would be a year with typical establishing animations of snow or the trees shedding leaves taking place. Then the entire thing would have the first turn be at a certain date. However it throws up oddities. For instance say you wanted to move soldiers from Hastings to Edinburgh- four turns = a year. In the same time you could rebuild all of London's walls. Technological developments would take a hundred turns when they should be taking several hundred years and people would die a too little quickly while their armies would be on the move for decades.
22* This would be achingly obvious in ''VideoGame/RedAlert'' - what with things like Yak-9s ending up replaced by 60s-era [=MiG=] jet fighters with no progression in between, and Sputnik-style satellites quickly leading to a GPS - but the AnachronismStew[=/=]SchizoTech of the technology in general does muddy up things a bit.
23* ''VideoGame/RiseOfNations'' takes the example put forth by the above Age of Empires and turns it up to eleven. Because the game deals with advancing through ages of technology, it's possible to build an army of medieval-era swordsmen and send them to attack an enemy on the other side of the map, and then proceed to advance your civilization well into the industrial age ''before the army arrives''. Even better, if you also purchase the appropriate unit upgrades, your soldiers will go from sword-wielding warriors to rifle-toting infantrymen by the time they reach their target.
24* In the original ''VideoGame/EmpireEarth'', this is drastically portrayed as you tech up from a neolithic culture all the way to a hyper-advanced "nano" age. Once you tech up to the next "epoch", you must individually research upgrades that move your units up the epoch ladder, so for a brief period of time you might have a revolution-era musketeer before he transforms — in field — to a WWI-style infantryman. What makes this egregious is that not all units have upgrade paths that take them through each epoch, so if you're not careful you can have the neanderthal-esque "Samson" unit hanging around your flying cars — about 45 minutes or more of gameplay at a breakneck pace.
25* Due to its nature of MMORTS, the time scale of ''VideoGame/{{Celestus}}'' might be less distorted than the other examples, but is nonetheless present: one day IRL is one year in-game.
26[[/folder]]
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28[[folder: Simulation Game]]
29* In ''VideoGame/MonopolyTycoon'', there is both an in-game clock with two speeds and a game year. After each in-game day the in-game year advances by 5 years.
30* In ''VideoGame/RollerCoasterTycoon'', a guest could be a the park for months, although in real time, he's just been there for 10 minutes.
31** One year in-game time is roughly an hour in real time.
32** Even more confusing is that if you look at a guest's statistics, it will displayed the time they've been in the park in real time.
33* In ''VideoGame/SimCity 4'', where you could see people do their day to day business, it could take a few days to cross town, where as it was only a few minutes.
34** ''VideoGame/SimCity 4'' actually has an explicit separate timescale for cars traveling and your My Sim's day (and, if you choose, the day-night cycle) visible by hovering your mouse over the date. This cycle always advances at the same rate regardless of game speed, and continues advancing when the game is paused.
35** This dual timescale is even more explicit in the 2013 ''VideoGame/SimCity'' game. The "normal" clock ticks off hours and minutes, and a day can last from a few minutes to an hour or so of real time depending on what speed the user chooses. Taxes are collected and bills are paid according to this clock. However, for measuring long-term trends, each "day" is regarded as equaling a full month--hovering the mouse cursor over the clock will show the current month and year, which advances by one month per day, with the day-of-the-month not being represented.
36* In the ''VideoGame/HarvestMoon'' series, [[InUniverseGameClock one real life second is equal to one in game minute]], making time management important. However, time doesn't pass during most menu-related features, which results in oddities like cooking food to cause no time to pass. In addition, the four seasons last around thirty days each. This results in years that last around 120 in-game days. This is taken even further in ''VideoGame/HarvestMoonAWonderfulLife'', where seasons are ten days long resulting in 40-day years.
37* ''VideoGame/TheSims'' games are big offenders in this regard. A minute of in-game time passes for every second of real-life time, so something as simple as walking from your bedroom to your bathroom can take half an hour, up to an hour if two people meet at a door and one has to step away. On the other hand, activities which in real life would take months if not years, such as building up strength through physical training, can happen over the span of a few days in-game. So, a Sim can learn to play the piano quite well in a few hours, but it takes him almost an hour to drink a coffee.
38** Taken to almost comedic extremes due to engine limitations in ''VideoGame/TheSims2''. Specifically, time only passes for the household you're currently playing. It's possible for an entire neighborhood, save one person, to go through (to take a completely random number) [[RuleOfThree three]] generations during the time it takes that one person to have a cup of coffee, and yet they'll still be able to interact with those three generations without aging a second.
39** Not to mention that it's ''always'' ThePresentDay in Simsland. This results in a bizarre "timeless" world in which the great-grandparents of the current generation grew up with exactly the same technology.
40** Going out of town also effectively freezes time at the household. This allows for an exploitation. If you build a place with beds, showers, food, and bathrooms, you can bring all your mood points back up to full green in what is literally no time. You go back home completely refreshed and ready for school/work.
41** ''VideoGame/TheSims3'' allowed multiple families to age in real time, avoiding the issue of one family going through three generations, and the others being stuck in an ageless limbo. There's still the issue of one second equals one minute, so walking to the bathroom still takes an hour.
42** This issue is now fixed via GameMod
43* ''VideoGame/TransportTycoon'' and its descendants feature this trope strongly. A day passes every few seconds, so trains take weeks to travel from one town to another. Because of this, we have the oddity that passengers will pay through the the nose for the privilege of travelling a couple of miles in "only" 10 days.
44* The instruction manual for ''VideoGame/RailroadTycoon 2'' lampshades this by saying that sure, it may seem unrealistic to only deliver two loads of cargo a year, but at least you won't be staring at your computer screen for half a day when one of the trains breaks down.
45* ''VideoGame/MonsterRancher'' games use a timeframe based on years. But while your ranch can run for well over a hundred years, the characters stay the same. In fact, in ''MR Advance 2,'' your assistant, Holly, will always say that she was a representative of the monster league FIMBA until "last year"--even if she's been your assistant for decades!
46* ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' fits this to a T, at least in Fortress Mode. Dwarves work for months at a time and then sleep for weeks, and it can take a year for them simply to haul a few dozen things from one end of the fort to another. There has been some interest from the creator in finding some way to balance this later and improve the level of detail, but that's far in the future. Adventure Mode averts this, however, as time moves quite slowly, and travelling and sleeping take appropriate amounts of time.
47* The characters of ''VideoGame/TheSimpsonsTappedOut'' occasionally comment on the mostly-arbitrary times the various tasks take. "Go to school", for instance is 6 hours, but "Go to Sunday School" is 12, despite it logically being shorter.
48* In ''VideoGame/SurvivingMars'' each martian day is termed Sol, just like in real life (1 Sol = 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35.244 seconds, equivalent to 1.02749125 Earth days). The problem is that after colonists come in, they spend their whole life cycle in this time reference. Before research increases lifespan, the average colonist will live for 70+ Sols, while reaching retirement age (Senior) at 61. Therefore, in-game days can be considered as an abstract measure of time, and actually a Sol would represent several months on Mars if not an entire year rather than its real counterpart. But then, this would mean that every colonist that walks in a fraction of a Sol in a dome actually would take entire real life days just to get from an apartment to dine at a restaurant, and that work-shifts last for months! There are even clear night/day cycles, and weather alarms such as cold snaps or dust storms are measured in Sols and hours.
49** Furthermore, rockets travel between Earth and Mars in a couple of Sols on average. Which is impossible in real-life (they would take months at best), but more reasonable if the in-game Sol is counted as an abstraction for a martian year or a bit less.
50* ''VideoGame/TwoPointHospital'', spiritual successor to ''VideoGame/ThemeHospital'', has days passing in a matter of seconds. It can take patients a month just to find the entrance to the hospital and they can survive a year or more with no food or toilets, but it's possible to build entire buildings in just a couple of weeks, while rooms full of technical equipment can be built instantly. In fact, rooms can be built so quickly that anyone in the area when it happens gets [[PlayedForLaughs catapulted out of the way]].
51* Each in-game day in ''VideoGame/{{Parkasaurus}}'' takes place over a few minutes of real time. Unusually, an in-game minute is ''shorter'' than a second.
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54[[folder:Four X]]
55* The years pass by in a strange way in ''VideoGame/{{Civilization}}'': In the beginning, a turn ranges from 50 years to a couple of centuries, depending on the game speed, but in later eras, less years go by per turn until one turn = one year. This would mean that it would take ''years'' for a unit to cross several spaces, whereas it would probably only take several days or maybe months. The "slowing down" effect over the course of the game corresponds to the idea that units can move faster as technology improves (independent of infrastructure upgrades which let units move more spaces per turn). Battles are where this trope kicks in full gear, as they last several of these turns. At the end of each turn, a forest could (by chance) appear in a square that troops are defending in, giving them an unexpected defensive bonus mid-battle. One can only wonder if these "battles" actually represent decade-long conflicts, which would make a ten-turn campaign in the Ancient Era into a ForeverWar that lasts the better part of the millennium.
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58[[folder:Other]]
59* ''VideoGame/BleedingSun'': The herb farm, potion-making furnace, thief service, and mining service all take real time to work, albeit less than what one would expect in real life. However, the more of an item the player has, the longer it takes to farm that item.
60* Each in-game minute in ''VideoGame/DragonCreek'' lasts a real second, and each season is 30 in-game days long.
61* In ''VideoGame/ShatteredUnion'', turns have a different time scale depending on whether or not player is in combat. In battle, turns represent days, and on the campaign map, they represent weeks. It gets weird when battle can last two weeks, but with no time advancing on the campaign map.
62* In ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'', a full day is 20 minutes long (8 of day, 2 of sundown, 8 of night, and 2 of sunrise). If you have two of one type of animal together, you can feed each of them their TrademarkFavoriteFood; they'll breed and pop out a baby version in half a (in-game) day.
63* The ''VideoGame/JakAndDaxter'' games have this to some extent with how quickly the day/night cycle takes to execute; a clock in the Hip Hog Heaven Saloon reveals that one minute in the game world is one second in ours. Despite this, characters still refer to our timescales for missions that have time limits, such as two minutes for the Strip Mine Eco Bomb mission. This is even Lampshaded in the second game:
64--> '''Krew''': Now get out! I need my beauty nap!\
65'''Daxter''': Trust me brother, there aren't enough hours in the day!
66* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' has time flow in a way similar to ''Grand Theft Auto'' where hours passed is just a few minutes in real time. The passage of time will halt in certain duties for the sake of a thematic setting (for example, one dungeon will always have a sunset as the backdrop), even though the in game Eorzea Clock still ticks ahead.
67* ''VideoGame/DragonQuestV'':
68** The passage from day to night takes a minute or two of real-world time (not counting time in battles).
69** Chapters 2 & 3 take place over less than a month of in-game day/night cycles + sleeping at inns unless you spend a lot of time grinding. However, in-story dialog suggests that each chapter takes over 2 years each. (e.g. You were rescued by your 8-year old kids, born on the day your wife was kidnapped. When you recover your wife, the game says that it's been 10 years that she was petrified.)
70* From the player's perspective, ''VideoGame/VampireTheMasqueradeBloodlines'' takes place all in one night. You hop from mission to mission and spend all the time you want cruising around L.A., but the player character never goes to bed and [[AlwaysNight the sun never rises]]. Yet there are subtle hints (changing newspaper headlines, a few conversations) that the story actually occurs over several nights, possibly even weeks or months.
71* ''VideoGame/Persona2'' doesn't have a day/night cycle, so it appears to take place all over the course of one hectic afternoon, but some dialogue at the start of the game pinpoints it to late October/early November [[note]]A student mentions the upcoming Culture Festival, which traditionally takes place on or around November 3rd[[/note]], and the game ends on the Grand Cross of 1999.
72* In the ''TabletopGame/{{Monopoly}}'' based video game franchise ''VideoGame/{{Richman}}'', one round equals one day in-game. This is important in earlier titles as the bank issues a 10% deposit interest at the end of each in-game month.
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